Go veggie!

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Jon Ward

Go veggie because countries that consume the least animal protein have the lowest incidences of cancer of the breast, colon and prostate, among other things. Do it for yourself. Do it for the animals. Do it because animals like cows, pigs and turkeys do experience pain and terror, and they feel it when they are shot and sliced open at the slaughterhouse factories they're crated to, and they feel it even more intensely than their fellow animals whose mercy they are at: namely, us humans.

We depend mostly on our higher intelligence to survive. The animals we eat have evolved sharper senses than ours in order to survive. They therefore experience physical pain far more intensely than we. And like we would, they do cry, tremble, cringe and cower - their hearts do pound in agony at the approaching knife.

Next time you eat an animal's flesh, try to imagine how it suffered before it was killed. Try to imagine what a relief its death must have been after its agonizing life of captivity, a piece of meat even in life.

Animals too sick, weak or injured to move when they arrive at a stockyard are tied to the back of a truck and dragged to an area where they're piled up for easy killing and butchering. These "downed" animals can lie outside dying for days without food or water. Veal calves spend their short lives chained inside tiny crates and are killed when just 12-16 weeks old. They're deliberately starved of vital nutrients and suffer from anemia and other diseases. Who is responsible? If you eat meat, you are.

Does a dead pig taste so good that it's worth crunching 85 million of these living animals into stacked crates and barren cement stalls where they can live their whole lives in their own excrement before being slaughtered and their remains chopped, ground, processed, treated, packaged, stored and shipped before going into your mouth? Are we really so primitive that we cannot stop killing? Or do you lie to yourself and say that it's not killing?

Go veggie because it is no longer necessary to kill animals for food. The myths about insufficient nutrition from vegetarian diets are unfounded nonsense, frequently perpetuated by big companies that rake in billions from the slaughter of animals. As long as you eat regularly with a varied diet, it's almost impossible to develop protein deficiency. The average person should consume no more than 10 percent of daily calories from protein. Too much protein is a much bigger problem. For example, it can cause kidney stones and osteoporosis.

Check into it yourself and you'll see that the healthiest diets require no meat whatsoever. Vegetarian diets are not just tofu and lima beans either. It's worth your while to see for yourself, because the risk of death from a heart attack is 50 percent for an average American man, but only 4% percent for a vegetarian man.

More people are going veggie all the time, and restaurants and food manufacturers are responding to their demands. It's only getting easier to live cruelty free.

Go veggie because factory-farmed cows are sprayed with pesticides and dosed with antibiotics, hormones and tranquilizers, the chemical residues of which are passed on to those who consume the animals' flesh and milk.

In America alone, six billion chickens are killed for food every year, more than one for every human on Earth. Chicken meat has as much cholesterol per ounce as beef.

Meat is very bad for you, and is the biggest single factor contributing to heart disease, the leading cause of death. That's the only revenge for the billions of animals slaughtered and eaten every year in this country.

Go veggie because government studies have found as many as 90 percent of chicken carcasses are contaminated with salmonella bacteria, and because if you could see where your meat comes from and what it goes through you would be too disgusted to put it in your mouth. That's why the big companies whose business is feeding our bloodlust take great pains to hide the horrifying realities of the meat industry from the public.

And whether you see the horror or not, it's there, and you're swallowing it.

Going veggie is good for your health and the environment. It's cheaper. It's compassionate. You can do it.

Jon Ward is an astronomy and creative writing junior. His column, Who's the Bull Goose Looney? appears every Thursday and he can be reached via e-mail at Jon.Ward@wildcat.arizona.edu.