If one conceives animals to be stupid, dirty and brutish, it may help to ease the moral burden of killing and eating them. Pigs, along with other food animinals, are highly intelligent. Professor Stanley Curtis of Penn State University has taught pigs to understand complex relationships between actions and objects in order to play video games. Pigs have been proven to be focused, creative, innovative and equal in intellgence to chimpanzees.
Food animals are butchered by the millions. Often they are skinned, boiled and butchered alive! Yet, if we are to eliminate the consumption of meat entirely, the food resources of the world would be sufficient to feed 10 billion people in 1998. On the average, it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce only one pound of beef, 6 pounds of grain to produce one pound of pork, 3 pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken and 5.3 pounds of fishmeal to produce one pound of farmed fish. The same grain can be consumed directly by humans.
The destruction of our environment caused by livestock production is a vast expense which is not calculated into the price you pay for a pound of flesh at the grocery store.
For example, the huge amounts of grain and grassland which are used to sustain the world population of 1.3 Billion beef cattle. The combined weight of domesticated cattle on Earth is more than that of all the people! Around the world, 60 percent of pasture land is overgrazed -- the leading cause of soil destruction and desertification. About 90 percent of US cropland is losing soil to wind and water erosion at 13 times the sustainable rate. Cattle disrupt ecosystems over half the world’s land mass. To add to this suicide trend, the US government subsidizes cattle ranchers on public lands with $500 million each year!
The so-called Environmental Protection agency decided that agriculture is exempt for the Clean Water Act in the US even though 60 percent of our rivers and streams are considered "impaired" due to agricultural water wastes. Hogs, for example, excrete an amazing 32 time their own weight in feces and urine every year. In central California, 1,600 dairies produce feces and urine of a city of 21 million people. Incredibly, five TONS of solid manure is produced by food livestock annually for every US citizen. That’s 130 times more waste than is produced by people! This waste is dumped into or is seeping through the soil into our fresh water supply.
There are 1.2 billion people in the world whose daily income is less than $1.00 a day. They spend 70 percent of their income on food, yet increasing grain prices due to competition with livestock is causing increased starvation globally. Ironically, in 1991, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine came out with the "New Four Food Groups": they are, Fruits, Vegetables, Whole Grains and Legumes (beans & peas). Meat and dairy are termed "optional" and not considered necessary for good health.
A further insult to our intelligence, or lack of it, as regards eating meat, has been revealed by the most extensive study of diet and lifestyles ever made, called the China Project. The study found that the eating of animal protein is linked to chronic disease! (source: "101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian" - 1998 Edition, by Pamela Rice)
The inhumane atrocities of commercial meat production combined with the tremendous abuse and waste of our shrinking land and water resources are thoroughly documented by John Robbins in his video film and book, entitled, "Diet for a New America".