Is being a Vegetarian destroying our Environment?

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My brother raised a good point to me on something. I am not a vegan or vegetarian at all! I am trying to eat more veggies lately, but from my own research I believe man needs both meat and vegetables to be healthy.

Anyways here was the issue he raised. Plants and trees and all that is what our Earth uses to our air, so whenever we eat a plant we are actually killing a resource that the Earth needs to keep itself clean. Now on the flip side, whenever we kill a cow or whatever and eat their meet, we are killing something that produces a gas that is hazardous to our environment. It is pr oven that cows produce more carbon Monoxide than all use humans put together. So, we are essentially saving our planet by keeping the balance.

What would be an argument against this that isn't a stupid PETA slogan. I mean it makes perfect sense. The Earth needs plants to thrive, yet you say eat them. Where as, animals eat and destroy much of these plants, as well as some creating toxic gas that destroys are planet, that, if we didn't kill and eat them, would be out of control and would probably kill us all.

I believe balance is key, just as in with life. I am just curious as to what you vegetarians and vegans have to say about this.
If they are eating more plants than us, thats all the more reason to eat more of them or else they would eat all of our plants and hurt our environment even more,
I am not for the MASS production of meat. I try my best to eat from places I know - Like from Amish farms or at least organic. But still, do some research and see that we do need meat! Every culture and society in the world recognized this. It's called balance! We eat TOO much meat! This mass production of anything is not right, but for my own health and the plants health, I choose to eat both in moderation.
Also, consider this - THE FOOD CHAIN. Just as in nature animals eat other animals to keep balance in the ecosystems, man eats animals to keep balance. Have we over-stepped the boundaries of balance? Yes, I beleive we did a long time ago. But the problem is it's already been done. What would happen if we released these millions of captive animals into our ecosystems? They would certainly destroy them. Which would put us back to where we left off, having to kill them in order to maintain BALANCE, and retain our position at the TOP of the FOOD CHAIN.
 
I can see where your brother is coming from but I'm afraid he is wrong.

The vast majority of soy that is grown (in some cases on deforested land) is for use in the Animal feed market, a beef cow will live for a couple of years, eating and f@rting away before he is turned into burger, in that time he will eat much more plant and grain than the same amount of people who could eat him would eat in plant equivalent.

Its trees that are the most important filter for earth not annual plants, although they all help...and think about it..if everyone was veggie there would be MORE plants grown and less flatulent cows around.

Geddit??

EDIT: the 'ol chestnut about being top of the food chain is [email protected] never were..put you on the savanah at night and lets see who is at the top..you or simba??
If you want to eat meat go ahead....get a gun, go shoot a deer, that makes you a prey animal..but farming in an intensive and greedy way is wasteful, enviromentaly harmful, cruel and a hazard to your health.
When my meat eating parents come for xmas I buy them shot wild game...THAT is natural...a whopper from BK is not.
 
It takes more than ten pounds of plants to produce one pound of meat, (soybeans, hay, corn) so meat eaters consume far more plant matter than do vegetarians.

Eating beef doesn't "keep the balance." It's called supply and demand. If the demand were not there, the cows wouldn't have been inseminated in the first place.
 
I get what you're driving at and I see your thought process, but you're not quite there. It *would* be in line with logic, but humans domesticated animals for slaughter, and those animals are being bred a LOT and they take years for them to grow to slaughtering age and they require tons of plant products. It's this process that causes a problem. You might also argue that agriculture of plant products causes problems with the planet. First, you have to chop down acres of natural forests, cultivate the land, plant seeds, pour millions of gallons of water on it, use heavy gasoline-powered machinery, then chop down all the plants and start again. Now if that's not cruel to the planet, I don't know what is. Humans, as a general rule, are always hurtful to the planet, no matter what they do. Going on the internet and using electricity is hurtful, too. The only way we could live on this planet without hurting it much is to go back to hunting and gathering. Not happening. Plus, only 2% of the world's population is vegetarian, so as a whole, we really don't eat that much more leafy greens than non-vegetarians. ;)

So are vegetarians hurting the planet? Yes. Are meat-lovers hurting the planet? Yes. Are Zen Buddhist monks hurting the planet? Yes. There's really no way around it in this modern world. We're all at fault. The best we can do is reduce, reuse, recycle and just try to live greener. Nobody is more at fault than anyone else. We all contribute to global warming.
 
When we kill a livestock animal, we are killing something that we put there in the first place. Those animals don't just pop up on their own, we farm them and breed them! We are responsible for the methane gas that domestic cattle produce. And those animals destroy far more plants than vegetarians do. So the meat industry is clearly worse for the environment.
 
1 acre garden can feed 40 people for 1 year.

1 acre can feed 1 cow for 1 year.

1 stall in a industrial fed lot will force fed 1 cow ( too many glow in the dark things that it would never chose to eat and should not eat) chemicals, antibiotics, growth hormones, etc. frankenmeat...

we do not need meat, it is a choice....

read this the other day...they have been studying what the egyptians/mummies/people died of ( the question of the exodus, etc.) the hebrews of the time where eating vegetables and keeping kosher...the egyptians where eating anything and everything/pork, sugars, too much of everything bad! they where dieing the way we are today.

moderation was the point there, even back then , once a week on Sabbath was the special meal that would have meat included, the rest of the week was veg and grains, water..


with all the meat recalls, daily recalls of meat products that are contaminated, is it wise to gamble with your health in such a fashion??
 
I don't get it either. I am not vegan nor vegetarian, but I am criticized by them for what I am. It is just human nature. and do they not realize that if they are so concerned with animals... they are eating more plants which takes away food from our animals. If you want to be that precise about it... any way you look at it, you are killing something. would they honestly say they would rather die than to eat meat to stay alive if that was their only choice?
 
yes i agree that we veg*ns do contribute a small amount to the tree and vegetation demise. but keep in mind that the space that the growing omnivorous population needs to keep their animals is constantly causing trees to be cut down a lot faster than just eating the leaves off of the trees. the leaves will grow back, but the tree itself has to be replanted, which it will not be, as the land is now being used by the cattle that will be soon taken over to slaughter houses. also your comment that the animals cause the most pollution is indeed wrong. the cows might cause a considerable amount of pollution, but they cause nothing close to what the production of meat does to the enviroment. the production of one pound of meat is the equal of driving a semi truck on the interstate for about 10-15 miles. also, cows mostly only cause air pollution. the slaughter houses and meat producing plants cause all types of pollution. when they slaughter the animal they are letting its blood leak out into holes in the floor, which lead out to nearby rivers and lakes. also, it takes about 2500 gallons of water in order to produce a single pound of meat, so this is a major waste of water, and what water is used to produce this meat is then after considered unusable, as it is so contaminated from the earlier processes that it has been used for. there are many other things that i could say about your question, but i will stop here, because this seems to have given you a basic answer to your question.

EDIT: the more of them you kill the more pollution you put into the air and the more trees you are allowing to be cut down!!! just because they eat a few plants a day is not the reason to be killing the innocent animals.
Also, if you believe that we are naturally omnivores than go to this site and read through the facts listed below the Q&A.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_humans_omnivores_or_herbivores
 
If everyone was vegetarian (or worse yet vegan) the consequences would be disastrous. They don't think things through and they don't consider all the ramifications. Not to mention they are denying themselves things that man has eaten for centuries and SHOULD eat.
 
Well, cows eat more plants than I do, that's for sure!

By breeding them for food, there's more of those gas emissions. There's also more plants dying; seriously, I /know/ that farm animals eat more than me. So, basically, when there are animals being raised for food, it's harming the Earth both ways.

There's a ton more ways other than this one that raising animals for food hurts us in the end.
 
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