save the planet and help animals: drop the drumstick, bin the burger
Date: September 25, 2007
Humane society says environmentalists should urge cut in meat consumption
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The Vancouver Humane Society (VHS) is calling on Canadian environmental groups to urge people to cut their meat consumption to reduce global warming. The call follows the release of research by the United Nations showing that livestock production causes more greenhouse-gas emissions globally than all forms of transportation combined. VHS has written to several prominent environmental organizations asking them to make the issue a priority and has asked B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell to include it in the government’s climate change work.
“Most environmental groups and governments have been focusing on issues like transportation and industry when it comes to climate change,” says VHS spokesperson Peter Fricker, “Now they need to recognize that the factory farming of animals is also a major part of the problem.”
The UN report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, says the livestock sector generates18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and is a major source of land and water degradation.
Fricker said some environmental organizations are acknowledging the implications of the new research and are taking appropriate steps. For example, the David Suzuki Foundation urges people to have one meat-free day a week.
“We just think it’s time all of us recognized the fact that eating less meat will not only save animals from factory farm cruelty, it will also help save the planet, said Fricker.”
Concentrated, intensive livestock farming has been growing across Canada and around the world, with more animals on fewer, larger farms. For example, the number of pig farmers in Canada has dropped by more than a quarter since 2001, but the size of the average operation has grown 45 per cent.
In B.C.’s Fraser Valley, which has more farm animals per square kilometre than anywhere else in Canada, the number of chickens on poultry farms increased by 78 per cent during the 1990s. Livestock production has caused air and water pollution as well as adding to green-house gases.
VHS has long opposed factory farming and most recently has been calling for an end to the caging of laying hens on intensive “battery” farms, which confine hens in conditions so cramped they cannot flap their wings.
