"Why are you actually vegetarian/vegan?"
Preface“Why are you actually vegetarian/vegan?“ How often did I hear that question now, since I stopped eating meat in summer 1995. How often did I have to explain to the people, that this has quite a number of reasons and how often did I promise to write down all these reasons one day. In the following text, this may finally be done, to show you, whoever you are, my opinion on these topics. If you read the text until the end, you will hopefully understand why I actually consider the question itself to be wrong, why I actually think, that I should be the one who asks the people: "Why are you actually not vegetarian?" A lot, really a lot has been written on this topic. For millennia already the educational elite of the world is discussing it, not only in Europe, but in all higher, value-based cultures of the earth. Many smart people made a start, made a good example for the people to come, tried to be an ideal. Unfortunately the ordinary world citizen could not be persuaded so far. In absolute numbers, everything did actually become much worse, due to the exponential increase of the population and the extreme increase of the meat consumption of those people. What is the highest thing, that the human civilization achieved so far? This question is not easy to answer. Is it the invention of the wheel? The moon landing? Agriculture, automobiles or computers? Is it music or painting? In my opinion it is ethics, although (or just because of that) ethics are probably the thing, that develops the most slow of all. But it does develop and its development did increase too since the start of industrialization, just as everything else did. Only 150 years ago it was nothing special, if two men dueled each other, as a matter of life and death. It was accepted by the society. Today this is unthinkable, that two men, arguing about something, draw their weapons on the street and try to kill each other .. fortunately. It was not easy for me to write this text. It took a damn long time and a lot of effort. I have been reading hundreds of web pages, studies and scientific articles and watched dozens of films and video clips. More than once I almost had to puke and had to stop playing those clips. I also learned a lot of new things during that time, gained a lot of knowledge, made connections and questioned so called 'facts'. The text varies in the way it is written, depending on the mood in which I have been writing it, so please do not wonder, if a funny paragraph is suddenly followed by a dead-serious one. As the whole topic moved and exasperated me a lot, I want to say sorry right in advance, in case someone feels massively offended, hurt or insulted. It is not my intention to hurt people with this text, but to show them the reality in which we live, and to question it. For the most parts, I tried hard to support as much as possible or as necessary with sources. From time to time however, I was just not in the mood for it, as it is a lot of work, so that you will find some 'source-free' parts. If someone doubts certain data, she/he may tell me so and I will search for the respective sources. The text is written from my local German and European perspective and I am aware, that it cannot satisfy every human being on this planet with this perspective. While South Americans, with their exorbitant consumption of beef, can probably identify quite well with the European eating habits, this might be more difficult for East Asians for example. For me however, there is no difference in whether we eat bovine, whales, chicken or fish and I hope to be able to explain this point in more detail within the text. Originally I wrote all this down in early 2007 and in March 2007 I finally put it online. The last significant revision was done in October 2009 in connection with the translation of the whole page into English. I will try to keep the links up to date, which are changing from time to time. The respective date of the last update can always be found at the very end of this website. Much much more I could have actually written, as every answer leads to new questions and every question gives more than one answer. More and more new thoughts came to my mind and I would like to somehow cover all these too and to share them with the people around me, but the world of thoughts is just too temporary, too transient. I simply forgot many thoughts after some time. I also did not write down many things, because it would have made the text even longer and many ideas I did not pursue further for not loosing myself into details. I hope the results are readable and comprehendible and especially able to transport my thoughts.
Furthermore it surely is reasonable not to read the whole work at once, but to take some breaks in between, though it is possible to read completely through, including everything, in just a couple of hours. I know, the text is long, but especially all those, who thought on the first look: "Oh my, this is much. That's something I'm not really in the mood for." should read it, at least if they are meat (and fish) eaters. What is and what eats a vegetarian / vegan?In the German version I was citing the German "Duden", the
official dictionary for German spelling and grammar, and found
that it is not very precise about the words 'vegetarian',
'vegetarianism' and 'vegan'.
Since I became vegetarian in 1995, I have been ovo lacto
vegetarian and never had any problems with it. Throughout the years my consumption of milk, eggs and products from them declined
continuously and meanwhile I'm a complete vegan, at least in
Germany, as it can be very difficult to live vegan in a foreign
environment. A questions of ethicsThe absolute main reason for me and most other vegetarians lies in the problem of ethics. Even without any of the other reasons, this would already be more than sufficient to stop all kinds of meat consumption immediately.
Let us start with the basis of all ethics, known as the 'Golden Rule':
This famous saying contains everything, which is really important about ethics. In the one or the other way, practically every larger religion on this planet (and many smaller ones too), every philosophical approach and every higher culture has formulated this sentence at some point. It can be found in a multitude of ancient Greek texts [1] [2] as well as in the writings of Confucius [3] or of the Zoroastrians [4]. The most important values of the three big world religions Islam [5], Christianity [6] [7] [8] and Judaism [9] can be reduced to it in large parts, Buddhism is based on it to a large extent [10] and even in the overall very bloody Vedic writings of Hinduism it can be found [11]. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and pretty much all modern legal systems are built on this principle. It is the logical consequence from the human ability for abstract thinking and to put oneself into other individuals' situation.
And now to the main point here: Based on this knowledge, on these principles, which have been acquired in early childhood, humans are generally afraid of taking life. Life is the highest thing, that a creature, a living being, possesses. You cannot take something more important from someone, than his or her life. So if you now give a knife to a man, who has never taken life before, no matter if it is the life of a human or a non-human animal, and you say: "Here, butcher the cow! Just cut her throat.", then he will surely hesitate, will probably not do it at all without some 'encouragement'. And if he has actually done it, then undoubtedly he will have this repressive feeling in his stomach. Even you might praise him excessively for it and tell him he can be proud of his first slaughtering, there will still be this feeling deep inside, to have done something wrong. And if the person has never even attended a slaughtering before, he will probably even puke, when the poor animal slowly stertorously dies. Butcher Harris, Schlachter Krause, Kasap Ahmed or Wú tú hù will probably slap him on the shoulder then and say: "The first time for me was also like that.". Interestingly, on an apparently completely different field, exactly the same behavior can be found: war. For millennia already there are stories, narrations and reports from, with and about soldiers, who made these experiences. Hundreds of thousands of times in modern literature and in thousands of movies this has been dealt with, this bad feeling, that people feel, after they have taken the life of another person for the first time. This inner, ethical barrier, which is supposed to prevent you from doing the most terrible thing that you can do to someone, to take his life. ... And if the person has never even attended a killing before, he will probably even puke, when the poor guy slowly stertorously dies. Comrade Harris, Kamerad Krause, yazgý arkadaþý Ahmed or Wú tóng zhì will probably slap him on the shoulder then and say: "The first time for me was also like that." … Another thought: If you show videos (preferably without commentaries, but with sound) of the breeding, killing and cutting up of cows and pigs to people in our society, then a large majority of the people will immediately turn away, will find it disgusting, does not want to see it, looks away or even feels insulted, becomes aggressive or rude. Understandable reactions, which can be explained easily: this 'large majority' never had to kill those animals themselves in their whole life and, in most cases, has never even seen it either. The above mentioned 'inner ethical barrier' never had to be crossed. You could say they have not been 'dehumanized' yet. Deep inside there is this feeling, that it is not right, even though one suppresses it, as one has probably learned the exact opposite, has eaten 'meat' or 'fish' the whole life, this red, black, grey and brown stuff, that you can buy in the supermarket and on which packaging you often find those happy looking little animals. In most cases the story ends with the respective person persuading him-/herself that it is OK, because we are superior to the animals .. or because of the law of the jungle .. or because it has always been like that .. or because it was made like that by god .. or because the animals are doing the same .. or because our ancestors did also eat meat or.... Everyone finds an own way to deal with it, an own 'excuse'. There have always been excuses to overcome this inner barrier:
Among the followers of Plato and Aristotle there could also be found a large number of vegetarians. The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero wrote:
With the decline of the Roman Empire at the latest, the average education of the people in Europe did also drop significantly and vegetarianism was limited to some single persons for centuries after that. The holy Francis of Assisi proclaimed:
And Leonardo da Vinci gave the statement:
Only since the early 19th century the idea of vegetarianism spread among larger numbers of people, which started especially in Great Britain to found vegetarian clubs and societies. At the end of the century, already thousands of more or less important people had 'converted' to vegetarianism and in other European countries more and more vegetarian associations were founded now too. A large number of these modern vegetarian movements was based right from the beginning on peace and humanism, but also on health aspects. Many important philosophers, writers and scientists dealt with these topics. In the following a few meaningful quotations: Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908): "Truly humane culture can only exist, when not only the consumption of human flesh, but of every kind of meat is seen as cannibalism." Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910): "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields." Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948): "I believe that spiritual progress demands from us at a particular point in time to stop killing our fellow living creatures for our own bodily satisfaction." Franz Kafka (1883-1924): "Now I can watch you in peace; I don't eat you anymore." [looking at fishes in an aquarium] Albert Einstein (1879-1955): "It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind." Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969): "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals." An interesting prophecy came from Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), which somehow proved to be true at last during world war 2 and the affiliated holocaust:
A big and apparent analogy can also be found to slavery. What if not slaves are the millions and millions of egg laying chickens and milk cows, which serve the humans with their whole existence day and night, instead of pursuing the things in their natural environment, for which they have been created or born. Just like the slaves in former times, they have an owner, to whom they belong forever and to whom all their offspring goes too. He can decide, what happens to them, can punish them and even kill them. As reasons you can usually find, that animals are worth less than humans, are standing on another evolutionary level, are more stupid or just 'different' from us. About the black slaves it was also said, that they are actually not human, that they are underdeveloped, stupid or just different. Referring to black (or differently coloured) people we call this racism nowadays. Referring to animals it is called speciesism and I am sure, that some day in the future this speciesism will have the same legal status as racism has today, which is forbidden by the universal declaration of human rights as well as by the constitutions of most countries, for a good reason. Have not the slaves been transported in huge numbers on big ships under miserable conditions to the new world? Did not about 15% of the slaves on those transports die and were thrown overboard? [12] Are not huge numbers of sheep and bovines transported nowadays from Australia to the Middle East under miserable conditions? Are not about 10% of the sheep on these transports dying and are also thrown overboard? [13] Was it not only some individual people in the beginning, who questioned the slave trade? Was it not only a few people from the upper social layers, who worked towards abolishment of slavery? And did it not become more and more? Was it not only single people from the upper social layers at the beginning of the vegetarian movement in the 19th century, who questioned the consumption of dead animals and spoke out for an abolishment of it? And did it not become more and more? Is it not millions of people already, just here in Germany?
Certainly everyone has watched a cat at least once how it stretches itself on the ground, how it enjoys it, if it gets caressed. Just like a human. How much happiness do dogs feel, if you play with them or if they can run around with other, befriended dogs. Does really no one think about cows, pigs and chickens, that they feel just the same, that they too enjoy it, if they get caressed or be happy, if they are with 'friends'? .. that they too have these very human feelings? We accompany animals like 'Babe' the pig or 'Benji' the dog during their adventures in cinema or TV, because we are able to put ourselves in their place. Instead of putting themselves into Babe and Benji, meat-eaters should try to put themselves into the animals, which they use to eat.
We tell each other tales, in which animals are representative for humans, read comics or watch animated movies, in which the leading roles are played by animals. We feed the ducks at the lake, hang seed rings on the balcony in winter as food for the birds and even construct nest boxes for them. We print funny and cute animals on our clothes and bags, send greeting cards with sheep, pigs or mice on it and make advertisements with animals in TV spots and on posters. All these animals open our hearts, cheer us up, make us happy or encourage us to buy something. All these animals are considered extremely cute and cuddlesome by us and nobody would even have the idea, to advertise with a young piglet, beheaded and bleeding, or to print a calf that has been cut in two in the middle onto a greeting card. For what reason? For comparison: Nobody would have a problem to advertise with a beheaded eggplant or with a zucchini that has been cut in the middle. Why is that so? Because deep inside every human knows for sure, that the animal feels (felt) like we do, feels pain and can suffer just like humans, the zucchini can not. We speak of animal protection, to even write it into our constitution, build frog fences so that the poor toads are not being driven over and we even construct artificial stork nests. But we allow at the same time, that millions of animals have to endure a life full of terrible suffering and instead of at least thanking them for it are being put to death in the end. Constantly you can hear and read, how enraged people are about cruelty to animals, about people who beat their dogs or kick their cats, but what the hell do the people think how the animals live, that end up on their plates? How ignorant is the human mind, that he complains about people who keep Haskis in their apartments, as those dogs need so much space to run around, but that he is largely responsible at the same moment, by purchasing and eating meat, for the fact that other animals, who need just as much space to run around, have to live a dull and inactive life in their own shit on extremely small space and are finally being mass-murdered?! We donate money for bears in Kamchatka and for Orang Utans on Borneo, but we accept the largest mass murder in the history of mankind, as if it would be given by god. So many people do really have a close relationship to their pets, feel 'real friendship' towards their dog or cat (whether this is a mutual thing is another question). At the same time most people consider pictures, figures and photos of small piglets for example as so cute, that they could never think of something bad happening to them. But what do those people think a 'sucking pig' is? It is one of those small, very sweet piglets, taken from his mother as a small child and murdered, just to be put on a stick and fried over the fire. Do the people really not see, that they are eating those, who they love?
The 'meat' as a 'product', which you can buy in the end, does for most of the people not have any relation to the animal, which had to give his life for it. The meat as well as the animal are regarded as abstract objects, which you can assign an origin, price and quality to, just like to a cheap toaster from Hong Kong. What actually happens to the animals is just being ignored by the people, according to the motto: "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over." But in principle one does actually know it. But one is not present. One does not have to watch. One does not know the animals and does not want to know them, because then one could not eat them anymore. Although it happens directly next to us, it seems to be unimaginably distant or not to exist at all. And somewhere in one's head there is always: "It's just animals."...
On a seemingly completely different field, exactly the same behaviour can be found: Genocide. One did not know the people who were brought to the concentration camps and did not want to know them, because otherwise one could not have approved how they were treated. And then, too, the same motto applied: "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over." But in principle one did actually know it. But one was not present. One did not have to watch. Although it happened directly next to the people, it seemed to be unimaginably distant or not to exist at all. And somewhere in the people's head there was always: "It's just gypsies/Russians/Jews."... Compared to the total population, the extermination machinery of the Nazis was also in the hand of just a few people, who were also just involved in single processes and therefore always just contributing a small part to the big picture. By this the 'guilt' was shared in such a way, that somehow everyone could live with it. The people who were responsible for loading the trains were 'just' transporting. The person who levered the switch which let the gas come out did not even see his victims. And the people who were drawing the gold teeth or who were responsible for the cremations could always say to themselves: "They are already dead."
But is it the solution with which one can have a good sleep? With which one does not clash about with his own consciousness? With which one could stand before god and say: "My conscience is immaculate. I have always given my best, to cause as few suffering as somehow possible in this world."? … Is it right?
Think about it. ... Please!
So what about seafood?Many people think approximately like this: "Well, for pigs and cows I can somehow understand, but fish is just something different." And so we do not have to wonder to keep meeting self-appointed vegetarians, who actually eat fish, which does not fit already per definitionem. Some of them are aware of this problem and simply call themselves "fishitarians" or "pisces-vegetarian". But is this really the case? Is fish really "something different"? Among the vertebrae, fish are our most distant relatives, genetically as well as by their outer form. The fact that they live only underwater, does not make it easier to identify with them. Additionally, here in Germany there is the Christian-European culture, in which fish did always have some kind of a religious special role as food, although I actually did not find any call for the consumption of fish in the New Testament. In many East and Southeast Asian countries it does also have a special role, as it plays a significant role in the traditional eating culture, usually together with a variety of other seafood. 
However, only because fish cannot tell us boisterously, that they do not enjoy having a hook of steel in their body, which cuts their inner organs, or to be squeezed together in a net with thousands of other fish, suffocating or being crushed to death, it does not mean that they might not have a tiny little problem with this. Since a British study dealt with exactly this topic in 1994, it is known, that fish feel pain in a very similar way as we do. [49] Many further studies followed and gave hints into the same direction [50] or, respectively, supported directly the found results [51]. Furthermore they also showed, that fish do also feel other sensations like fear, stress and panic in a similar way to humans. Therefore it is completely unacceptable that our society does still make a difference between "meat" and "fish", because what is actually eaten is nothing else but fish-meat. Yes, OK, fish are usually not as cute as dogs or cats (what about
Nemo?), but it does also have to do with common sense: If I do not
eat my dog or my cat, because I know that it has feelings similar to
my own, then I have to draw the logical consequence not to eat any
other living being with such feelings as well. And beside mammals
like pigs or cattle this does also include all other vertebrae ...
fish too! But what about the other seafood then? These are not
vertebrae and shrimps, clams and mussels for example are so small
and strange and different, they cannot feel pain anyway, right?! Let me briefly explain a fundamental concept of evolution
at this point: So if all animals that are able to move can feel pain now, which
is not scientifically proven, but seems obvious, then this does also
apply to animals like prawns and other crustaceans. They do also
have legs. I do not want to claim that insects, spiders and crabs
can feel pain in the same way as we do. And for worms and snails it
does not even make much sense at all due to their extremely low
velocity. But most of these animals will probably be able to feel
some form of pain and the larger, the more complex and the faster
the animal is, the stronger this feeling will be developed. And what about clams, shells or mussels now?
I have to admit, that I was not aware myself for a long time, what
kind of life form such a mussel actually is. In fact they are quite
interesting and complex. Most of them can move by themselves quite
freely with a foot that they can extend. Some of them can even swim
or jump. They have eyes, gills and so on and reproduce in more or
less the same way as fish do. Furthermore many species are capable
of digging themselves into the ground and then stick out their long
siphon (some kind of long neck with a small head), out of the
surface to breathe and eat. And so I think, every deliberate, ethical vegetarian should let them be, the prawns, clams, crabs and other animals called 'seafood'. Animals and climate protection / environmental protection?ClimateGreat .. first the meat-eaters are bad people, then they supposedly live less healthy and now they should even be responsible for climate change? The simple answer to this somehow odd question is: Yes! The main keyword here is methane. 'Livestock breeding' produces huge amounts of this gas. All the cows, pigs, chicken and etc. are farting and shitting with all that is in them. Although it might be hard to imagine for a layman, that excrements and farts might change the climate, this is unfortunately the case. The reason lies simply in the sheer amounts, which are produced and in the fact, that the effects of methane on the climate are 20 [15] to 23 [16] times as high as CO2. But carbon dioxide is also produced in large amounts, especially indirectly by burning fossil fuels for the production of the required heat and electricity, by pumping and purifying the huge required amounts of water and by cutting or burning the forests, to make room for grassland and animal food. Interestingly this realization is not even particularly new. The German Parliament's 'Enquete Commission' for the "Protection of the Earth's Atmosphere" (12th election period) did already proclaim in 1994 in their closing report:
In the year 2003 an American study compared the sustainability of a meat-based and a lacto-vegetarian diet in relation to the US population. It concluded, that both are not sustainable enough for the future survival of the people, but that the lacto-vegetarian diet is much more sustainable than the meat-based diet. [17] A vegan diet was unfortunately not part of the investigation.
In the United States a study from March 2006 [18] came to the same results to which the Enquete Commission had come here already in 1994 and praised it as the newest discovery and found out, that the greenhouse gas emissions due to meat consumption amount to 6% in the United States, which is much lower than the above mentioned values especially because many additional factors of the meat production have not been considered in this study. It caused some turmoil anyway, because the authors made a public appearance and announced, that it makes much more sense to become vegetarian than to buy a hybrid card. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations published its report on the consequences of livestock breeding in 2006, in which they explain, that livestock breeding is responsible for 18% of the worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, measured in CO2 equivalents. They point out, that this is a higher percentage than that of the whole world's transport sector, that means more than all cars, airplanes and ships combined. [19] A study published in 2009 by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency confirms the 18% stated by the FAO and assigns 80% of the worldwide anthropogenic land use to the livestock sector. The study calculates, that shifting to a low or non meat diet would reduce the global climate mitigation costs by about 50%. The saved amount is put at an estimated 20 trillion (20000 billion) US$. The costs that would be saved in the health care system, that would reduce from a then generally more healthy population (which is also emphasized by the study) are not even included in this amount yet. [71] So if we take the surely quite reliable data of the FAO, then we might conclude, that of all the possibilities which one has as a small individual being in the big, wide world, to do something against climate change, none has comparably strong effects as the changeover to a vegetarian or even better to a vegan diet. Environment in generalAs if it would not already be bad enough, that livestock breeding destroys our earth's atmosphere (our only one, by the way), it has numerous other negative effects on the environment. Some of them shall be summarized here representatively: WaterDo you also skip taking a bath from time to time and just take a shower instead, because it simply requires less water? Do you use the 'save water' button of your toilet flush? Do you shut off the tab while you brush your teeth? Well, if you are meat-eaters, then you can just stop it all, because the little water used for taking a bath, flushing the toilet or brushing teeth is pretty much a joke compared to the gigantic amounts of water, that are used (wasted) in livestock breeding. More than 8% of the worldwide water consumption is caused by livestock industry. In the industrialized countries this amount is even much higher. One kilogram of dead sheep baby (commonly called lamb meat) used 10m³ of water for its 'production', i.e. 10000 litres. For taking a shower I usually use about 30 litres of water each time. That means, that I could take 333 showers from one kilogram of lamb meat, what would be more than a year in my case. In case of dead cow (commonly called beef) the water demand is actually even higher than this. At least as bad as the high consumption of water is the contamination of this basic element of life. Worldwide data is not available for this, but instead the US data may be listed here, whose dietary habits are much closer to the European ones than most people here would admit: Livestock breeding is responsible there for 55% of the erosion and desertification in the country, for 37% of the used pesticides, for 50% of the demand for antibiotics and for one third of the nitrogen and phosphor amounts, which are flushed into the freshwater resources. Worldwide, the livestock breeding is responsible for 64% of the anthropogenic ammoniac emissions, which are decisively responsible for acid rain and acidification of water bodies and soil. [19] [20] In marine ecology there is a phenomenon that is usually called "marine death zones". The over-fertilization of the seas with nutrients, called eutrophication, here leads to the collapse of entire ecosystems. The reason for this over-fertilization is the use of fertilizers in agriculture, the waste water from sewage plants and livestock husbandry. In the Black Sea for example, during the 1970s and 1980s in huge areas (about as large as Switzerland) the whole fauna and flora of the sea died out completely. More than half of the nitrogen that was responsible for this came from agriculture, mainly from factory farming. Before the collapse of the communist planned economies in Eastern Europe, one single pig farm in Romania with more than a million pigs brought in about as much pollutants as a whole city with five million inhabitants. Up till now these areas have still not recovered completely. [76] Land consumption
On the one hand people like to complain about the rainforest being cut down, about areas being concreted over, about floods due to a lack of overflow areas and about wild animals not having enough big and connected forest areas in Germany to have an optimal life in it. On the other hand almost no one seems to ask, what all these areas are actually used for, though there are some easily comprehensible numbers behind this. According to WWF Switzerland, and they do not only employ vegetarians and vegans want to add, the land demand for the production of one kilogram of vegetables and/or potatoes amounts to about 6m², for the production of one kilogram of beef from local grassland cows it is 269m². This is not just the double or triple or even tenfold area, but it is 45 times as much area as for the vegetables. If the (then very pitiable) cows are just kept in the stables and are fatted there with concentrated feed stuff, then a few less meadows are needed here, locally, but the more area overseas, where the rainforest is burned to make room for the soy beans, from which the concentrated feed stuff is made. Because of this, the average area demand does even amount to 323m² then, 54 times as much as for the potatoes. For those who just do not want to believe, that the whole rainforest is cleared for meat: according to FAO, 70% of the cleared Amazonas rainforest is used for cattle pasture and a large amount of the remaining 30% for the growing of feeding stuff. [19] The conflict in Sudan has numerous reasons and it would be negligent to solely blame animal husbandry for it. Yet it has its share in the conflict. One of the main driving factors for conflict in Darfur is the steady population growth for more than 50 years (a linear 12% growth per annum). At the same time, the livestock population has increased by over 400% between 1961 and 2004 in northern and central Sudan alone, probably much more in Darfur. The high number of livestock leads to conflicts about grazing rights, livestock migratory routes and in combination with climate change it leads to deforestation and desertification, resulting in even less usable land. [75] OverfishingTo counteract the common objection, that one could eat fish from fish farms instead of sea fish, right from the beginning: for one kilogram of farmed fish about two kilogram of fish are taken from the sea and used as food for the farms. [21] Moreover, bred salmon eat around 400g of antibiotics throughout their lives, get vaccinations against all kinds of diseases and have colorants mixed in their food, to make their meat pink. [22] 52% of the global sea fish stock are already so intensely fished, that an increase is not possible anymore, 17% are regarded as overfished, 7% of the numbers of fish decreased significantly between 2004 and 2006. In the 1970s 40% of the fish were regarded as 'moderately exploited', now this is just the case for 23%; the number of 'significantly exploited' fish has therefore increased respectively. [23] The catching of a certain species of fish until shortly before extinction has much deeper reaching consequences than just the numeric reduction of specimens. It is rather part of a complex marine ecosystem, which often gets totally out of balance or totally collapses because of this. Hundreds of other species are connected to this, no matter if predator or prey of the overfished species. Birds that lived from this species are just as much affected as water plants, which lived in some kind of symbiosis with those fish. [24] Though the seas in Europe and North America are also overfished, the rich countries can afford to have fishing quotas. But as this does not reduce the people's appetite for dead fish, the big fishing fleets look for other 'harvesting areas'. Only too often these are the coastal waters of African counties, whose governments earn a few Dollars from it and accept the collapse of the ecosystem as well as of the local fishing industry for that. With regard to the continuing economic growth in China, I do not even want to imagine the future of the marine ecosystems in the pacific ocean. More miseryBeside the mentioned examples, livestock breeding is also largely responsible for particulate matter emission, resistance of germs against antibiotics, desertification and for the loss of biodiversity. Twenty percent of the whole animal biomass on this planet is occupied by 'domestic animals' [19], bred only for their death. Inconceivable 30% of the whole land areas of this world are used for livestock breeding in one or another way, land which has once been used by a multitude of other animals and, in many cases, was covered by dense forests before.
In fact, meat-eating environmentalists can therefore not really exist, at least they would be very implausible. With regard to the immense demand for land for livestock or respectively for the growing of the animal's food, with regard to the huge amounts of water, which are wasted for it, with regard the forests, that are cut down or burned for that land, with regard to the extremely big energy consumption, which is mainly covered by fossil fuels and especially with regard to the huge amounts of methane, which are emitted by the whole thing, environmental protection / climate protection and vegetarianism are actually two sides of the same coin. The one has become almost unthinkable without the other. In 1950, the worldwide meat production amounted to 44 million tons, 2004 to 259 million tons. At the same time, the space required by the heavily grown human population has immensely increased, but the effectively available space has declined by the strong expansion of the livestock industry. Desertification, water shortage, famines, rural migration and emigration did all more or less 'explode'. People who do not see, that something has to change here, are either stupid or ignorant. Albert Einstein formulated this already more than 50 years ago like that: "Nothing will [..] increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." Meat kills peopleApart from the completely unacceptable destructions of the environment and atmosphere, nowadays it can be said with easy justification, that 'meat kills people.' Meat kills people? I don't understand. 'Meat' is already dead, isn't it? ... Well, strictly speaking the meat does not kill people of course, but its consumers do so, the meat-eaters .. and of course they do not do it directly. The vast majority is in fact not even aware of what happens and how it all works. In those areas of the world, in which fresh water is scarce anyway, the above mentioned enormous water consumption usually leads to a steadily dropping ground water level and the poor rural population does suddenly not have water anymore, because their hundreds of years old wells dry up. Not a bloody soul gives a damn about it. Depending on the region and the local conditions there, one of the following three things happens:
Just alone that part of the climate change, which cannot be stopped anymore, will lead to significantly lower precipitation in many parts of Germany during summer [26], which lets these problems come to us in some decades too. Which gives us, too the choice between giving the water to the majority of the people for drinking or giving it to the animals that are bred for the culinary delight of a minority of people. The decision will surely be made for the first choice, as we are a modern constitutional state and will not let our citizens die of thirst of course. But as almost nobody will be willing to give up his steak, the second option will happen even more in the so called 'third world' and here the people will complain again about famines and illegal immigrants. ... Humans are so stupid. The World Water Development Report of the United Nations provides the following details:
Let us scroll up again a bit to the paragraph >Water< under >Animals and climate protection / environmental protection? - Environment in general< ... does that ring a bell? Might there be some kind of connection?... As described above, many of the ultra modern high tech fishing
fleets of the industrialized countries have moved their fishing
areas, partly to the coasts of poor third world countries,
especially Africa. What is good for Captain Iglo (fish finger brand)
and what brings the local government members a few dollars, from
which they can buy a new Benz (so it actually strengthens the German
economy twice :-/ ), is not necessarily good for the respective
country and its inhabitants. More and more often, fishermen at the
coasts of Ghana, Sierra Leone or Mauretania come into the situation,
that after decades of constant conditions there is suddenly no
fish anymore and they cannot provide their families with food anymore and
finally either starve or flee to Europe. There just needs
to be one single big frozen fish trawler passing by, fishing
everything empty and instantly the locals are left with nothing.
[27] Conclusion: M e a t - k i l l s - p e o p l e Already at the beginning of the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt said:
Unfortunately no one took his thoughts seriously… Vegetarianism and healthBy far the biggest part of the German population, including several people in my circle of friends and familiars, does still believe, that giving up on animal products would be something unnatural, which would cause a deficit of certain vitamins and minerals. For these persons right here: this is not the case! It is rather the opposite the case in our society, with the vegetarians living much healthier than the 'meat-eaters'. The most common things I get to hear, are that vegetarians / vegans do not get enough iron, calcium and vitamin B12 from their "grass". First thing I can reply to this is, that I did not have problems of any kind in all those years as a vegetarian. Physically I have always been ready for action, did never have any deficiency symptoms and even regular blood donations were not a problem. As ovo lacto or also as only lacto vegetarian one does not have
to pay attention to anything more in daily life than one should also
do as a meat-eater. The prejudice about an iron deficit can be explained easily, as one can see the high iron content in the animal cadavers, called meat, just alone by their red color and therefore every meat-eater seems to think, that he could not get his iron without the blood of other beings. The fundamental flaw in this reasoning, which is that the completely vegan cows obviously get enough iron from their plant food too, does not seem to occur to anyone. A view into the nutrition tables instantly tells us, that a lot of plant-based food does actually contain more iron than dead animals. From one slice of whole-wheat bread one does get more iron than from the same amount of dead pig. Peas, spinach and oats do all contain much more iron per mass unit than meat, some mushrooms like chanterelles even more than blood sausage. And millet and soy beans do even have three times as much iron content as the same amount of meat. In the morning a little sugar beet syrup (classical German spread for breakfast) on the bread roll and the problem is solved, as sugar beet syrup contains more than three times as much iron as spinach (remember Popeye?). Although there are slight differences between the iron from animal-based food and from plant-based food and although the resorption process is a little bit more complicated from the chemical perspective, many studies have shown, that vegetarians take in even more iron than meat-eaters, and vegans even more than vegetarians, as the plant-based diet contains less inhibitors and more amplifiers for the iron resorption than the non-vegan diet. Many people think, that especially vegans would not get any
calcium anymore without drinking milk or consuming milk
products. Considering that a large chunk of the people on this planet
does not consume milk and that ALL other mammals do never drink milk
again after they have grown up, this idea is completely stupid of
course. However, with regard to the decade-long advertisement
machinery for the "healthy milk" it is understandable. The
fact that other food of non-animal origin does often contain much
more calcium is seldom spoken about there. Tofu for example contains
about 4 to 5 times as much calcium as the same mass of milk. Kale
and almonds after all contain about double as much and poppy does
even have 20 times as much calcium as milk. Although the least mentioned of all three substances here,
vitamin B12
is actually the only one, for which in case of a completely vegan
diet, i.e.
without any animal-based products like milk and eggs, a deficit can
occur, but only and solely, if one does ignore this fact completely
and does not incorporate any products with added B12 into
one's diet, which is already almost impossible nowadays. But this
might be the reason, why large apes like gorillas cover about 0.2%
of their food demand from animal sources,
[28] whereby the vitamin
is, strictly speaking, produced by bacteria, which could also be
found on 'contaminated' plant food.
A diet rich in cholesterol (especially meat, eggs, milk, butter and other milk products) leads to increased cholesterol levels in the body and therefore to arteriosclerosis. As the majority of heart strokes is caused by arteriosclerosis, the consumption of food rich in cholesterol, i.e. food of animal origin, is a major cause for heart strokes. Strictly speaking, one has to distinguish between the (good) HDL and the (bad) LDL cholesterol and most animal-based food has very high LDL cholesterol levels. A vegan diet is completely free of cholesterol. The cholesterol that is needed for life is produced by the body itself from the fatty acids which we consume with the rest of our food and for a plant-based diet these are predominantly the (good) unsaturated fatty acids. Since 2002 it is known, that cardiopathy, that means arteriosclerosis in the coronary blood vessels, causing in Germany alone tens of thousands of deaths by heart stroke each year, can not only be treated by medication, but that switching to a vegetarian diet does often also help to reduce the cholesterol levels enough, with no need for medication at all. [30] Intestinal cancer, one of the most common types of cancer, is directly related to the diet. Several studies have shown, that the consumption of red meat, i.e. every type of muscle meat like e.g. steak, increases the risk for intestinal cancer significantly. [31]
The major cause for the above mentioned civilization diseases is obesity. Doing sports is still a good method to counter this problem of course. However, a healthy diet is just as important. A long-term study of the Oxford University with 22000 participants found out, that within a period of 10 years the participants had gained 2kg per person on average, but that the vegetarians had gained much less weight than the meat-eaters and the vegans even less. [32] So how comes that many so called 'nutrition scientists' still discourage people to become vegan, although their studies show that vegans are completely healthy? Well, they probably just eat meat themselves, have never thought about the ethical and environmental aspects and can, just as many other people too, not imagine a diet without meat for some strange reason. This leads to reports, in which the scientifically proven facts on the excellent health of vegans is mentioned, but which finally still discourage people from eating vegan with undefined reasons like "It can lead to problems" without giving any proof or even an example. [74]
It can be downloaded as pdf file from: http://www.eatright.org/ada/files/veg.pdf Let us close this chapter then with the conclusion, that I am perfectly healthy, that I can eat as much as I want, without significantly changing my weight, that I feel great, i.e. I am not getting grumpy after eating or something like that, that my risk to become ill from one of the above mentioned diseases is clearly lower than for carnivores and that I even have a clear conscience with all that. Thiftiness saves money .. vegetarianism even more!The thing with the meat is somehow comparable to the problems
with lignite (brown coal). If the value of lignite would be calculated on
the basis of the damage that it causes to environment and climate,
no one would have the insane idea anymore to use it for power
generation. So if the value of meat would also be calculated on the
basis of the damage that its 'production' causes for environment and
climate, then it would be so expensive, that the exorbitant
meat consumption in Europe and North America (and increasingly in
Eastern Asia) would instantly fall to a tiny fraction of its current
value. Although this would not solve the ethical problem, it would
be a step into the right direction, as vegetarianism would also pay
off financially very well then. The many counter-argumentsHumans are the pride of creation and therefore command over all plants and animals on the planet.It is actually quite funny, how often I still hear this argument, considering that nowadays almost no one believes in the biblical creation story anymore in the way that it has been written down; in Europe in general and in Germany in particular. Instead it is rather implicit for almost everyone today, that humans are a product of evolution, just like all the other living beings in our world. But then the people should be aware, that humans are also just animals and that many animals, especially those that are eaten by 'us' are closely related with us and can feel just the way that we do. But even if it would be true, even if one believes deeply in the myth of creation, then one did obviously not read it very carefully as a meat-eater:
In my opinion this states quite clearly what god gave to the humans for eating and what to the animals. That the prior eat the latter was somehow not the idea it seems. The body needs meat; as a vegetarian you're lacking something.
I consider it to be intolerable, that still so many people on this continent (and elsewhere too) share this wrong idea. Without any exaggeration, there were thousands of studies on this topic and if there can be found one unanimous result, than it is that vegetarians do not lack anything. It is just wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again. Most of the studies do actually show the direct opposite, which is that omnivores in general live less healthy than herbivores. For this topic see especially the chapter #Vegetarianism and health. Hitler was vegetarian too.Not a direct counter-argument, but still an 'argument', which I hear extraordinarily often. But as much as the community of meat-eaters might wish this to be true to justify or excuse the suffering and terror caused by it, this argument too is just plain wrong and can interestingly be traced back to old Nazi propaganda, which did always try to present Hitler as a 'good guy' .. and was obviously very successful in doing so. But even if it would be true, how could one say: "I go on eating meat, because Hitler was vegetarian."? According to this kind of logic one would have to become vegetarian even more, because far more 'bad' people throughout human history were not vegetarian of course. Under the following link you can find a wonderful essay by Rynn Berry, which has been created on the basis of a series of articles and reader's letters from the New York Times and was published in 2002. It finally clears up this really stupid myth: If all humans become vegetarians suddenly, what would become of all the animals which have been bred to be eaten?Oh, man! Even this questions is being asked over and over again. How realistic do the people think it is that "suddenly all humans become vegetarians"?! If the meat consumptions drops, then the "production" of new animals drops too, i.e. less bulls are forced to ejaculate to get their sperm, less cows are artificially "inseminated", less calves are taken from their mothers, less cows are cooped in narrow dark barns and, finally, less bovines are murdered with electroshocks, to be cut into peaces and eaten afterwards ... just to show this by the example of cows here; of course it applies to all kinds of animals. Do you think you change anything by being vegetarian? The animals will be butchered anyway.What can I say? Do you think you change anything with your vote during elections? Do you think a small donation to Unicef or something like that would move the world forward? Do you think it is an advantage for your favourite football team, if you cheer to them in the stadium? The answer to all these questions is of course "No!". It does not bring anything, if I/you/he/she/it is doing something alone, but it does bring something indeed, if many people are doing it. During the 2005 elections for the German parliament, a little more than 48 million people have voted. [36] Each single one of them had a share in the total result of just one over 48 million and yet each of these votes made a crucial contribution to the total result. Just imagine, that half of the voters of a party would say: "What does my one single vote can change?" Then this party would have only half as many assemblymen in the parliament or even none at all anymore. After the Tsunami disaster in Asia, German private households have donated more than half a billion Euro (!!!). [37] Each single one of them only a tiny little amount of the whole sum, but altogether it was so much, that hundreds of thousands of people could be fed with it over several months, that tenths of thousands of new houses were built for them, new wells, churches and mosques. And last but not least probably everyone has heard of the so called home field advantage. What do you think where this comes from? Simply from the fact, that the team is being cheered to by their own fans in their own stadium, while the opposing team is being barracked. In Germany, depending on the statistics, between 6 and 8 percent of the population are vegetarian. [38] [39] [40] [41] At currently about 82 million inhabitants [42] that makes around 6 million vegetarians, using an average value of 7%. In the year 2002 each German ate, on average, 37.8kg of dead pigs, 8.7kg of dead cows and 10.6kg of dead chicken. [43] For the pigs that means for example, that every year just alone here in Germany about 40 million (!!) pigs are murdered. [44] Projected on one's whole life, we get that each German, on average, throughout his whole life, consumes 22 pigs, 7 cows, 20 sheep and 600 chicken (for fish and other animals I did unfortunately not find any data). [45] Therefore, based on these numbers, six million meat-eaters less mean, that within their lifetime (of 78 years on average) 132 million pigs, 42 million cows, 120 million sheep and 3.6 million chicken are saved from death, because the market serves the demand and no one will breed and murder billions of animals, if they cannot be sold. Humans are carnivores and carnivores eat meat.Definitely wrong. Biologically, humans are omnivores at best with a clear focus on plant based food. [46] See the next section for this: #Animals kill other animals too. / Our 'relatives', the man apes, do also eat meat. Animals kill other animals too. / Our 'relatives', the man apes, do also eat meat.For the first argument one should mention, that this is actually not right in this way, as the major part of the animals on this planet feeds purely on plants or, to be more precise, not on animals. Next we can use mom's good old saying here: "If all the others jump out of the window, then you are jumping too, or what?" Humans are so called omnivores (i.e. everything-eaters). This attribute does mainly refer to the possibility to somehow digest almost everything. In comparison with other omnivores, as well as with meat eaters and plant eaters, one can see quickly, that humans are way more comparable to herbivores than to carnivores. For example the saliva secretion, the structure of the tongue, the vertical to horizontal chewing movements of the lower jaw and the relatively small mouth match with the plant eaters just as well as the existence of cheek pouches, the villus covered bowel surface and the pre-digestion in the mouth with enzymes. [47] In contrast to many other carnivores and omnivores the canine teeth, which are often mentioned as a counter-argument, are just very small in humans, especially in comparison to the large chewing surfaces of the molar teeth. A view on the dietary habits of our next relatives among the man apes, the chimpanzees and bonobos, makes this construction of the human body easily understandable [28]:
So it is true: our relatives, the man apes, do eat meat. A majestic 0.2% in case of the chimpanzees. At this point the argument would have already been scoring an own goal (like all the others too), but it is even better: for chimpanzees it has been shown several times, that they practice cannibalism, but no one derives from this, that it would be OK to eat other humans. The 'argument' is especially abstruse, whenever it is thrown in by the same people, who insist before or afterwards that humans stand above the animals, are ahead of them, are something 'better'. Even though humans are not different from animals in
the biological sense
[48],
they do differ in terms of being able of abstract thinking and
doing, of putting themselves in someone else's place and of having
created basic ethical principles throughout the millennia. Insofar
it does not make much sense to look at the fact, that human apes do
'also' eat other animals. This is just the way it works in nature. This is the law of the jungle.Oh yes, right, I must have forgotten. We humans have built our whole civilization on the law of the jungle, right?! That is why we have established care for elderly people, why we help mentally disabled to live a good and happy live in dignity, why we provide medical care for everyone in emergency cases, why we build elevators and ramps to train stations and public buildings so that wheelchair users are not being discriminated, why we run homes for homeless people so that no one has to freeze to death on the road, why we provide financial assistance to the needy so they are not left behind, why we donate millions for victims of natural disasters or why we just offer our seat in the bus to elderly people. Exactly because of that, because of the law of the jungle. Isn't it?!?... 
But you eat fish, don't you?Beep, wrong question. .. "I'm clean now, I'm not taking drugs anymore." – "But you're still taking cocaine, don't you?" Every time I'm newly astonished when I'm asked this question. How do people get this completely crooked idea? The term vegetarian in itself excludes the consumption of killed animals categorically. Are fish no animals? Do they not feel pain? Obviously many people really believe: "No." Here I want to recommend the paragraph #So what about seafood? Not to forget: fish is by no means as healthy as most people think, a mistake which is probably one of the reasons for this frequently asked question. Catched fish does usually contain a multitude of heavy metals and other toxics. Fish from breeding facilities / aquaculture is often fed with antibiotics and the meat of many fish species contains a lot of fat and cholesterol. [52] The craftsmanship of butchery, the recipes, the bred animal species, isn't this all part of our culture?!"Culture" .. I am not sure, if the causeless torment and murdering of fellow living beings should be called culture. If so, it is at least not one to preserve. Giving up on the consumption of meat would surely be as much a bitter loss or our culture as the prohibition of slavery, the general declaration of human rights, the emancipation of women and the abolishment of the death sentence. No one has to give up on the recipes. There is already some kind of vegan replacement for almost every carnivorous crap and the more the demand will rise, the more the market will satisfy this demand. Last but not least the animals. They will probably be very grateful to be a part of our culture, to be cooped into small cages, maltreated and murdered. Every day hundreds of animal species die out in this world due to human influences. In view of that, the possible dying out of some cow or fish species or the like, which have been bred by humans does really not have to bother us. You drink alcohol? I thought you're vegetarian.Ahem … well. Fortunately I did not hear this shit too often recently, but it is still kind of a riddle to me, where to find a connection between alcohol and vegetarianism, except for the fact, that alcohol is a purely vegan product of course. Vegetarians can drink, smoke cigarettes or weed, sniff coke and mainline as anyone else. It is not about abstention, it is about ethics (whereby most vegetarians are hopefully aware, that consuming heroine for example is ethically quite questionable too, given the suffering that it causes in its countries of origin and transit). Milk, eggs and moreThe big difference between the consumption of eggs, honey, milk and milk products and the consumption of meat is of course, that the animals do not have to be killed for those products. Unfortunately the borders are much more blurred in reality, which made me reduce the amounts that I ate of this and finally made me stop eating it at all. EggsFor eggs it is basically quite disgusting to think about what you are actually eating there: the ovum of a chicken. This is absolutely comparable with the human female ovum, just a little bigger and with a harder shell, as it develops outside of the body. So while we discuss for years, whether or not it is ethically justifiable to experiment with (especially but not exclusively human) reproductive cells, no one seems to raise this question for ovae outside of the body. However, normally they are not impregnated of course, so that no chicken would develop from them anyway, but sometimes they just are, which makes the eating of such an egg comparable to some kind of abortion. By far the biggest problem is without any doubt the breeding and keeping of the chickens. The cooping of hens in tiny cages of steel, all abreast and one on top of the other and ... the best is probably to have a look into the following video. Though battery cages will be prohibited in the EU from 2012 on, aviaries won't and please do not think that hens in these or so called free run hens do really have a better life. Most severe is probably what happens to the male hatchlings, which are not needed anymore for laying eggs of course. They are sorted out after hatching and ... are being poisoned by gas. This is not a joke. How sick is this society, having the history that it does have and from which it has allegedly learned so much, that it murders thousands and thousands of small innocent hatchlings every day by poisoning with gas? Doing the same with millions of human beings in world war 2 is nowadays seen as the largest crime in the history of mankind. Poisoning billions of animals with gas arouses (almost) no one's interest?! Ironically one almost has to envy the hatchlings in Germany
compared to those in the laying batteries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe (and many other
countries in the world), where they are thrown into the shredder
alive. In view of this fact, the SS concentration camp guards are
almost humanists. By the way, the practice to 'dispose' of the male hatchlings is equally done for cage, free-run and even free-range eggs. I can hear some people saying now: "Oh I didn't know about this, about what they do with the male hatchlings and how they treat the chickens etc." ... Well, I have heard that before. "But I didn't know what they do with the people in the concentration camps." Just like then, everyone can know about it today, if he/she just wants to. Nowadays even much more than back then, as literature and videos on this topic are available without any problems. Milk and milk productsFor milk too, it is first of all quite disgusting to think about what milk actually is. It is the mother's milk of the cow, with which she nourishes her baby .. under normal circumstances. Unfortunately it is not possible anymore to find out, which sick idiot was first in having the completely mad idea to drink the mother's milk of other animals. No one drinks the human mother's milk, except for the babies, for which it is intended for and apart from humans, there is no other animal on this planet, that would drink the mother's milk of another species. By nature, the human body is actually not able to digest milk, or more precise lactose, after infancy. And for what should it?! A fact that shows impressively, that it was not meant like that by god / nature / the evolution. As the myth of healthy milk did obviously already exist thousands of years ago in Europe, the children must have been filled with that stuff all the time, even when they had to vomit from it. At least it is hard to find another explanation on why, over time, larger and larger chunks of the population developed a genetic ability to digest lactose even as an adult. [53] But if we have a look on the world map showing the percentages of people with lactose intolerance, we can see easily, that altogether even today most people are not able to digest milk properly (for a good reason): Even in Germany the number of people with lactose intolerance is estimated to exceed 10% and this although Northern Germany has probably been the region of origin of the genetic mutation that allows the digestion of lactose. [53]
Furthermore it works for the cow the same way as for humans of
course: mother's milk is only produced, if a child has just
been born. Once it is old enough to take other food, the milk
production stops. So the cows have to have children all the time to
be able to produce milk. For this purpose they are impregnated
artificially. That sounds harmless, but it is not much fun, not like
sex. For some reason people started one day, not to let the bull
jump on the cow, but to jerk
him off (not so pleasantly by hand, but with a rather uncomfortable
machine) and then to pump his sperm with some kind of syringe into
the cow's vagina. Once the child has been born, it is taken from the
mother quickly, so that it does not drink the precious milk. That
would of course be terrible, if the child would drink the milk of its
own mother, the milk that has been produced by her
exclusively for this child, for no one else. But let us come back to the milk. It is sooo healthy. The advertisement tells us so every day. Everyone knows. Milk is healthy. In the GDR we even had 'school milk' every day, so that the children may grow up well. Without milk this is impossible. ... How the billions of people do that, who do not or almost not drink any milk, must be a huge riddle to the milk industry to date. What is so healthy about milk is of course the high calcium content. This too, everyone knows from the advertisement nowadays. Calcium is healthy. That an over-consumption of calcium is not healthy at all, is being withhold. [54] That the recommended daily dosage of calcium can be covered easily without milk, is also not the most common thing to be told. A lot of plant-based food contains more calcium than milk, as has been already written under #Vegetarianism and health. The above mentioned lactose intolerance is also not mentioned and the comparably high cholesterol content neither. Milk might be not unhealthy in small amounts, but it is not specifically healthy in any way. At least from the health perspective it does not make any sense therefore to drink milk. Here a little video clip about where our milk comes from: http://veg-tv.info/Meet_your_Milk Even if one does not drink a glass of milk daily anymore, the food in the central European society is heavily specialized in milk. There is almost no product in the supermarket which does not contain something made from milk, be it 'whey', ’skimmed milk powder’, ’milk protein’, ’lactose’, ’sweet whey powder’ or the very popular ’aroma (milk)’. In addition there is a huge cheese and yoghurt culture. Both have been pure luxury goods not so long ago, but now it seems to be normal to put cheese on the bread for breakfast and dinner and to have cheese fondue, 4 cheese pizza or potato gratin with cheese for lunch. After dinner and lunch one or two yoghurts are eaten then each as a dessert. On top of that there is large amounts of milk chocolate, which is unfortunately produced on the basis of cow milk as well. To limit one's consumption of milk chocolate or cheese to a minimum or give up on it completely (or replace them with vegan alternatives), lies in the interest of health anyway due to the high content of sugar and fat, and yoghurt is already available in great quality and diversity on the basis of soy milk (because the bacteria forming the yoghurt cultures do not care much about whether they live in cow secretion or soya bean juice). Maybe you have already noticed, that soy milk or rice milk are now available in every supermarket in Germany. Furthermore there has been a lot of media coverage on 'fake cheese' recently. [72] Isn't it remarkable, that despite the subsidization of dairy-farmers and the clear exclusion of milk substitute products from public promotion programmes [73] the plant-based alternatives have taken off on their triumphal course? First because the market for them has grown (more vegetarians and vegans as buyers), second because many meat-eaters are buying soya drinks too, for health reasons, and third because in terms of the price they are simply quite close to milk products now or have even overtaken them already as in the case of the fake cheese. HoneyFirst of all the same thing applies here as to the previous topics too: the bees do not collect the honey for humans. These do rather steel it from them. Though the modern day bee colonies can probably well do without the honey that is taken from them by the beekeeper, as they have been bred to a point, where they collect way more honey than they actually need, there is the big problem, that many commercial beekeepers simply exterminate those bee colonies which do not produce enough honey anymore. In this case too by the use of gas. It might be still debatable, whether bees can feel anything like pain or fear at all. Among the insects however, they are one of the most advanced species, along with ants and termites, have a complex social behaviour and even some kind of own language. This alone let's the murder of a whole colony of bees out of pure greed seem very questionable. If one would not exterminate the older bee colonies, but would let them come to a natural end with dignity, then theoretically no bee would have to die for the production of honey and one could almost call this relationship between bees and humans some kind of symbiosis, from which both sides can profit, but in the end it remains exploitation. In any case, I gave up on honey as well. And since I found out, that agave syrup does not only resemble honey in its look and texture, but even in its taste, I do not see any reason anymore for consuming honey at all. Leather and furThe mere idea to 'wear' the skin of other feeling beings is, to be quite honest, rather disgusting. But of course one does not think much about this, standing in a shop and comparing clothes. Yet, in principle a jacket made from the skin of cows does not differ much from a jacket made from human skin. The two species are much too similar for this. Nevertheless almost no one would be willing to wear a jacket made from the skin of humans nowadays. How fine the line is, on which we are walking here, can be seen in history on numerous occasions. The stories about lampshades made from human skin might be wrong and just made-up [55] [56], but it is still true, that in the concentration camps of the Nazis, especially in 'Buchenwald', pieces of skin with tattoos were kept / collected / exhibited and skin fragments have been processed into leather. In Tibet, skin and bones of killed criminals and people who died in war were once made into ritual objects and music instruments [57] and from many other less developed regions in the world various cult objects and tools made from human skin and bones are known. [58]
Tolstoy once said: "From murdering animals to murdering humans it is just one step and therefore also from cruelty to animals to cruelty to humans." I can just agree with that and someone who dresses in animal skin is, in my opinion, always a little closer to dressing in human skin. Nowadays leather is extremely cheap, because for the most part it is being imported from countries like India, where the (originally holy) cows are brought to the slaughterhouses under the most dreadful conditions and murdered there not less appalling. Labels like the well known "genuine leather" can only marginally hide this matter, especially if the shoes are sold for prices like EUR 9.99. So for me the mentioned label is now more of an instrument to learn what I should not buy. Contrary to the prevailing opinion, which can mainly be traced back to the leather industry itself (or their advertisement campaigns respectively), artificial leather is in now way generally inferior to the 'original'. The problem rather is, that the artificial leather of higher quality is just too expensive and therefore not used so much and the cheap materials, which fall apart after two months, are then taken as confirmation for the prejudice, that artificial leather is no good. Meanwhile I gathered some experience with 'vegetarian shoes' and you can basically be just as lucky or unlucky with buying such as you can be with non-vegetarian shoes. With my last everyday street shoes (right side in the picture) for example, it took me 2 full months until they stopped being uncomfortable and this even though they were pretty expensive. My completely vegan hiking shoes on the other hand were a really lucky choice. Although they have been made in Spain (not in Bangladesh or the like), they were even cheaper than 'normal' hiking shoes and served me soo well, accompanied me across all climate and vegetation zones, at temperatures between -10 and +45°C. The keeping and putting to death of animals for fur production is so unimaginably cruel, that I actually do not want to go into this any further. Who buys fur, supports pure torture. WoolAnother one of those products where people usually assume, that no animal has to be killed for the stuff they produce. In principle this is not totally wrong, in reality it unfortunately is, but more on that in a moment. Against what many people seem to think, the wool does not grow on the sheep for the purpose of being 'harvested' by humans. It simply is the dense fur of the sheep, their body hair, just like we humans have hair on our head, in our armpits, around dick or pussy and occasionally anywhere else on the body as well. In contrast to the sheep, we do of course not really need our body hair anymore, as we dress ourselves in artificial fur for already thousands of years, so called clothes. But the little sheep feel cold quite bitterly, if one takes their 'clothes' away. Under the care of humans, who put them into dark stables, they do not freeze to death, however they are for sure not very happy about being made 'naked'. Furthermore, on the gigantic sheep farms in Australia the sun is burning and one gets an unpleasant sunburn quickly. In any way, the real problem is the fact, that in wool production as well the sheep are not giving wool somewhere until their natural life span ends and then fall asleep one evening and do not wake up anymore, but that they are being murdered in the end. Australia, the world's largest producer of wool and sheep meet (usually called mutton) [59], exports 6.5 million sheep to the middle east every year. Alive! Remotely comparable to the slave transports into the new world, the condition for the sheep is usually even worse on the ships. Food, air and light are scarce and up to 10% dies on the transport, not to mention that it is not field work that awaits them in the end, but death in the most cruel slaughterhouses that this planet has come up with. [60]
HuntingHunting is murder. Point. Nothing else. The argument, that hunters would control the animal population is a completely absurd construct for the justification of this injustice. If humans are not controlling the population, then this is indeed done by nature or god or whoever or whatever else, just as it has been since the dawn of time, or better since life evolved on our planet, when there were no humans around yet, that would arrogate to themselves to decide upon live and death of whole populations. Ecosystems work well even without predators, without carnivores. How could it otherwise be explained, that for example elephants, which live completely vegan, are on top of the food chain? They do not have any enemies of which they would have to be afraid. If there are too many deer or wild boars in our forests, then at some point they will just not find enough food anymore or a disease will shrink down their population again. A natural balance evolves. But if man is 'controlling the populations', he eternally prevents the achievement of such a balance. I can already foresee, that in 20 years from now there will not only be thousands of deer be shot, "because otherwise it would become to many of them", but also the wolves that will have become native again by then, "because otherwise they would eat too many deer". Isn't it a somehow perverted thing of the forestry departments to put up signs in the forest saying: "Protect the animals" or "Be quiet and do not frighten the animals" and in the same forest to put raised hides, from which the animals, that we have protected so decently and well before, are simply shot then?! By the way, fishing is neither a hobby nor a sport. Fishing is murder as well. Indeed it cannot be anything else than murder, as fishing is the hunting of fish. For this do also see: #So what about seafood? Zoos and petsAlthough personally I disapprove of Zoos and keeping pets as well, it is quite a different league as the killing of animals for motives like e.g. greed for profit or for luxury in eating. That basically means: I would not keep a pet on my own and will stay as far as possible from zoos and animal parks, I also wish that other people would do the same, but as long as the majority of the people does not even recognize that the eating of animals is wrong, they will even less recognize that locking up and 'owning' animals is not right as well. ZoosA great thing those zoos. Originally they were only set up to present exotic animals to the people and to make money with that if possible. Not such a long time ago, the animals were still locked up in tiny steel cages and got only something completely unsuited to eat. With time, education, research and recreation came to the fore (or were at least used as an excuse) and the cages were remodeled to ever larger enclosures. The visitors as well as the operators of the zoos are happily ignoring the fact that this is still completely out of touch with reality. If for example a zoo has enlarged the enclosure for the Siberian tiger to impressive 50 by 50 metres, that is 2500m², then it will gloat over this 'charitable' undertaking, how generous the zoo has been to give such a large enclosure to the tiger. For comparison: in nature a Siberian tiger roams an area of about 250km², which is 250 million m², in figures: 250 000 000. That means the natural habitat of this species is approximately one hundred thousand times larger than the oh so big enclosure in the zoo. The educational aspect is practically irrelevant, because if you really want to know something about those animals, then you can read about them in wikipedia or in a textbook. To get an impression of size and movements of the animals, one can watch videos, which are widely available in libraries and on the internet nowadays. Research can also be neglected, as you can learn way more about the social behavior and eating habits of an animal species by watching them secretly in their natural surroundings instead of watching them in captivity and the anatomical knowledge about an animal can nowadays be obtained with one single computer tomography of the narcotized animal. About most of the species that are kept in zoos, everything important is already known anyway. What remains is the recreational aspect. It results from the park landscape, through which the visitors stroll. There is no need to imprison other animals there. Often there is the objection that zoos would have the important task of protecting endangered animals from extinction and to reintroduce them to the wild then. Apart from the fact that this could be done with two to three large facilities worldwide, instead of having a zoo in every one-horse town, there have been almost no successful project to date. The few species that the zoos care for, for example the panda which does not have a bright future in evolution anyway with its extremely unbalanced diet and slow reproductive behavior, all those species are at the top of the food chain and are actually only being cared for because humans find them so cute. No one tries to save the thousands of insect species and amphibian species, that die out every year, which can result in the collapse of whole ecosystems. Nowadays zoos are usually purely commercial enterprises and are therefore being managed as such. It is all about money, profit. An impressive example how zoos work, was given by the Berlin zoo some time ago. The polar bear breeding programme was successful and suddenly a sweet little baby polar bear was roaming around the enclosure. A big big marketing campaign did the rest and, voila, all around the world pictures from the baby polar bear now called 'Knut' could be seen on TV. The stocks of the Berlin zoo (yes, indeed, zoos are even listed on the stock exchange) rocketed upwards. All money worries are forgotten for years to come, jobs have been secured and everyone is happy... Well, OK, 'Knut' has been taken away from his mother, which is extremely agitated from living in captivity, so that it does not harm him (after all the little bear is worth millions of Euros) and had to play with the zookeeper then, who also got famous from this. Yes, OK, the whole story has diverted the attention from the fact, that most baby animals in zoos are simply murdered, because there would not be enough space for them. But Knut was soo cute... And some zoos, the Berlin zoo unfortunately among them again, do even go one step further with their greed for profit. They intentionally breed too many specimen of certain exotic species and sell them to special buyers, who kill them and make traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) out of them. In case of the Berlin zoo it was about a family of bears and one pygmy hippo. [70] Although the TCM bears partial responsibility for those incidents, as it creates the demand in the first place (and is therefore also responsible e.g. for the still ongoing hunting of the above mentioned and almost extinct Siberian Tiger), the animals are bred and sold by the zoos after all.
PetsOh how cute they are the little pets. One can cherish them, caress them, play with them, cuddle them and simply have fun with them. One can also feed them wrong, lock them up in tiny cages, beat them, when they are noisy, can starve them to death or flush them down the toilet. One can give orders to them, can live one's despotic fantasies on them and can 'nurse them to death'. 
Of course all the pet owners will say now, that they would never do those things and for most people this might be true, but often enough pets are bought for children and they simply forget to feed their hamsters or the like from time to time. Many parents want to teach their children a sense of responsibility with that and if the hamster has starved to death, then the child is crying for a moment and the parents say: "You see, we told you this would happen. Let this be a lesson to you." Afterwards there is just love, peace and harmony again. No one is really interested in the suffering of the animal. People just say "the hamster / the mouse / the bird has starved to death" as if it would be nothing special, but almost nobody realizes what this actually means. Among humans the deprivation of food is regarded as serious abuse or even torture. Why should that be any different for small rodents? They feel pain just the same way as we do, are hungry if they do not get food and are just as lonely in their cage, as if we would be locked up in a cage. The only thing that you really teach your children with this, is that life has different value. That the life of a hamster for example is of inferior value than that of the dog and of much much inferior value than the own life of course. From this point it is just a small step to say that the life of black people, Jews or Chinese is of inferior value than that of a white or Christian person or maybe even of a German or Aryan European. It is nice, if parents try to teach their children a sense of responsibility, but please not at the expense of another life. One of the most repulsive habits in the keeping of pets is undoubtedly castration. How can people honestly claim to love their pets, but have them castrated. Are they really not aware of what that means? The castration of a male mammal, no matter if it is a human, a horse or a cat, is always a strong interference with the development of this being. It is a mutilation of the genitals, changes massively the hormone balance and therefore the natural behavior of the animal and it especially takes away the most basic, most important ability, that is given to any form of life in nature: the ability to reproduce. It does not matter, whether or not the animal will ever make use of this option. It is about the possibility to do so. That is a little bit like in Disneyland: it does not matter if you really use up all the entry fee by using the attractions dozens of times in the park, but it is all about he possibility to do so, to take any attraction as often as you like, without having to think about the price each time. The fact that millions of pets are abandoned each year, brought to the animal home or killed is also not really an argument for even grown up people's ability to handle animals under their guardianship in a responsible way. Furthermore many pet owners say, that they love their cat / dog so much, that they could never do it any harm. They are fully aware, that the animal is capable of feeling and compare its behavior quite often with their own behavior. And nevertheless they eat meat, eat the dead corpses of beings, that are just as capable of feeling as their own pets, have also those very similar behaviors like themselves and to which they, if they would keep them as pets, would never do any harm .. and this, exactly this does really piss me off. What sucks the most, is
There is another wayAfter expressing all these things here, there is the question for alternatives of course. The basic answer is, as expected, vegetarianism. The vegetarian does not assign the task to murder in the first place. He/she reduces factory farming of cows, pigs and chickens and therefore makes a significant contribution to environmental and climate protection, to a better and fairer world, to less poverty and to the own health as well as to a better conscience. A vegetarian diet is better for everyone: it tastes good, gets along without bloodshed, is environmentally compatible, is a diet that is sufficient to feed all humans and is even more healthy. Above all, however, it is more fair, more ethical, more righteous to the animals. But what are the alternatives in detail? There is definitely not a lack of vegetarian recipes. Just type something like "cookbook vegetarian" into amazon.com and have a look for yourself. Furthermore most dishes in which meat is not a main component, can usually be cooked vegetarian without any problems. And for just finding recipes, I usually enter the following into Google: "recipe vegetarian XX", where XX stands for the name of the recipe, and in almost every case I'm successful.
Many other 'meat dishes' can also be substituted vegetarian. Whether it is gyro, meat balls, Ćevapčići or wiener, for all of them there are vegetarian pendants, which can basically not be distinguished from the 'originals'. It is more difficult in cases of steak, roulades or fish, but you should be willing to make this 'sacrifice' and it should not be too difficult actually, if you simply think of the video footage from slaughterhouses when you see those dishes .. if you recall the squeaking and crying of the shaking animals, trying to flee, that had to give their lives for this small piece of taste on the plate. To reduce the consumption of eggs and milk products is also not very difficult. Instead of butter one can generally use margarine, on the bread, for cooking, frying and baking. To do without 'the daily glass of milk' is even from the health perspective the better choice. For everything else, that is again the trio cooking, frying and baking, substitutes can be used without loosing anything. This does not have to be the expensive pure soy milk from the health-food shop, but can simply be the cheap soya rice drinks from the normal supermarkets, for sauces as well as for soups, gratins and various baking recipes. For milk shakes and self-made ice cream however, the better soy or rice milk products are more recommendable. To abandon the habit of the daily or be it just the sundayly breakfast egg, should also contribute to a more healthy and longer life and should therefore not be too hard. During shopping it is easy to choose alternatives to the products that contain eggs, like e.g. for noodles, where the egg-free version is usually even cheaper, or for waffles where you do not have to choose the 'whole egg waffles'. Omelets are very unhealthy anyway due to their extremely high content of cholesterol and for all baking recipes there is egg-substitute powder available (made from potatoes, tapioca or soya) which is even cheaper in the end than 'real' eggs. Under #Web recommendations I included a small list with vegan online shops, among other things. However, most of the important vegan products can also be found in health-food stores and the like. Berlin residents should additionally have a look on: http://www.berlin-vegan.de/index.php?id=90 For those who consider all this already way too much work, you should not try elaborately to find a substitute for every single meat dish, but just leave the meat out of the diet. If you did not live too unhealthy so far, then there is more than enough left to get your stomach filled. Furthermore one can do this step by step. Almost no one becomes vegan without the 'intermediate stage' of ovo lacto vegetarianism. Besides, one should make oneself aware of the following again:
You are not asked to exert some extreme abstemiousness. As far as I am concerned, you can go on to consume alcohol, tobacco or cannabis, download porn and go to the swinger club, watch horror movies and shoot yourself through the lately more and more denounced shoot 'em up games, turn the volume of your MP3 player so loud, that your eardrum almost bursts, sit the whole day in front of your TV or destroy your skin in a solarium. But for heaven's sake stop to do things that hurt others, that do even kill them. Stop to support a system with your consumption of meat and other animal products, which causes unspeakable suffering every day in this world and does even destroy it. It lies in your responsibility to do the right thing. For me it is obvious, what is the right thing. For you too? [ At this point the German version contained a link to a
small text on the historical perspective of the animal rights
movement by the famous Swiss animal rights activist Helmut Kaplan.
For those who want to have a look anyway, here it comes:
In this context I want to address my family and friends: If you want to give me anything sweet as a present, please do not buy milk chocolate. I still love to eat chocolate that is made without milk as well as all kinds of nuts and dried fruits. Instead of a box of confectionary, I would be happy about those nuts which are usually too expense for me, like Macadamia or Brazil nuts as well as about dried dates and the like. Happily every other vegan candy / sweets are welcome as well, but in principle I assume you all know that I do not set such a high value on presents anyway. At this point I want to thank my parents, who always supported me in my vegetarianism. Especially my mother did encourage me right from the beginning to go through with this, but also my father did never say anything bad about me having become a vegetarian but did always stand behind me in this question. Very much in contrast to many other families, in which the parents offer massive resistance against such decisions of their children. I do not know, if I would have stand it in such a case, especially in the starting phase. Though I regret that they have never become vegetarian themselves, I cannot dictate it to anyone of course, although their meat consumption has declined significantly over the years. A nice little video on the connections between our food and our world: SummaryLet us summarize briefly: Non-human animals, especially vertebrates, feel pain in the same way as we humans do. For most mammals and birds it has also been proven, that they feel emotions like fear, sorrow, loneliness, but also happiness and satisfaction in a very similar or even identical way to the human species. It suggests itself, that this is most probably the case for all vertebrates and has just not yet been shown scientifically. So this does also apply especially to those species which humans like to eat, like cows, pigs and chickens, and in a wider context also fish, frogs, crocodiles, whatsoever. Insofar the killing of a cow is basically not any different from the killing of a human, except for that a cow looks different and is somehow less intelligent than we are, which cannot and should not justify murder in times where we have stopped to enslave black people and to kill mentally disabled children. So from the ethical perspective it is most questionable, to lock up and murder feeling beings just alone for the own culinary delights. If you look at it just slightly closer, then it is simply wrong! Furthermore, 'livestock breeding' is one of the major factors for the still increasing ecological destruction. It is responsible for a large part of the greenhouse gases, contaminates the soil and water, occupies and destroys huge areas of land, consumes unimaginable amounts of freshwater, is a decisive reason for the clearing of tropical rainforests and contributes to further desertification. In terms of health, the consumption of meat is not only unnecessary, but does even have immense negative consequences with regard to the gigantic amounts that are consumed every year. Due to the extreme meat consumption, the people in our society nowadays suffer from overweight, arteriosclerosis, heart diseases, problems with bones and joints as well as various skin diseases. This leads to horrendous extra costs for the health insurances and causes economical damage in the billions by loss of working hours due to illness and by disability. The nowadays common methods of meat "production" for the rich industrialized nations destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people in third world countries, contaminate their wells or make them dry out, let the people die from hunger or thirst or force them to migrate to the rich countries that are responsible for these conditions. A diet without meat is financially much cheaper, does probably reduce the potential for violence in humans, brings the disgusting double standards towards animals to an end, which we supposedly love soo much and the agricultural areas that would become available could be used for growing energy crops, which would be another contribution to climate protection. In addition, a large number of important people did and do plea for a change to a vegetarian diet, various Nobel prize winners among them and the world's smartest brains throughout history. And yet almost no one seems to care at all. Yet millions of animals are unnecessarily tormented and murdered every day, so that the fat average German can gobble down his sausages. Yet also and especially in politics almost no none tries to eliminate those grievances. Yet many restaurants in Germany do still not offer even one single vegetarian dish in their menu, not to speak of vegan dishes. Yet vegetarians are being looked upon, as if they are the ones, who are doing strange, unnatural, probably even wrong things. For me, personally, the ethical aspect is clearly the most important one and I can still not understand, how the people can be so cruel and stupid, that they do not see this wrongdoing. But in the end I do not really care why someone turns vegetarian, whether it is to save the planet or its climate or for the own money bag, for a better, more peaceful world or for his/her own health. But please please please do not go on like this.
Noticeable is the fact, that in previous days as well as today the amount of vegetarians is much higher among the people with higher education, than among the less educated. [61] So the key to success is education. Not just education in terms of knowledge, of mathematics, natural sciences and arts, but especially of ethical and philosophical education. My dream for a better future is that at some point in the future enough people have realized what goes wrong in our society and become vegetarians. That these people speak with one voice and will eventually be able to change the whole system. Not by some kind of brutal revolution, not by means of terrorist attacks and not through war, but with the help of reason, understanding and compassion. Everyone can make his own little contribution. Everyone can at least start to reduce the amount of meat in his diet to a minimum. Quickly even the most German eater will realize, how many delicious alternatives there are and then be able to give up completely on the consumption of dead animals. One last time I want to quote Tolstoy at this point:
And here a few more convincing quotations of famous vegetarians:
Although I kept this film until the very last moment, that is I watched it only after I had written the whole text, had dealt intensively with the entire matter and had really seen a lot of things during that process, Earthlings was one of the most terrible movies, that I have ever seen in my life ... and maybe one of the best too. There is no other work that manages so well to open one's eyes. People who have seen this film completely and continue to eat meat, buy leather jackets or visit the circus, are lacking what makes us human in my opinion: humanness. Those who have watched the film till the end and still believe that there is no connection between cruelty and violence between humans and against other animals, should probably watch it again. And those who deliberately not watch the movie, but continue to eat meat, can at least be sure that they are lying to themselves. About one and a half hours, everyone should watch. Fortunately there are people who make it available for free on the internet:
Remarks
Historically important vegetariansIn the following a short list of famous vegetarian people in world history. There are much larger, more comprehensive lists available on the internet. Here I have listed only those, that I personally consider to be kind of important in this context and of which it is really quite well known to be true:
Usually I do not give much on listing 'Stars' in such a list, that are still alive, as many of them often just do these things for PR reasons. But of course there are also a lot of good examples among them, that means VIPs who are really serious about it. Only two of them I want to mention here, as I know there are certain fans in my closer circle of friends: One of them is Bryan Adams, who lives vegan for quite a long time already. [65] [66] In the following a nice interview with him: http://www.animal-lib.org.au/interviews/bryan/ The other one is Moby. He too lives strictly vegan and is rather happy with it. [67] [68] [69] In the following entry in his ’journal’ he conveniently completes the confutation of the annoying counter-argument, that god had given the animals to us for eating them: http://www.moby.com/journal/2001-02-28/vegan.html Sources
Web recommendationsMost of the links in this section were in German in the original (German) version of the website, so I deleted them from this English version. If you want to check them anyway (by being able to understand a little German for example), please refer to the German version. Speciesism and animal rights
Videos
Hunting, fishing, wool and milk
General vegetarian and vegan sites
Vegetarian and vegan online shopsThe shops listed here are all German online shops, as I'm not going to make lists for vegan online shops for every country (naturally).
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