Veganism isn’t just for Animals

A lot of people try to invalidate veganism by reducing it to “animals.” 

This misrepresentation often sounds something like, “Well, let’s solve the problems of humanity first, like racism and world hunger. Then we can get to the animals.”

But many problems facing humanity are due to a fundamental lack of compassion for each other. Leaders in the western world don’t want to spend the time and money required to reengineer the global food system because they lack compassion for those affected by world hunger.

Compassion starts with the smallest decisions in our daily lives, and permeates upward. What’s on our plate subconsciously influences our attitudes towards others. When we embrace compassion in the everyday decisions such as what we eat or wear, that raises the level of compassion that we carry into all aspects of our lives.

Compassion for animals isn’t at the expense of compassion for humans. Compassion for animals increases compassion for humans. 

Compassion isn’t mutually exclusive. 

On a more practical level, ending the suffering and exploitation of animals is indeed the first priority of veganism. But if you dig even deeper, veganism is a fundamental rejection of violence against all living beings - including humans. Many people are not aware that humans suffer immensely as a result of the animal agriculture system, and that ending animal agriculture would not only liberate animals, but improve the quality of life for humans by reducing or eliminating food insecurity, pandemic potential, climate change refugees, traumatizing jobs, and chronic diseases. 

The humanitarian perspective is a less common argument for veganism, but it can be extremely persuasive for people with strong speciesist ideology. They may never care about animals, but showing them how animal agriculture negatively impacts humans is a great way to shift their perspective.  

In this blog, we’ll examine two aspects of how animal agriculture harms humans: food scarcity and pandemic potential.

Food Scarcity

Animal agriculture is incredibly inefficient. It consumes far more calories than it produces. 

On average, it requires 16 calories of plant input to produce 1 calorie of meat output. Which makes sense, because when an animal is consuming calories, all of those calories aren’t converted into edible animal products. Most of the calories are converted into inedible tissues such as bones, cartilage, feathers, etc. In fact, meat has an average energy efficiency of only 7%, meaning that only 7% of calories consumed by the animal are converted into meat consumed by humans. On average, 93% of input calories are completely wasted.  

In order to produce meat, we have to grow a massive amount of feed crops. Humanity currently grows enough plants to feed 10 billion people, but we feed nearly 40% of those crops to animals exploited in animal agriculture.

According to the FAO, as many as 783 million people experienced food insecurity in 2022, while the population of humans was around 8 billion people. This means that we could effectively end world hunger almost three times over by just feeding people the plants that we already grow. 

Some critics may counteract this by saying that all parts of the plant aren’t edible, and the animals can consume parts of the plants that humans can’t. This may be true of the monoculture feed crops (primarily wheat, corn, and soy) fed to animals that utilize 77% of all agricultural land. But if we were to use that land to cultivate a variety of plants, it would yield even more nutrient dense plants for human consumption. 

The point is, animal agriculture is the biggest obstacle to and silver bullet for solving world hunger. We currently have the capability to feed every single human on earth, we are just wasting those calories by feeding them to suffering animals exploited in animal agriculture. 

We could end world hunger by ending animal agriculture. 

Pandemic Potential 

The crowded, concentrated, filthy way we raise animals for food is the perfect breeding ground for deadly pandemics.

60% of all known infectious diseases and 75% of new and emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, meaning they originated in animals and jumped to humans. 

The most deadly pandemic in human history was the outbreak of Spanish Flu in 1918. It killed over 50 million people worldwide, with a case fatality rate of about 2.5%.

Now, “Spanish Flu” is a bit of a misnomer. The virus didn’t originate in Spain, but the Spanish media was one of the only countries to report on the pandemic, as many other countries censored reporting during wartime. 

The outbreak has actually been traced back to a Kansas chicken farm. 

But let’s back up for a second and examine the nature of viruses. There is much debate about whether viruses can be classified as “alive,” but they undoubtedly evolve and mutate over time. Like any organism, the evolutionary goal of viruses is to propagate. Not necessarily to kill their host, but to spread far and wide. 

Let’s take avian flu as an example. 

In wild birds, avian flu is very common, and never deadly. The virus prefers to hang out in still bodies of water. So it hitches a ride in the intestinal tracts of water fowl, who carry it to other bodies of water. Then it can infect more hosts, and spread further.

In the wild, the virus isn’t deadly because it needs its host to survive the journey from one body of water to another. It’s not evolutionarily advantageous for the virus to kill the bird. 

But when avian flu infiltrates a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, its next host isn’t miles away like in the wild, it’s inches away. In CAFOs, the evolutionary advantage to keep the host alive doesn’t exist anymore. 

The virus evolves to be much more virulent. 

Chicken farms can house 30,000+ chickens under one roof, with multiple sheds in the farm itself. 

That’s 30,000+ hosts for the virus, more than it could ever have access to in the wild. With every host, the virus evolves, becoming more easily transmissible and more virulent. 

Chickens and humans have similar “linkages” that the virus attaches to in the lungs. So a virus that evolves in birds is capable of jumping to humans. 

That’s how the most deadly pandemic in human history occurred. The virus jumped from chickens to humans at a Kansas chicken farm.

Next thing you know…50 million people are dead.

Bird flu outbreaks at chicken farms have been occurring for decades all over the world. Each time an outbreak is identified, most countries have laws that mandate the entire chicken population be “culled” in order to prevent the virus from evolving and spreading further. 

Because if some viruses make that jump from chickens to humans, we wouldn’t be dealing with 50 million deaths…We’d be dealing with billions of deaths.

Enter: H5N1.

According to the CDC, H5N1 originated in China in 1996, and has jumped from chickens to humans in 19 countries since 2003. 

The 2022 avian flu outbreak that caused egg prices to skyrocket up to 300% was H5N1. From February 2022 to February 2023 alone, 53 million chickens were killed in order to stop the spread of H5N1. 

In humans, H5N1 has a 50% - 60% mortality rate. The deadliest pandemic in human history that killed 50 million people had a case fatality rate of under 2.5%. COVID-19, which brought the entire world to its knees, had a case fatality rate of 1.1% in the US.

And H5N1 has a mortality rate of 50% - 60%. That’s potentially 4 billion people dead…because we want to eat chicken and eggs. 

H5N1 hasn’t become a global pandemic yet because currently, it requires very close contact to spread between humans. And each time it’s jumped to humans, we’ve been able to contain it.

But that can change. The virus can evolve. 

And through our farming practices of chickens, we are giving the virus every opportunity to evolve. Every year, 70 billion chickens are raised and slaughtered globally for meat and eggs. That’s 70 billion opportunities for H5N1 to evolve to be more easily transmissible and jump from chickens to humans again. 

And if H5N1 evolves to be highly transmissible and is able to jump to humans again, 4 billion people could potentially die. 50% of the world’s human population. That’s literally an apocalypse!

Animal agriculture, and chicken and egg farming in particular, is a breeding ground for disaster when it comes to pandemics. 

This goes without saying, but farming plants carries none of this risk. Any recalls for plant foods, such as the 2021 recall of spinach contaminated with E. Coli, is not because plant farming is inherently unsafe. Plants don’t have a gastrointestinal tract. They don’t poop. It’s because the plants become contaminated with animal waste. Animal waste is the source of the pathogens.

In the US alone, animal agriculture produces over 116,000 pounds of excrement every second. That waste has to go somewhere, and a lot of it ends up in agricultural irrigation. Animal-derived fertilizers are also a significant source of contamination. 

Animal agriculture is the single biggest source of new and emerging diseases. The crowded, concentrated, filthy way we raise animals for food is the perfect breeding ground for deadly pandemics. 

Conclusion

Animal agriculture is inherently unsustainable not only from an environmental perspective, but from a human population perspective. Our planet can not continue to feed a growing population of humans with a diet based on animal products. By contrast, a plant based diet is so resource-efficient that we could effectively end world hunger in one fell swoop by simply consuming the plants that we already grow. 

Animal agriculture also threatens the future of humanity itself. Even if someone doesn’t care about animals, following a vegan diet would drastically reduce the potential of future deadly pandemics. 

Compassion for animals is not at the expense of compassion for humans. Expanding our compassion for animals and the planet raises our compassion for our fellow humans as well.

A vegan diet doesn’t just benefit the animals. It benefits all of us.