1. Helping animals also helps the global poor:While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of millions of tonnes of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, and a complex one, but not as pressing as the issue that meat-eating is.
2. Eating meat supports cruelty to animals:
The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today's factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates and other confined spaces. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won't even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.
3. Eating meat is bad for the environment:
A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that eating meat is "one of the . significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."
For example, eating meat causes almost 40 per cent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world combined.
The report concludes that the meat industry "should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."
4. Avoid bird flu:
The World Health Organisation says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming – from foot-and-mouth to SARS – can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.
5. If you wouldn't eat a dog, you shouldn't eat a chicken:
Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals who are able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats and dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, "As a trick at conferences I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens, and people think I'm talking about monkeys."
6. Heart disease and cancer are big killers:
Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the United States’ three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer and strokes.
7. Fitting into that tiny bikini:
Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight-loss diet, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. Of course, there are overweight vegans, just as there are skinny meat-eaters. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 per cent lighter than meat-eaters.
8. Global peace:
Leo Tolstoy claimed that "vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism". His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than humans acquired taste for animals' flesh. Great humanitarians from Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only one for people who want to make the world a kinder place.
9. The joy of veggies:
As the growing range of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants shows, veggies rock. People report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a centre-of-the-plate meat item to grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables that they didn't even know existed.
