People sometimes ask me why I am a vegetarian. To be sure, I am not a strict vegetarian, or vegan. I eat fish. I eat eggs and dairy products. Most people who know me know that I am a rather health-conscious individual, so they assume that I quit eating red meat for health reasons. That actually had nothing to do with my decision.

I was never a big meat eater at any time in my life. Even as a child, I didn’t care much for steak or pork. Several years ago, when meat from organically raised, free-range cattle became available in some of our stores here in Jacksonville, I began to buy it on a regular basis.

What spurred my decision to stop eating red meat was when I found out about the cruelty to animals in the meat industry, combined with the fact that America’s appetite for meat is supporting an industry that is extremely bad for the environment.

Pigs are kept in such crowded conditions that they are literally piled on top of each other. Their tails are cut off because under the horribly crowded conditions they would chew each others’ tails off. They are forced to live in their own filth. They are unable to turn around, let alone walk. For cattle the situation is no better. And chickens have their beaks painfully chopped off in a machine so that they won’t peck each other to death. Chickens, of course, will not peck each other to death under normal conditions, but in the chicken industry they are piled up so tightly in cages that they are unable to lift their wings.

Animals are routinely given antibiotics as a preventive measure, because being forced to live is such deplorably squalid conditions are very conducive to the spreading of disease. Cattle are fattened up on corn, which, being something they were never meant to eat in the first place, causes many health problems.

The amount of corn that is grown to keep feed livestock in this country is staggering. I won’t quote any figures here but I implore the reader to look it up. This corn is all produced by farming methods that ultimately deplete the soil. The amount of fossil fuel and water that is required to produce one pound of beef is staggering when compared to the amount that it takes to produce on pound of cereal crop. In this paragraph I have barely touched on the far-reaching environmental effects of modern industrial meat production. I leave it to the reader to look up the details. I guarantee you will be amazed.

I am amazed at the hypocrisy (hypocrisy or ignorance?) of people who decry the sport of hunting because it is cruel to shoot an animal, yet they eat meat every day, supporting an industry that causes an incredible amount of suffering to millions of animals every day.  The animal that a hunter shoots may experience extreme pain, but it is all over in a very short time. The animals kept in modern industrial farms, suffer immensely every day of their horrible lives.

By the way, since I mentioned in the first paragraph that I eat eggs and dairy products, I should mention that I only buy eggs that are marked as cage-free or free-range, and I only buy milk and milk products that come from grass-fed cows.

In short, I became a vegetarian for ethical reasons. The meat industry, through greed, forces millions of animals to live a life that is a purely hellish existence. I find that absolutely deplorable. The meat industry is very harmful to the environment. I have barely scratched to surface in this short blog, as to the far-reaching effects on the environment that are a consequence of the modern methods of meat production. And I have not gone into much detail about the pain and suffering that the meat industry forces upon millions of animals. Again, I urge the reader to look it up for themselves. Stop burying your head in the sand!