Ecological



More than 40 per cent of the world's tropical rain forest has been destroyed this century. The current rate of disappearance is 50 hectares a minute. Most people might think it fatuous to suggest that becoming a vegan could have the slightest effect on this. Yet it is a simple fact that most of the vast areas that are being destroyed and laid down to grass in South America are being levelled for no better reason than the raising of beef cattle for the North American steak and hamburger market. As a result, the world is losing rare species at a frightening and accelerating rate.

Similar pressures apply wherever land is farmed intensively. Britain's countryside is fast being turned into a vast, bleak, prairie-like landscape devoid of hedgerows or trees simply in order to produce yet more contributions to the EEC grain mountains, most of which are sold off as animal feed. Countless species of our wild birds, animals, butterflies and wild flowers are threatened as a result.

At sea, intensive fishing has destroyed the vast herring shoals that once roamed around Britain's shores (and the North Sea fishing industry with them) and everyone knows how near several species of whale have come to extinction.

The list, alas, goes on and on. There are hundreds of other species whose habitats are threatened by the millions of omnivores our species counts among its members.


Multiply this by the 55 million people in the UK and you begin to realize the scale of the problem.

Clearly, every single person who becomes vegan immediately ceases their personal contribution to this inexorable demand for the products of the intensive farming of animals. So everyone who becomes vegan ceases to be part of the problem and becomes part of the solution - helping to ease the intolerable pressure that humanity now exerts on every other species to the farthest reaches of the globe.

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