A Joosr Guide to… Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

It’s not an argument you’ll hear very often, but, technically, it would be better for the environment if we ate more dogs and fewer cows.

In reality, for many, being a meat eater is not a proactive “choice” that they have made. Unlike the decision to cut down on meat consumption or avoid it altogether,

From a young age, we learn to disassociate meat products from the living animal

It’s been estimated that large-scale agriculture is the driver for as much as 80 percent of all deforestation carried out globally. Some experts believe that factory farming is a bigger contributor to climate change than the entire global transportation industry. Furthermore, animals on factory farms produce staggering amounts of waste that we simply cannot accommodate.

Farmed animals in the United States alone produce 130 times as much waste as the entire human population. Its polluting strength is 160 times that of raw municipal sewage and with no infrastructure to deal with it, the waste gets pumped into incredibly toxic “holding ponds.” This has a hugely negative impact on surrounding environments, and environmental disasters are just waiting to happen. In fact, Smithfield Foods accidentally spilled 20 million gallons of toxic waste into the New River in 1995, an ecological disaster twice the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.