The coronavirus pandemic should be a wake-up call for the urgency of eliminating, or at least sharply reducing, the consumption of animals.
Food and health experts agree that the pandemic began due to the consumption of a wild animal, raised in dirty, cramped, stressed, disease prone,-conditions at one of China’s many live animal markets.
These repulsive places are known as “wet markets,” because animals are often killed in front of the buyer, in the midst of mess and filth, and the slaughtered animals’ blood washes over and mixes with other animals to create perfect conditions for creating and spreading novel viruses that can cross the species barrier.
The pandemic has caused widespread illnesses, the loss of thousands of lives, millions of jobs, and trillions of dollars, and is threatening many businesses and industries. Is eating animals worth all of this devastation?
It is ironic that a disease resulting from animals being kept in closed, confined spaces is causing so many people to be confined in their homes, with their freedom of movement sharply curtailed.
Upon recognizing the great devastation caused, China prohibited the sale of animals at their wet markets. Will other nations follow their example? After all, modern factory. farms and slaughterhouses also pose many similar dangers, as millions of animals are raised in disease-promoting, crowded conditions and then are slaughtered daily in mass production methods, with blood, feces, and other pollutants spreading widely.
Many previous major disease outbreaks, including swine flu, mad cow diseases, bird flu, SARS, and MERS, were due to human consumption of animals.
Additional reasons for eliminating or at least sharply reducing animal consumption include:
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- Many studies published in peer-reviewed articles in respected medical journals have shown strong links between the consumption of meat and other animal products and incidents of heart disease, several types of cancer, strokes, and other life-threatening diseases. Several studies showed that not only can well-balanced animal-free diets and other positive lifestyle changes not only can reduce risks of such diseases, but in some cases can reverse them.
- Because factory farmed animals live in unnatural, cramped, unsanitary conditions, farmers routinely use antibiotics in animal feed in efforts to reduce disease outbreaks. This has resulted in an antibiotic resistance-related health crisis for people, as antibiotics are becoming less effective in responding to human diseases.
- Animal-based diets require as much as 20 times as much land, 13 times as much water, and ten times as much energy per person than vegan diets. While an estimated nine million of the world’s people die annually of hunger and its effects and over ten percent are chronically malnourished, 70 percent of the grains produced in the United States is fed to animals destined for slaughter.
- While climate experts are increasingly warning that unprecedented changes must soon occur in efforts to avert a climate catastrophe, and there seem to be almost daily reports of severe, sometimes record breaking heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms, floods, and other climate events, the livestock sector is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), largely due to huge amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, emitted from cows and other farmed animals.
- A 2006 report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” stated that the livestock industry emits more GHGs, in CO2 equivalents, than all the cars, planes, ships, and other means of transportation worldwide combined. A 2009 cover story in WorldWatch magazine, “Livestock and Climate Change,” by two World Bank environmentalists, concluded that the livestock sector is responsible for at least 51 parent of all human-induced GHGs.
- Climate change is especially threatening to Israel as a rising Mediterranean Sea could inundate the coastal plane where much of Israel’s population and infrastructure are located, and the hotter and dryer Middle East that climate experts are projecting make instability, terrorism, and war more likely, according to military experts. These experts warn that climate change will cause tens of millions of desperate refugees worldwide to flee from severe climate events, resulting in a far much more unstable and violent world.
Diets free of meat and other animal products have the added advantage of being most consistent with basic Jewish teachings on preserving human health, treating animals with compassion, protecting the environment, conserving natural resources, and helping hungry people. It also makes it more likely that one is being consistent with the laws of kashrut.
Hence, shifting to a vegan diet is the best thing one can do for their health and the health of the planet, for animals, for reducing hunger, for the efficient use of water energy, and other natural resources, and for living most consistently with Jewish values and laws. It is a win – win – win – win situation.
We failed to heed the warnings of medical experts and were unprepared for the present coronavirus pandemic. Will we now fail to heed the warnings of climate experts, and face another future catastrophe? To leave a decent, habitable world for future generations, it is essential that there be a major societal shift to plant based diets. As Jerry Brown, former governor of California, expressed it, “Humanity is on a collision course with nature.” There is no Planet B.
Richard H. Schwartz is a professor emeritus at College of Staten Island and author.
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