Feel the Pain,,,stop cruelty Jetters: Factory farming is nothing new. People should buy free range. But most people do not care enough to bother. Jetters: Ok, you have nothing to input but videos. Everyone knows factory farming exists. Everyone knows MacDonalds and KFC use those farms. In every country in the world. Bye bye. Ms Aryaa: No...not just videos, I will post lot of other things too...everything related to animals and environment Jetters: I suggest you investigate alternatives to buying your meat products from factory farms (if you eat meat) There are farms that allow their animals to roam, to be free essentially until time of slaughter. Its an ethical choice for meat eaters, to cut down the profits of factory farms that use stalls and cages and cruelty. I urge you to make changes in your life, and those around you by making people aware of how animals are treated in factory farms. And letting your money make a difference by not purchasing any of it. Ms Aryaa: ok, I got it. No, I don't eat meat. I am vegetarian, trying to become a vegan....butter and honey are still on my plate. DiIIy: I purchase Macro products, our super market has a good range. http://www.woolworths.com.au/wps/wcm/connect/Website/Woolworths/About+Us/Our-Brands/macro/ Free range eggs ALWAYS, i have watched enough documentaries on Battery hens to never want to support that industry. http://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/hope-in-sight-for-battery-hens.php Ms Aryaa: Mrs Maneka Gandhi is is an Indian politician, animal rights activist, environmentalist.... "I wish I could have been with you today but unfortunately I have parliament. So what I would have said before you I would like to take the liberty to say now. For many years now we have been experiencing the problems of climate change. In my own constituency there was a terrible drought this year. And just when the government had come to grips with it, it turned into an unseasonal flood. The farmers lost everything. The lentils I eat, regarded as a staple in India, are now so expensive that they have become a luxury. From an exporter of food we have become an importer. And yet look at the anomalies. We are also the largest meat and leather exporting country in Asia. We send meat to the entire Middle East. We are the largest milk producer in the world and we have a livestock population that runs into millions. The result is that We have no rain, no water, increasing heat, drying rivers and dying people. Do you feel powerless as an individual to stop the world from dying? Do you feel that you are at the mercy of politicians and their endless games Let me explain how you and I can turn this around immediately. Methane and carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases, which means that their presence in the air traps heat and affects the earth’s temperature and climate, making the planet warmer. As it warms, the climate changes and the glaciers melt. When the glaciers melt, the rivers first flood and then dry up. The developed countries of the world are at fault for producing so much carbon dioxide and the developing countries like China, India and Brazil are being blamed for producing methane. In this strange political debate we have stopped recognizing that this is one world and we are all going to live or die together. And then we can carry on pointing fingers upstairs. (Edited by Ms Aryaa) Ms Aryaa: Let’s take methane. It’s an easy problem to deal with. It’s produced from four sources: livestock (livestock manure), rice farming, coal mining, and landfills. In all the international treaties that have come and are coming, like the one in Copenhagen, the developing world has tried its best to keep methane out of the debate. And they have succeeded to a large extent, because the West is justifiably guilt-ridden about their carbon dioxide emissions. But The time has come for both the developed and developing world to recognize that reducing methane is the quickest way to stop global warming, while we wrestle with the problems of technology changes for reducing carbon dioxide. Ms Aryaa: Methane concentrations have doubled in the last century and now they are about 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions. While carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 31% during the last 200 years, methane has increased by 149%. By 2005 methane emissions were estimated as 6407 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Now, even if they are just 20%, why is that important? What makes methane so lethal? Is that It may be less than carbon dioxide, but it is 23 times more efficient in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. This means that a methane emission has 23 times the impact on the temperature rather than a carbon dioxide emission of the same mass. And methane has a large effect for a brief period. In fact it lasts in the air for a net lifetime of about 8.4 years, whereas carbon dioxide has a small effect for a long period. Ms Aryaa: What does that mean? It means that if we stop generating methane today, we will see the effect almost immediately. The methane emissions for India, China and Brazil have doubled since 1990. And I expect it to go up even further by 2020; scientists say up to 43%. And there is only one reason. And it’s not an increase in coal mining in these countries nor is it an increase in landfills. It’s because these countries grow animals for meat. And whom do they grow them for? For you. For the developed world. These animals are grown for meat that you eat. So these three nations cannot stop producing methane unless you stop buying their product. In developing countries, where people are told that to be rich is to eat meat, the number of people eating meat and the amount they are eating every year has risen steadily. Between 1970 and 2002 the annual per capita meat consumption in developing countries, like mine, has risen from 11 kilos to 29 kilos. In developed countries, like yours, the eating of meat has risen from 65 kilos to 100 kilos per year. 100 kilos means over 300 animals are killed by one person every year. The annual global meat production is projected to rise more than double, from 229 million tons at the beginning of 2000 to 465 million tons by 2050. In fact in 2008 meat eating went up by 10% because countries like India entered the McDonald’s loop of evil. Ms Aryaa: Meat eating, why is it a problem? Because it increases both carbon dioxide and methane. Producing one steak in your supermarket takes roughly 60,000 calories of energy. Keeping cattle or pigs, growing food for them, feeding them, transporting them, killing them, cleaning and packaging the meat, sending it by air conditioned vehicles to the supermarkets which keep it in freezers, then you buy it, then it’s in fridges at home. And then you cook it because you can’t eat it raw. This is all carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide will increase because forests are cut by the minute in places like Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, just so that we can graze the cattle, the pigs, the hens, the goats, the sheep. These forests absorb carbon dioxide. So when we cut down the forests, we cut down the carbon sinks and we exchange them for meat. Why do we increase carbon dioxide? Because It takes 11 kilos of grain to make one kilo of meat. And when we harvest wheat, corn, soya bean this is a mechanized thing. We use fertilizer-rich agriculture. All this creates carbon dioxide. In fact, when we burn fuel to produce fertilizer to grow feed to produce meat and to transport it and to clear vegetation for grazing, we produce 9% of all carbon dioxide emissions, millions and millions and millions of tons. Ms Aryaa: Now come to methane and its relationship to meat. Livestock produce 23% of all methane, because of the fermentation in their intestines, which produces gas in these animals. It is produced in their manure, in the wastewater that they produce. A single dairy cow produces between 550 to 700 liters of methane a day. The world’s top destroyer of the atmosphere is not the car, nor the factory. It is the meat eating human being. And this monster is on the rise. There is a 400-page United Nations report, not written by vegetarians, not written by me, which has identified the world’s rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests, wildlife and the continuation of the earth. Your ham sandwich is killing me. Your ham sandwich is killing the earth. Ms Aryaa: Livestock produce more than 100 other polluting gases, including two-thirds of the world’s emissions of ammonia. Ammonia creates acid rain. Acid rain destroys forests. The other way that you destroy it is ranching, because it is the major cause of deforestation worldwide. And over-grazing has turned pastures and mountain ranges, like my Aravalli Range, which used to protect Delhi and no longer does because it has become a desert. | Off Topic Chat Room Similar Conversations |