Should we stop eating meat?
Is it wrong to eat animals? In this episode, I’m going to talk about the consumption of animal products. We will discuss both myths and truths about climate change, factory farms, health, pandemics and superbugs. And finally, I will tell you why we are approaching the greatest dystopia in history, and why avoiding it is in your hands.
First of all, I should warn you that this video is going to be long, tough and controversial. But before diving into it, to get some energy, let me prepare a tapa of cheese and chorizo.
Mmmm.
I love meat
As you can imagine, I love cheese, chorizo, and ham, and it’s been this way since I was little. The best memories of my childhood occurred in Puerto de Santa María, where we used to spend the summer at my grandparents’ house, with their dog, my good friend Boro.
Boro only understood 3 words: “Boro”, “street” and “leash”. The last two were what my grandfather used to say when he was about to take him for a walk. “Street, leash!” and Boro would go crazy.
Of course, if you said these words by mistake, Boro would go crazy anyway, so you had to be very careful.
I loved going to the bar downstairs to have tapas with my family. In the neighborhood, I was known to the waiters. They knew that they had to bring that smiling, chubby little boy a tapa of the best Iberian ham they had.. I wasn’t happy with anything else!
Throughout my life, ham, chorizo and cheese were always present, as well as pig cheeks, octopus or crumbed fish filets . In some of the best moments of my life: weddings, birthdays, Christmas…
One day, the whole family went to the bullring to see a flamenco version of the opera Carmen. We were sitting there enjoying the show when, suddenly, they brought out a bull. And even having grown up in Andalusia, until then I had never seen a bullfight in my life.
To my pleasant surprise, the arena transformed into a parade of music, color, courage and energy. And a big part of the experience was seeing people cheering on a tradition that had existed for centuries. Seeing a fierce bull running and charging is genuinely impressive.
However, seeing that bull in the ring, the only thing I could think about was how much it reminded me of Boro. And I was just starting to grow fond of the bull when… they began to thrust the lances in its back.
Being there, surrounded by people who had grown up in the same country with the same culture and values as me, I couldn’t understand why I was the only one who felt sorry for that creature. Luckily, it turned out I wasn’t the only one. My sister took my hand and we went outside to wait for it to be over.
That day, I realized that a bull is not so different from a dog. And if my good friend Boro was capable of suffering, then that bull surely was too.
Still, after the show we went out to dinner and I ate a grilled cuttlefish without breaking a sweat. After all, farmed fish and animals live in good conditions, and are always killed in a humane and painless way. Right?
Where do we think meat comes from?
Since we were kids, we have read books and watched cartoons of little animals and happy farmers, who all became a part of our childhood. We have bought products from smiling, dancing cows, “healthy” pigs running around the countryside, and talking chickens.
And these beliefs accompany us when we grow older. In a poll of 1,100 people in the US, 58% responded that “most farmed animals are treated well,” and 75% said they bought “ethically produced” animal products. Nearly half of those surveyed supported a ban on factory farms, and even on slaughterhouses. Which is quite ironic, with the US being one of the countries with the highest meat consumption per person, with 99% coming from factory farms.
As explained by psychologist Melanie Joy, humans suffer from what is called “cognitive dissonance.” That is, we have beliefs, such as “animals should be treated well”, which are incompatible with our actions, such as “eating meat.” This tension makes us uncomfortable, and, as a defense mechanism, we generate new beliefs to excuse our actions.
Several psychological studies have been done in different countries on this so-called “meat paradox”, in which a series of people are asked if eating meat is okay. And it turns out that the answers are usually more positive if the respondents have just eaten meat, and less so if they have just seen images of slaughterhouses.
That is, we usually respond with whatever makes us seem less contradictory in that exact moment.
But hey, animals have to be killed in some way in order for us to eat them. And maybe they don’t suffer as much as a human being. Maybe they don’t even feel pain at all?
Can animals feel pain?
I am going to explain the evolutionary origin of suffering with a simple example. Imagine two almost identical animals. The only thing that distinguishes them is that one is capable of feeling physical pain and the other is not. What happens to them if there is a fire? The animal that does not feel pain burns, dies, and leaves no offspring. On the other hand, the one that does feel pain moves away from the fire, continues its life, and reproduces, thus giving rise to other animals also capable of feeling pain.
So we see that physical pain is an evolutionary mechanism that helps us survive. So farm animals, just like humans, and yes, also fish, share the ability to feel pain.
But not just physical pain. Emotional suffering is also an evolutionary mechanism. For example, feeling sad about the death of a child leads an animal to try to protect other children, thus increasing the chances that one of them will survive.
If you have cats, you can surely attest to the fact that they have a very complex psychology.
In fact, we have been doing psychological experiments on animals for decades. Not to understand and improve their well-being, but our own. Some of the saddest experiments that I have ever read about were psychological experiments on monkeys. These experiments consisted of inducing states of depression and desolation, or locking monkeys in the so-called “pits of despair”.
And primates are not the only animals with a complex psychology. Experiments are also done on dogs, rodents, and even fish. Indeed, certain behaviors in fish associated with depression disappear upon receiving antidepressants, just as we would expect to see in a human being.
Very well, but are you going to tell me now that plants suffer too?
Can plants feel pain?
Let’s carry out an imaginary experiment similar to the previous one, but now with plants. Imagine that there are two almost identical plants. One of them is capable of feeling pain, and the other is not. In the event of a fire, neither plant can move, so both plants die. However, the ability to feel pain is a physiological process that requires additional energy. This means that the plant that is in pain needs more water and nutrients. So, in the case of drought, the plant that feels pain is more likely to die sooner, while the plant that does not feel pain has a better chance of surviving and spreading its seeds.
In other words, pain does not provide any evolutionary benefit to plants. Even if they are able to respond to stimuli, plants do not have a nervous system, and there is no scientific evidence that they experience pain.
Then there are more complicated intermediate cases, such as oysters, mussels and sea nettles. They are animals too, but they have a very simple nervous system. Pain may not have provided them with much evolutionary benefit, and therefore it is not clear how much pain they are capable of feeling.
But there’s no need to debate the most complicated cases. In April of this year, hundreds of experts signed the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, supporting that it is highly likely that all vertebrates are conscious, as well as many invertebrates, including insects, octopuses, and even prawns and shrimp.
And there is no doubt that fish, chickens, pigs, cows…In short, the animals that we tend to eat most often do feel pain.
Even so, when it comes to meat production, there is always someone who says “Well, an uncle of mine has a farm where the animals are treated very well.” And we could debate whether the animals on that farm are happy or not. But it would be a huge waste of time, since in reality around 94% of the animals we consume globally don’t come from “my uncle’s farm”.
They come from the factory farming industry.
Factory farming
The first victims of factory farming that I’d like to mention are… human beings. The majority of ranchers today live in debt to be able to supply the production that the big supermarkets demand. And working in a slaughterhouse is not only physically dangerous, but entails high levels of depression and anxiety, and is usually carried out by immigrants and refugees, who have no other alternative. Additionally, factory farms pollute the air and water of nearby communities, causing serious physical and mental health problems.
But of course, the primary victims of factory farms are the animals.
In recent decades, intensive livestock farming and fish farms have been optimizing their processes to maximize production. A very illustrative example is that of chickens. Over the years, we have separated chickens into two categories: “laying hens,” optimized for producing eggs, and “broilers”, optimized for producing meat.
The laying hen
While wild chickens in their natural environment used to lay around 12 eggs a year, today’s laying hens produce in the order of 300 eggs. They usually live in cages of between 4 and 10 chickens per cage, so small that they cannot even spread their wings.
Imagine having to sit for hours in a Ryanair seat without ever being able to stretch your legs. Well, a chicken experiences something similar, but not for a couple of hours, nor for a couple of days. But for its entire life.
And after between 12 and 18 months of caged life, the productivity of the hens begins to decline, and they are slaughtered, to be replaced by younger and more productive hens.
In order to maintain this production line, some of these hens are inseminated. Of the fertilized eggs, approximately half are female, and the other half are male. The females end up in cages like their mothers. And the males… get eaten by us, right?
Actually, no. These are not “broilers,” meaning they are not optimized for meat production. So it is more profitable to simply get rid of them as soon as they are born. And how do you do that?
Sadly, and though it seems like a cruel joke, the vast majority of these adorable chicks die as soon as they hatch, usually by being gassed or shredded in a machine.
The broiler chicken
The other production line is that of broiler chickens. We can see how over a 50-year period, these chickens have been selected to eat very little and grow insanely big in a short time. In other words, they are the animal version of Frankenstein.
The chicken often becomes so heavy that its legs cannot support its body weight, and they break. When this happens, they are either slaughtered, or die from infections or from hunger, due to not being able to reach the feeder.
In other words, while laying hens usually live in cages, for broiler chickens, their own body is their cage.
We could talk about many other examples of optimization in factory farming. But I’ll show just one more example. For me, it is one of the saddest images I have ever seen.
Gestation cages
This photo is from a farm in Spain.
This is what maternity looks like on factory farms. This sow, like countless others, spends her life between the gestation cage and the birthing cage. It is inside these cages that she’s inseminated, goes through pregnancy, gives birth, feeds her young, and then it starts all over again, until she stops being “productive”.
This means that, throughout her life, she doesn’t even have enough space to turn around.
And after those 3 or 4 years of life in captivity, having made a huge physical and psychological effort, do we let the sow go free so that she can retire happily?
No. Once the sow is no longer productive enough, we take her to the slaughterhouse.
How do you kill an animal?
Of all the ways the animals we consume die, the most common is by asphyxiation, since this is how fish usually die in wild fishing. Keep in mind that while a human can only survive a few minutes under water, fish out of water can last much longer. Some, even several hours. In other words, asphyxiation for fish is a slow and agonizing death.
If we look at land animals, the most common way is by bleeding to death. To be more precise, the method par excellence in industrial slaughterhouses around the world is the one used on chickens.
It involves hanging the chicken by its legs on metal hooks. The chicken’s head is immersed in electrified water to render it unconscious. Then its neck is cut for it to bleed out, and finally, the chicken is plunged into boiling water to facilitate feather plucking.
Maybe you think it’s not so bad. After all, the animal is unconscious before having its throat slit and being scalded. But the truth is that not all the chickens are stunned correctly in the electrified water. Some are still conscious when their throats are slit. And some also manage to survive this part, so then they are literally boiled alive, one of the most painful ways to die.
And maybe you also think that this only happens in very exceptional cases, or in countries where farm conditions are more precarious. But in reality, the methods and instruments used in industrial farming are very similar all over the world, whether in the United States, Spain or India.
But okay, let’s assume that chickens being boiled alive only happens exceptionally.
Well, if we assume that this happens to only 0.05% of all chickens slaughtered, tragically, that means that globally, one chicken is boiled alive every second.
I know it can be difficult to process. But the fact is that the number of animals that die in the world to produce meat is simply staggering.
How many animals die to produce meat?
Are you ready for some really scary facts? Here we go: every year, more than 80 billion terrestrial animals are killed to produce meat.
This is equivalent to 2500 animals per second.
90% are chickens. And this number does not include the chicks that are gassed or shredded in the egg industry, which could be an additional 7 billion a year.
And after chickens, the second most consumed land animals are, surprisingly… ducks (mainly because duck is consumed in high quantities in China). Next in descending order come pigs, geese, sheep, rabbits, turkeys, goats, cows, and the rest of the animals we consume.
These numbers do not include other species for which we do not have data, such as frogs, quails, or insects. And they also do not include the many “accidental” deaths that occur before reaching the slaughterhouse.
What’s more, according to some estimates, approximately 1 in 4 animals born in the global livestock industry are not eaten. Either they die along the way, or are simply thrown away.
And now, if we count aquatic animals as well, such as fish and crustaceans, the figures become astronomical. The number of animals that die every year to produce fish and seafood is of the order of trillions.
Without a doubt, meat production has gotten out of control.
Part of the growth in meat production is because the world’s human population is growing. But the meat consumption of each individual person is also growing. For example, in Spain, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, in 1960 we used to eat between 1 and 3 chickens per person per year. In 2022, we ate between 15 and 17 chickens per person.
The curious thing is that, despite the rapid growth in meat production, the number of farms in Europe and the United States is actually decreasing. And it is estimated that the number of farms worldwide will be halved by the end of the century. In other words, there are fewer and fewer farms, but they are bigger, with more animals, and even more intensified.
Bad news for farmers, for the environment, and, above all, for animals.
We are heading towards a dystopia
The sad reality is that in the coming decades there will be more and more animals on factory farms. And this will be the case until we reach an all-time high, where the number of animals suffering a horrible life of captivity and a painful death will be higher than ever before. In other words, never in the history of the world (and, as far as we know, of the observable Universe) has there been as much suffering as there will be then.
And for each of those trillions and trillions of animals, existence is hell. Like the laying hens or broiler chickens that I explained before, who live lives deprived of freedom, in closed spaces where even the air they breathe is irritating, since it is full of ammonia generated by urine, feces and corpses accumulated around them.
Most farm animals see the sun for the first time in their lives for just a few seconds, when they are transported to the slaughterhouse.
But what I have told you so far is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other atrocities in food production that I haven’t even mentioned. We could talk about foie gras, the ikizukuri Japanese, the debeaking of chickens, or the tail docking or teeth clipping of piglets.
But I am going to mention just one more example, which for me is especially illustrative: The castration of pigs.
Is all this suffering worth it?
The vast majority of male pigs have their testicles removed shortly after birth. The procedure, of course, is not the one that a veterinary clinic would use to neuter a pet such as a dog or cat, in which they try to minimize the animal’s suffering.
In factory farming, what we seek to minimize is the cost. So you can imagine how it works.
Welfare Footprint Project estimates that surgical castration without anesthesia causes each piglet 10 hours of disabling or excruciating pain.
For me, the castration of pigs is a particularly illustrative example. Not only because of the suffering it produces, but because of the main reason why it is practiced. Do we do it to ensure the well-being of the pig itself, or to prevent them from fighting among themselves? No.
As you can read on the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food website, the castration of the pig is carried out…
…so that the meat doesn’t smell bad.
I wish I could tell you that this practice is illegal in Spain. But it isn’t. As it says in the Official State Bulletin itself, the castration of pigs less than 7 days old can be done without anesthesia.
And I wish I could tell you that the Iberian pigs are free from this torture. But no, Iberian ham also sells better if it comes from castrated pigs.
After telling you this, I’m going to again show you the photo which, for me, is one of the saddest images I have ever seen. This image represents what is surely the greatest moral catastrophe of our time, and is an omen of the dystopia we are heading towards.
Ah, but I forgot that the image was not complete.
Some of the piglets do not survive. And their mother can’t even move to try to help them.
The worst thing is realizing that this little pig may be luckier than all its surviving siblings, since for him, the suffering is already over.
As I said at the beginning of the video, I love ham, chorizo and other pork products. But when I think about this type of practice, I ask myself: Is it worth it for a pig to experience such unbearable pain, so that I can enjoy just a few minutes of pleasure?
I hope I have convinced you that factory farming presents a moral problem of colossal scale. But if I haven’t convinced you yet, stay a little longer, because now I’m going to tell you why this industry not only affects animals, but also you and me.
Environmental impact of meat
Food and agriculture are among the main causes of anthropogenic climate change.
The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the energy sector, whereas agriculture “only” contributes between a quarter and a third of emissions. However, even if we were to stop burning fossil fuels overnight, emissions from agriculture would be enough to increase the temperature by almost 2 degrees, making it impossible to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. And most of these emissions are ultimately caused by meat and fish production.
Of course, vegetable production also has an environmental impact. But be careful: obtaining protein from an animal involves not only raising that animal, but also growing that animal’s food. So getting proteins directly from plants is more efficient.
But how much worse is the impact of animal products compared to plants? For this we need a life cycle analysis of the entire impact caused by a particular food, from initial production to its final consumption.
Let’s take tofu as a reference, which is a product made from soybeans. To produce 1 kg of tofu, about 3 kg of CO2 equivalent is emitted. Well, 1 kg of chicken generates 3 times more emissions; 1 kg of pork, almost 4 times; 1 kg of cheese, 7 times; and 1 kg of beef generates 30 times more emissions than tofu.
And if we examine how much water, or how much land surface is needed to produce food, again, chicken, pork, cheese and beef are all much worse than tofu.
In the bibliography [this document], I will leave links to a data explorer which you can use to study the environmental impact of other products, such as nuts or vegetables, compare the impact of a veggie burger with a chicken, lamb or beef burger, or the impact of almond, soy or oat milk with cow milk.
But hey, bringing 1 kg of avocados from Mexico or Peru surely emits much more than 1 kg of beef from the farm in the next town, right? Well, surprisingly, no. International food transportation occurs mainly via huge ships that carry thousands of tons of food. So, per kilogram of food, the emissions are relatively low. In fact, transportation is responsible for just 5% of all emissions from global food production.
So, if you think the solution is to eat “local meat,” I’m afraid I have some bad news: what you eat is much more important than where it comes from.
And if you want to eat “sustainable meat”, bear in mind that producing 100 grams of the best meat, in environmental terms, is still usually more polluting than producing 100 grams of the worst plant-based food.
In general, an all-plant-based diet is better for the environment than a vegetarian, pescetarian, or omnivorous diet, whether in terms of emissions, land use, water use, or biodiversity loss. In fact, the Director General of the World Health Organization proposes a global transition towards more plant-based diets, for the sake of global health and the health of the planet.
Despite all this, it is often said that soy is contributing to the deforestation of the Amazon. And this is true. But only 20% of those soybeans are allocated to feeding human beings. Most soybeans are used to feed livestock.
Actually, the main cause of deforestation worldwide is meat. Specifically, beef.
To give us an idea, currently half of our planet’s habitable land is dedicated to agriculture. Of all that land, 80% is for livestock. In other words, if we stopped consuming animal products, we would have 38 million square kilometers to grow whatever we wanted, or to reforest… or to play cricket. In fact, we could reuse the equivalent of the surface of the entire American continent.
And land is something that we’re definitely going to need. According to estimates by the United Nations, before the end of the century we will reach a historical maximum of about 10 billion people on Earth who we will need to feed.
So what should we do? As I showed before, the environmental impact of beef is much greater than other protein sources. So the solution seems clear: We should eat less beef, and more chicken and fish, right?
Do we save the planet or the animals?
People often think that what is best for the environment is best for the animals too. But unfortunately, it’s often the other way around.
Producing 1 kg of beef implies between 3 and 10 times more emissions of greenhouse gasses than 1 kg of chicken. But a cow produces as much meat as about 200 chickens. So, if you replace beef with chicken, you are doing something good for the environment, sure, but you are consuming many more animals. Furthermore, the quality of life for factory-farmed chickens is significantly worse than for cows. And if you quit beef to eat more fish instead, you find yourself faced with a similar dilemma.
But it doesn’t end there: The better the conditions for farm animals, generally, the bigger the environmental impact. For example, the less space available to an animal, the less it moves, and therefore the less energy it consumes, and the less surface area it requires.
And if you think the solution is to buy “organic” products, again, I have bad news. According to several studies, caged chickens produce more eggs and consume less food than chickens from organic farms. So organic eggs have a larger carbon footprint in the end.
So, paraphrasing Rajoy: The worse [for the animal], the better for everyone, and the worse for everyone, the better [for the animal].
So we’re screwed, right?
Not so fast. This is what’s called a “false dichotomy”: a dilemma in which there seem to be only two solutions, but actually there are other solutions that we are ignoring unconsciously.
There is a way to help the environment and also the animals: Reducing meat consumption.
But of course, this is impossible, since eating meat is essential for good health, right?
Is it necessary to eat meat?
The largest organization of nutrition professionals, as well as many similar organizations from different countries, state that well-planned vegan diets are appropriate for all stages of life, including pregnancy and childhood. A lot of studies have concluded that a well-planned vegan diet can reduce the risk of chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension and certain types of cancer, which can help with weight loss among the general, healthy population (which is no small feat, given that more people are dying due to obesity than hunger).
On the other hand, the cancer agency at the World Health Organization classifies red meat as “probably carcinogenic,” and processed meat (which includes ham) as “carcinogenic”, based on sufficient evidence that its consumption causes colorectal cancer.
But of course, a poorly planned diet (vegan or otherwise) presents risks. And there are experts who report the risks from a poorly planned vegan diet, at the level of the nervous, skeletal and immune system, and even to mental health. This is no mean feat either, considering that we live in a society that is not well adapted to veganism.
However, what seems very likely is that a diet based mostly on plants is beneficial for health, regardless of whether it’s 100% vegan or not. So I think two indisputable conclusions can be drawn:
- Is it possible to live a healthy life on a diet that includes animal products? Yes. It suffices to say that the vast majority of healthy people in the world eat meat.
- Is it possible to live a healthy life on a plant-based diet? Also yes. Around 2% of the world is vegan, which is already about 160 million people, including elite athletes like Novak Djokovic, Lewis Hamilton, and Venus and Serena Williams, as well as a long list of athletes, cyclists, wrestlers, weight lifters, basketball and football players, and even bodybuilders of all ages.
Still, the plant-based diet gets a lot of criticism. A very common one is that it is an incomplete diet, since, indeed, it requires vitamin B12 supplementation. But what is not usually mentioned is that we give these supplements to farm animals as well.
And that’s not all – animals are given many other things, including hormones and antibiotics. Which brings us to another health risk posed by factory farms. A truly terrifying risk.
Pandemics and superbugs
Most pandemics that humanity has endured throughout history have been of “zoonotic” origin, that is, transmitted from animals to humans. This is the case of the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, AIDS and COVID19.
And intensive farms are spaces with a high density of animals, and very poor hygiene. In other words, they are a breeding ground for viruses and bacteria.
In such conditions, it is common for animals to get sick and die before they have grown sufficiently. So, to ensure they survive, and thus produce more meat, farm animals receive enormous doses of antibiotics.
So much so that the vast majority of antibiotics produced worldwide are not for humans, but for animals. Up to 80%, in the case of the USA, for example. How dangerous is this?
Imagine you go to the doctor with a simple infection. The doctor prescribes an antibiotic, and it… doesn’t work. You are infected by antibiotic-resistant microbes.
Well, this is not some hypothetical idea in a dystopian future: it is already happening.
Factory farms not only increase the risk of pandemics, but also the risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: superbugs.
In 2019, it was estimated that about 5 million people died from causes associated with super bacteria worldwide. In Spain in the same year, about 27 thousand died. For comparison, that’s 25 times more fatalities than in all traffic accidents together.
And according to some estimates, by 2050, superbugs could kill about 10 million people a year globally, which is as many as cancer kills at present.
But after so much dystopian content, I’m happy to finally give you some good news: We have solutions to all these problems!
What can we do globally?
In Europe, the European laws and agricultural subsidies are increasingly taking animal welfare and environmental protection into account. And this trend is likely to continue, which means that the price of animal products will surely increase too. This will cause the market to be redirected to other alternatives, for example, non-animal meat.
Today we already have a huge variety of products that emulate meat, eggs and dairy, but based on plants, and which are much less harmful to the environment and animals. But there are also other ways to produce non-animal meat. One is precision fermentation. And another is cultured meat, synthesized from stem cells.
I have no doubt that, sooner or later, we will have non-animal meat in the supermarket that is more nutritious, less polluting, cheaper, and tastier than animal meat. The more market acceptance these products have, the more investment they will receive, and the faster they will improve.
Although very slowly, this is already happening. In a recent European survey, more than half of participants said they had reduced their meat consumption over the past year. And 40% intended to purchase more plant-based alternatives in the coming months.
As I mentioned before, the number of animals on factory farms will continue to increase year after year, until reaching an all-time high. What we have to ensure is that we pass that maximum as soon as possible.
And for this, you can help.
What can you do?
Animal activists often try to convince you to go vegan. And indeed, that’s one way to reduce animal suffering. But for many people, due to different circumstances, becoming vegan does not seem like a feasible option. So, instead of going vegan, many people decide to do nothing at all.
But again, this is a false dichotomy. There are several other effective things you can do instead, and I’m now going to give you 3 suggestions.
1. Reduce consumption of animal products
You decide your own challenge: Meatless Mondays, replacing cow’s milk with soy or oat milk, or replacing chicken nuggets with plant-based ones.
But maybe you think that if you don’t buy a chicken breast filet at the supermarket, someone else will buy it, or it will end up in the trash. And often, sadly, that is the case. However, from time to time, the supermarket counts their stock and realizes that they have too many leftover filets. That day, the filet you haven’t bought tips the scales, and the supermarket orders, say, 100 fewer filets for the following week.
But I’ve just made these numbers up. What are the real figures?
The only study I know of on this topic estimated that for every egg you don’t buy, production is reduced by 0.9 eggs. For every liter of milk you don’t buy, production is reduced by 0.6 liters. And for every kilo of beef, chicken, or pork that you don’t buy, production is reduced by between 0.7 and 0.8 kilos.
In other words, for every 10 chickens you don’t eat, you avoid the suffering of 7 or 8. And therefore, if an average Spaniard stops eating chicken meat, after a year he is helping to avoid the suffering of about 11 chickens.
Almost a decade ago, I decided to reduce my consumption of animal products. To the minimum, actually. And until now I have managed to stay in very good health and live a happy life.
And the best part is that, today, stopping eating animal meat doesn’t imply giving up meat altogether. As I said before, there are plenty of plant-based alternatives that emulate the flavor and texture of the meat we love so much.
But there is also a whole world of recipes that are plant-based, or that can be easily adapted, and that are nutritious and delicious. To name just a few, I love Asian food, like pad thai, chana masala or dahl. And of course, I also love papas arrugadas con mojo picón (“wrinkled potatoes” with spicy sauce), salmorejo and Andalusian gazpacho (cold tomato-based soups).
And remember that cheese and chorizo tapa that I ate at the beginning? It was made from plants. Last Christmas, I prepared these tapas for my family, and they ran out before the tapas of animal-based ham and chorizo.
But we’re going off topic now. What else can you do to help animals?
2. Donate to effective charities
For example, The Humane League is an NGO that works to improve the conditions of factory farmed animals, and is considered by independent evaluators as one of the most cost-effective charities. What this means is they achieve more for less money. Among many other things, they have convinced large corporations such as Starbucks, Burger King and KFC to implement policies to improve animal welfare.
These types of campaigns, according to some estimates, can help improve the lives of hundreds of chickens for every euro donated.
If you live in Spain, you can donate to The Humane League through Ayuda Efectiva. And you can also donate to the Animal Welfare Observatory, a Spanish NGO with similar objectives.
3. Become a vegan ally
As Melanie Joy explains, you don’t have to go vegan to help animals. You can also become a vegan ally, meaning you can support the animal cause, regardless of whether or not you consume animal products yourself.
For example, when you go to the supermarket or a restaurant, you can try the plant-based options. And if they don’t have any, you can tell them that you would be interested in purchasing them. Given that they are new products (and lack subsidies like many animal products have), some of these vegan options will be a bit more expensive. But if you can afford to, by buying them you will be forcing the market to adapt, and over time, these products will become better and cheaper.
You can also sign petitions which demand better conditions for farmed animals, or join peaceful protests.
And if you are a journalist, or have a podcast or a YouTube channel, you can talk about the problem of animal suffering and its solutions.
For example, here you can see the excellent video by the vegan Alvaro Majo, and also the reaction of El Xokas, a non-vegan, but perhaps a vegan ally, and the reaction to the reaction of many others vegans and non vegans, with more and more people participating in an ever-evolving conversation about animal welfare.
Conclusions
We are heading into the most difficult era in the history of the universe. It’s in our hands to forge a better future, and although our part may seem very small, for each animal that we save from a life of torture, our little bit is everything in the universe.
Is it wrong to eat meat? Frankly, the answer doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you have the power to greatly reduce the suffering of many animals, as well as your environmental impact, the risk of another pandemic breaking out, and the spread of superbugs.
To do this, you only need to do 3 very simple things: Reduce, donate, and become a vegan ally.
Do it for your dog or for your cat. What lengths would you be willing to go to to prevent them from suffering?
Do it for my good friend, Boro. Or for the bull that I saw bleeding in the ring that day. Or for the mother pig who watched one of her piglets die without being able to do anything about it.
Do it for a future when we can be enjoying a barbecue with our friends, eating a delicious cultured meat burger with plant-based cheese.
Or if not, do it for chubby little Pablito (now slightly more mature), who would love to experience what it’s like to go and eat tapas with his family once again, and enjoy the chorizo, cheese and ham from his homeland, without any animal needing to die for it.
It seems crazy to us now. But if it’s the future we want, we’re going to have to fight for it.
Thank you very much for watching this video. I know it hasn’t been easy to watch. So if you found it interesting, don’t forget to give it a “like”, share it, leave a comment, and subscribe to my channel. That way I will have the great pleasure of seeing you again in the next episode of AltruPhysics.
