Ethics
The human body has no biological need to eat meat, on the contrary a vegetarian diet presents many advantages for health.

The reasons why people eat meat usually don’t have anything to do with survival needs. People eat meat because they are used to it and/or because they like its taste. Can pleasure or habit justify the torturing and systematic killing of sentient beings?

Answering yes to this question means that even the simple pleasure some people have from eating meat is held more important than the huge holocaust that this pleasure involves.

Animals and human beings are different under many aspects, but what they all share is the only morally relevant characteristic important when we have to work out if it’s fair to kill them or not: the capacity of feeling pain.

Until not very long ago, differences in race made bearable some of the most execrable crimes committed by human beings, like slavery and racism, the latter justifying the former.

The discrimination in our case is made upon a difference in species instead of race: belonging to a different species doesn’t allow us to treat sentient beings like objects.

The vegetarian nutrition can markabily reduce the incidence of various pathologies, degenerative diseases in particular, which are among the first causes of death in industrial countries.

Many scientific researches revealed the determinant role of meat in generating the most serious and widespread pathologies in western countries. It’s not by chance that vegans and vegetarians are statistically less subject to cancer, hypertension, infracts, ictus, diabetes, obesity and many other diseases.

Epidemiological studies on vegetarians reveal that their diet is totally able to provide all the necessary nutrients, without involving more risks of nutrients lacks than omnivorous diets may do.

For more information on vegetarian nutrition you can look at the web site www.ivu.org

Hunger in the world
World population overtook 6 milliards of people in 1999, and will be over 10 in the next few years.

Already today 2 milliards of people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition, and 840 millions live on the brink of survival.

It’s impossible to give food to the whole mankind with the diet we have in Europe or in the States, where more than 60% of the proteins comes from animal sources.
Meat production requires a vast quantity of vegetables to feed the animals, therefore it needs huge fields for growing animal food and vast spaces for the grazing land.

If the vegetables would be directly eaten by people instead of being used to feed animals for meat, 650 millions of people dying from starvation could be fed.

If we use a hectare of land for cattle breeding, we obtain 66 Kg of proteins every year. If we would cultivate soy on the same hectare, we would obtain in the same time 1848 kg of proteins, about 28 times more!

About one third of the cereal production in the world is used for cattle feeding, about 65% of the cultivable land in industrial countries is used to feed animals, while millions of people are starving in other parts of the world.

The environment
Vegetable production is more ecologically sustainable than animal derived food production.

Less land is necessary in order to feed a vegetarian rather than an omnivorous. The impact on the environment of milliards of people eating meat is definitely heavier then the one of a vegetarian mankind: forests wouldn’t be cut down to make space for pastures and for fields for animal food, less fossil fuels would be burnt to cultivate the fields (reducing the amount of greenhouse gases), less pests and fertilisers would pollute the soil.

In the Amazonian forest 88% of the cut down areas are now pastures. According to Ernst U. V. Weizäcker from the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, the contribution to the greenhouse effect from the animal farms is approximately the same of all the vehicle traffic in the world.

The millions of tons of animal excrements, too concentrated in a small space and not sustainable for the soil, cause a microbiological pollution also for the water resources. There is the problem of pharmaceutical residuals given in enormous doses to factory farming cattle (especially hormones and antibiotics).

Nearly half of the drinkable water in the USA is needed for animal farms.

Also fish consumption doesn’t match with the respect of the environment and with the sustainable development of economics. The fishing industry is a colossal business and is consequently strongly overexploiting the oceans.

Furthermore, fish from farms as well as the ones fished in the sea, die stifled suffering a tremendous pain.