7 Reasons Why I Am Vegan: 6. For The Wildlife

Vittoria
Jan 7, 2018
3 min read

Welcome to my series 7 Reasons Why I Am Vegan (and so could you)! In honour of Veganuary I will publish everyday on the first week of January 2018 from Monday 1st to Friday 7th, and by the end of the week I will explore all the motives that compelled me to choose this lifestyle. As I mentioned before, I believe in the power of information and even if you feel like this is not for you, you might end up discovering something you didn’t know and make a more informed choice going forward.

We are almost at the end of this series, we already talked about the habitat destruction and biodiversity loss cause by the meat and agriculture industry. But what I want to discuss today is what we are doing to wildlife.

As I explored in the "1. For The Animals" post, more than 10 billion land animals are killed for food every year in the U.S. alone, as are trillions of wild-caught and farmed fishes worldwide. These are staggering numbers, but the harm doesn’t stop there. Nearly half the landmass of the USA (149 million acres) is used to grow feed for food animals, resulting in significant habitat loss. 270 million acres of public land is used for livestock grazing, which harms more than 175 threatened or endangered wild species by destroying vegetation, damaging soils, contaminating waterways, and disrupting ecosystems.

According to the United Nations, raising animals for food (including land used for grazing and to grow feed crops)

now uses a staggering 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface.

Currently in 2017 we have 8'170 endangered animal species and 11'674 plants.

Already 801 animal species that have gone extinct, 64 are extinct in the wild,

10'002 are vulnerable, and more the 30'000 could become endangered in the near future.

"Industrial production of animals like pigs, chickens, and cows raised for food, especially in feedlots and concentrated animal feeding operations, contributes significantly to climate change, wastes enormous amounts of water, degrades and pollutes millions of acres of wildlife habitat a year, and pollutes public waterways"

We already discussed in the post "4. For The Rainforest", that rainforests are disappearing alarmingly fast with almost 4 million hectares in South America each year (2.6 million in Brazil alone). Vast tracks of forests are cleared for beef cattle grazing and to grow feed crops like soy and corn. As a result, beef is now the biggest deforestation driver in the world. Soy crops disrupt fragile ecosystems like forests and savannas: "threatening biodiversity, endangering species like the jaguar and giant anteater, and displacing and exploiting local peoples".

"Livestock grazing, not including the large portion of agriculture devoted to cattle production or other forms of meat production, is among the greatest direct threats to imperiled species, affecting 14 percent of threatened or endangered animals and 33 percent of threatened or endangered plants” ~ Take Extinction Off Your Plate

Additionally, the meat industry kills grazing animals, such as elk, deer, and pronghorn, to reserve grass for cattle. It also destroys communities of species like beavers and prairie dogs, as the natural habitat they create is detrimental to raising livestock.

"Many people don’t know that an additional 3 million wild animals, including threatened and endangered species, are killed each year by the USDA’s “Wildlife Services,” an organization whose goal is to destroy wildlife that is deemed a threat to animal agriculture. Wildlife Services spends millions of taxpayer money each year to brutally kill carnivores and predators like coyotes, wolves, foxes, mountain lions, bears, and bobcats. They also kill prairie dogs, beavers, and hundreds of other species, including hundreds of thousands of birds". And so-called "predator control" programs have caused keystone predators like Mexican gray wolves and California grizzly bears to go extinct .