Your words about justice and kindness are hollow and meaningless when your meals consist of the suffering and slaughtered bodies of animals.
The voice of peace, the voice of truth. 🕊️✨
@GreenPathForAll ☘
The voice of peace, the voice of truth. 🕊️✨
@GreenPathForAll ☘
❤20🔥7😱4😍2👏1
Animal Testing is a Crime Against Peace and Justice
Animal testing is cruel and unjust, causing immense suffering to innocent creatures. Products tested on animals—like cosmetics (e.g., makeup, shampoos), household cleaners, and some medicines—perpetuate this cruelty. Avoid them!
Choose cruelty-free alternatives:
- Cosmetics: Look for brands with "cruelty-free" or vegan logos (e.g., Lush, The Body Shop).
- Household Products: Buy from brands like Ecover or Method, certified cruelty-free.
- Medicines: Support companies exploring non-animal testing methods, like 3D cell cultures.
Wherever there is oppression and injustice, we will take aim.
#CrueltyFree #Peace #Vegan #EndAnimalTesting
@GreenPathForAll 🍀
Animal testing is cruel and unjust, causing immense suffering to innocent creatures. Products tested on animals—like cosmetics (e.g., makeup, shampoos), household cleaners, and some medicines—perpetuate this cruelty. Avoid them!
Choose cruelty-free alternatives:
- Cosmetics: Look for brands with "cruelty-free" or vegan logos (e.g., Lush, The Body Shop).
- Household Products: Buy from brands like Ecover or Method, certified cruelty-free.
- Medicines: Support companies exploring non-animal testing methods, like 3D cell cultures.
Wherever there is oppression and injustice, we will take aim.
#CrueltyFree #Peace #Vegan #EndAnimalTesting
@GreenPathForAll 🍀
❤46🔥5👍3👏2
Are Vegetarians Also “Killers”? A Deeper Look at a Common Excuse
One of the most common arguments against vegetarianism goes like this:
"You're a killer too! Thousands of insects and small creatures die during farming and harvesting of your crops!"
At first glance, this might sound logical. But in reality, it’s a clever excuse to hide from a much bigger and darker truth. Let’s examine this claim using logic and real statistics.
Point One: The concern isn’t really about insects.
The person making this argument isn’t genuinely worried about the lives of insects. Their goal is simply to justify their own choice (meat consumption) and to find a flaw in yours, so they can ease their conscience.
Point Two (and the key): Who are agricultural lands really for?
This is where their entire argument collapses. According to global statistics (including reports from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – FAO), around 80% of all agricultural land worldwide is not used for direct human consumption, but rather to produce animal feed.
Yes, you read that correctly. A massive portion of corn, soy, and grain farms exist solely to feed animals that are ultimately slaughtered.
Logical Conclusion:
Now let’s revisit the idea of “killing”:
A vegetarian is responsible for the unintended deaths of small creatures in crop fields (that 20% of farmland).
A meat-eater is not only responsible for the direct killing of animals (chickens, cows, sheep), but also for the indirect killing of countless small creatures in the 80% of farmland used to grow feed for those animals.
Put simply:
Meat consumption involves two layers of killing—the intentional slaughter of animals, and a far greater share in the unintentional deaths of field creatures.
The motive is an excuse, not compassion.
Most people who bring up the “insect deaths” argument aren’t truly concerned about those creatures. It’s a tactic to dodge responsibility and justify continued meat consumption. They hide behind this excuse to say: “Since no one is perfect, trying to be better is pointless—and I can keep doing what I know is wrong.”
If our true concern is reducing pain, suffering, and harm to all living beings, then the most logical and effective step is to eliminate or reduce the product that causes the most damage. And that product, without a doubt, is meat and animal-based products.
Final Thought:
Choosing vegetarianism doesn’t mean claiming perfection or zero harm. It’s a conscious decision to minimize harm as much as possible.
So next time someone brings up this excuse, ask them:
“If you’re truly worried about the tiny creatures in crop fields, why not choose the path that uses only 20% of those fields instead of 80%?”
Awareness means looking beyond excuses and seeing the full cycle of a choice. Let’s choose consciously.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
@GreenPathForAll🍀
One of the most common arguments against vegetarianism goes like this:
"You're a killer too! Thousands of insects and small creatures die during farming and harvesting of your crops!"
At first glance, this might sound logical. But in reality, it’s a clever excuse to hide from a much bigger and darker truth. Let’s examine this claim using logic and real statistics.
Point One: The concern isn’t really about insects.
The person making this argument isn’t genuinely worried about the lives of insects. Their goal is simply to justify their own choice (meat consumption) and to find a flaw in yours, so they can ease their conscience.
Point Two (and the key): Who are agricultural lands really for?
This is where their entire argument collapses. According to global statistics (including reports from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – FAO), around 80% of all agricultural land worldwide is not used for direct human consumption, but rather to produce animal feed.
Yes, you read that correctly. A massive portion of corn, soy, and grain farms exist solely to feed animals that are ultimately slaughtered.
Logical Conclusion:
Now let’s revisit the idea of “killing”:
A vegetarian is responsible for the unintended deaths of small creatures in crop fields (that 20% of farmland).
A meat-eater is not only responsible for the direct killing of animals (chickens, cows, sheep), but also for the indirect killing of countless small creatures in the 80% of farmland used to grow feed for those animals.
Put simply:
Meat consumption involves two layers of killing—the intentional slaughter of animals, and a far greater share in the unintentional deaths of field creatures.
The motive is an excuse, not compassion.
Most people who bring up the “insect deaths” argument aren’t truly concerned about those creatures. It’s a tactic to dodge responsibility and justify continued meat consumption. They hide behind this excuse to say: “Since no one is perfect, trying to be better is pointless—and I can keep doing what I know is wrong.”
If our true concern is reducing pain, suffering, and harm to all living beings, then the most logical and effective step is to eliminate or reduce the product that causes the most damage. And that product, without a doubt, is meat and animal-based products.
Final Thought:
Choosing vegetarianism doesn’t mean claiming perfection or zero harm. It’s a conscious decision to minimize harm as much as possible.
So next time someone brings up this excuse, ask them:
“If you’re truly worried about the tiny creatures in crop fields, why not choose the path that uses only 20% of those fields instead of 80%?”
Awareness means looking beyond excuses and seeing the full cycle of a choice. Let’s choose consciously.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
@GreenPathForAll
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Cast Out to Die: The Price of Ignorance
A helpless pigeon suffering from PMV (Newcastle disease)—struggling with a twisted neck and unable to eat or drink on his own—needed only one thing: Compassion.
Medical facts say he just needed 2 weeks of hand-feeding and warmth to fight the virus and return to life. But what did he face in this world? Rejection. Cruelty. Disrespect.
He was thrown out of the house. Cast away into the cold to die alone in his sickness, simply because he was seen as "inconvenient."
We witnessed this atrocity. We will not look away. Wherever we see injustice and oppression against the innocent, we will expose it.
Ask yourself: Why does society build idols out of celebrities and obsess over famous people, yet treats a suffering living being—who desperately needs nursing—like garbage? Why do we allow a sentient being to endure such a tragic fate when saving him was so easy?
This must change. In the near future, we must build a dedicated hospital for animals and birds. A place where no life is considered "disposable."
This is not merely a personal desire. This is the will of Peace and Love. This is the voice of Consciousness and true Humanity.
#AnimalRights #Veganism #EndSpeciesism #Compassion #Justice #vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #scientific #science
@GreenPathForAll🍀
A helpless pigeon suffering from PMV (Newcastle disease)—struggling with a twisted neck and unable to eat or drink on his own—needed only one thing: Compassion.
Medical facts say he just needed 2 weeks of hand-feeding and warmth to fight the virus and return to life. But what did he face in this world? Rejection. Cruelty. Disrespect.
He was thrown out of the house. Cast away into the cold to die alone in his sickness, simply because he was seen as "inconvenient."
We witnessed this atrocity. We will not look away. Wherever we see injustice and oppression against the innocent, we will expose it.
Ask yourself: Why does society build idols out of celebrities and obsess over famous people, yet treats a suffering living being—who desperately needs nursing—like garbage? Why do we allow a sentient being to endure such a tragic fate when saving him was so easy?
This must change. In the near future, we must build a dedicated hospital for animals and birds. A place where no life is considered "disposable."
This is not merely a personal desire. This is the will of Peace and Love. This is the voice of Consciousness and true Humanity.
#AnimalRights #Veganism #EndSpeciesism #Compassion #Justice #vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #scientific #science
@GreenPathForAll
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The B12 Question: A Lost Vitamin Is Not Proof of a Carnivorous Past 🌱
The most common attack on plant-based living is: "You need supplements —
so your diet is unnatural." Here is what that argument leaves out.
1. No Animal on Earth Produces B12
Not a cow. Not a lion. Not a human. Not one animal in the history of life.
B12 is built by a chain of roughly thirty enzymes found only in bacteria
and archaea — microorganisms. No animal, plant, or fungus has ever carried
those genes. Not one.
This matters, because people often claim humans "lost" the ability to make
B12 when we started eating meat. That is biologically impossible. You
cannot lose what no ancestor ever had. The gene does not exist in animals,
and never did.
Animal flesh is not a source of B12. It is a storage container for
bacterial B12.
2. Then Why Does a Cow Have It and You Don't?
This is the real question, and the answer is not evolution or diet.
It is the physical layout of the gut.
A cow is a foregut fermenter. Her rumen — an enormous fermentation chamber
holding billions of bacteria — sits BEFORE her small intestine. The
bacteria there manufacture B12, and it flows downstream into the intestine,
where it is absorbed. Production comes first, absorption second.
A human is a hindgut fermenter. Our fermentation chamber — the colon —
sits AFTER the small intestine. Bacteria in the human colon are
synthesizing B12 right now, inside every person reading this. But
absorption occurs in the ileum, upstream. The vitamin is manufactured
past the only door it could enter through, and leaves the body unused.
We are not missing the bacteria. We are not missing a gene.
The plumbing simply runs in the wrong order.
3. The Same "Limitation" Exists in Gorillas, Horses, and Rabbits
Here is why this destroys the carnivore argument rather than supporting it.
Every hindgut fermenter has exactly the same problem — and nearly all of
them are strict herbivores:
Rabbit — solves it by cecotrophy: it re-ingests soft cecal pellets
directly, running them through the gut a second time. A rabbit
prevented from doing this becomes deficient and dies.
Gorilla — a pure herbivore, and documented in the wild practicing
coprophagy, alongside soil and incidentally eaten insects.
Horse — a pure herbivore with an enormous cecum, relying on gut
microbes and on cobalt-rich soil in its forage.
Not one of these animals eats meat. Not one of them synthesizes B12
internally. Every one of them depends on bacteria and on contact with the
earth, exactly as we once did.
A trait shared with gorillas, horses, and rabbits is not evidence of a
carnivorous past. It is evidence of a herbivorous one.
4. Where Our Ancestors Got It
Early humans drank from rivers and springs, ate plants pulled from the
ground with soil still clinging to them, and lived without sanitation.
B12-producing bacteria live in soil, in untreated water, and on unwashed
roots and leaves. Our ancestors consumed B12 constantly — not from
hunting, but from dirt and water.
5. What Modern Life Removed
Chlorinated water. Washed and packaged produce. Sterile agriculture.
Antibacterial everything. Modern hygiene — which saved millions of lives
from cholera and dysentery — also severed the oldest link between humans
and this bacterial vitamin.
We did not lose B12 because we stopped eating meat.
We lost it because we started washing our food.
6. The Fact Almost Nobody Mentions
The overwhelming majority of B12 produced commercially in the world is not
sold to humans. It is added to livestock feed. Farmed animals are raised
in confinement, on processed feed, cut off from soil — so they are
deficient too, and the industry supplements them.
Even grazing cattle need help: B12 contains cobalt at its core, and herds
on cobalt-poor pasture develop wasting disease. Farmers dose them with
cobalt specifically so their gut bacteria can build the vitamin.
So the real choice is not "natural versus supplemented." It is:
take B12 directly, or pay for it to be fed to an animal first.
7. The Argument That Ends the Debate
If needing to obtain a nutrient from outside the body proves what a species
is "designed" to eat, then consider vitamin C.
Dogs, cats, cows, and nearly all mammals synthesize their own vitamin C
internally. They never need to eat it. Humans cannot. We carry a broken
gene — GULO — that was disabled in our primate ancestors millions of years
ago. We must consume vitamin C from outside, continuously, or we develop
scurvy and die.
Why did we lose it? Because our ancestors ate so much fruit that the
ability became redundant and the gene decayed.
Note the contrast carefully:
B12 — no animal ever had the gene. Nothing was lost.
Vitamin C — humans DID have the gene, and lost it, because of fruit.
The one real genetic loss in this entire discussion points directly at a
plant-eating ancestry.
True carnivores make their own vitamin C and never need fruit.
Humans cannot make vitamin C and will die without plants.
8. Deficiency Is Not a Vegan Problem
B12 deficiency is widespread among meat-eaters as well, especially after
age 50, and in anyone taking metformin or acid-reducing medication —
because the limiting factor is absorption, not intake. Eating meat
protects no one from it.
In Conclusion
B12 is a bacterial vitamin that modern sanitation removed from everyone's
diet. Humans never produced it, because no animal ever has. We simply sit,
like the gorilla and the horse, on the wrong side of our own fermentation
chamber — and until recently, soil and water filled the gap.
A small, cheap, cruelty-free tablet restores a link that hygiene broke.
That is not a weakness of plant-based living. It is a consequence of
civilization — and the meat industry solves it in exactly the same way,
only by routing it through an animal first.
Sources:
- Watanabe F, Yabuta Y, Bito T, Teng F. (2014). "Vitamin B12-Containing
Plant Food Sources for Vegetarians." Nutrients, 6(5), 1861-1873.
DOI: 10.3390/nu6051861
- Albert MJ, Mathan VI, Baker SJ. (1980). "Vitamin B12 synthesis by human
small intestinal bacteria." Nature, 283, 781-782. DOI: 10.1038/283781a0
- Allen LH. (2009). "How common is vitamin B-12 deficiency?" American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 89(2), 693S-696S.
DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.2008.26947A
- Nishikimi M, et al. (1994). "Cloning and chromosomal mapping of the human
nonfunctional gene for L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase." Journal of
Biological Chemistry, 269(18), 13685-13688.
- Harcourt AH, Stewart KJ. (1978). "Coprophagy by wild mountain gorilla."
African Journal of Ecology, 16(3), 223-225.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science #b12
@GreenPathForAll🍀
The most common attack on plant-based living is: "You need supplements —
so your diet is unnatural." Here is what that argument leaves out.
1. No Animal on Earth Produces B12
Not a cow. Not a lion. Not a human. Not one animal in the history of life.
B12 is built by a chain of roughly thirty enzymes found only in bacteria
and archaea — microorganisms. No animal, plant, or fungus has ever carried
those genes. Not one.
This matters, because people often claim humans "lost" the ability to make
B12 when we started eating meat. That is biologically impossible. You
cannot lose what no ancestor ever had. The gene does not exist in animals,
and never did.
Animal flesh is not a source of B12. It is a storage container for
bacterial B12.
2. Then Why Does a Cow Have It and You Don't?
This is the real question, and the answer is not evolution or diet.
It is the physical layout of the gut.
A cow is a foregut fermenter. Her rumen — an enormous fermentation chamber
holding billions of bacteria — sits BEFORE her small intestine. The
bacteria there manufacture B12, and it flows downstream into the intestine,
where it is absorbed. Production comes first, absorption second.
A human is a hindgut fermenter. Our fermentation chamber — the colon —
sits AFTER the small intestine. Bacteria in the human colon are
synthesizing B12 right now, inside every person reading this. But
absorption occurs in the ileum, upstream. The vitamin is manufactured
past the only door it could enter through, and leaves the body unused.
We are not missing the bacteria. We are not missing a gene.
The plumbing simply runs in the wrong order.
3. The Same "Limitation" Exists in Gorillas, Horses, and Rabbits
Here is why this destroys the carnivore argument rather than supporting it.
Every hindgut fermenter has exactly the same problem — and nearly all of
them are strict herbivores:
Rabbit — solves it by cecotrophy: it re-ingests soft cecal pellets
directly, running them through the gut a second time. A rabbit
prevented from doing this becomes deficient and dies.
Gorilla — a pure herbivore, and documented in the wild practicing
coprophagy, alongside soil and incidentally eaten insects.
Horse — a pure herbivore with an enormous cecum, relying on gut
microbes and on cobalt-rich soil in its forage.
Not one of these animals eats meat. Not one of them synthesizes B12
internally. Every one of them depends on bacteria and on contact with the
earth, exactly as we once did.
A trait shared with gorillas, horses, and rabbits is not evidence of a
carnivorous past. It is evidence of a herbivorous one.
4. Where Our Ancestors Got It
Early humans drank from rivers and springs, ate plants pulled from the
ground with soil still clinging to them, and lived without sanitation.
B12-producing bacteria live in soil, in untreated water, and on unwashed
roots and leaves. Our ancestors consumed B12 constantly — not from
hunting, but from dirt and water.
5. What Modern Life Removed
Chlorinated water. Washed and packaged produce. Sterile agriculture.
Antibacterial everything. Modern hygiene — which saved millions of lives
from cholera and dysentery — also severed the oldest link between humans
and this bacterial vitamin.
We did not lose B12 because we stopped eating meat.
We lost it because we started washing our food.
6. The Fact Almost Nobody Mentions
The overwhelming majority of B12 produced commercially in the world is not
sold to humans. It is added to livestock feed. Farmed animals are raised
in confinement, on processed feed, cut off from soil — so they are
deficient too, and the industry supplements them.
Even grazing cattle need help: B12 contains cobalt at its core, and herds
on cobalt-poor pasture develop wasting disease. Farmers dose them with
cobalt specifically so their gut bacteria can build the vitamin.
So the real choice is not "natural versus supplemented." It is:
take B12 directly, or pay for it to be fed to an animal first.
7. The Argument That Ends the Debate
If needing to obtain a nutrient from outside the body proves what a species
is "designed" to eat, then consider vitamin C.
Dogs, cats, cows, and nearly all mammals synthesize their own vitamin C
internally. They never need to eat it. Humans cannot. We carry a broken
gene — GULO — that was disabled in our primate ancestors millions of years
ago. We must consume vitamin C from outside, continuously, or we develop
scurvy and die.
Why did we lose it? Because our ancestors ate so much fruit that the
ability became redundant and the gene decayed.
Note the contrast carefully:
B12 — no animal ever had the gene. Nothing was lost.
Vitamin C — humans DID have the gene, and lost it, because of fruit.
The one real genetic loss in this entire discussion points directly at a
plant-eating ancestry.
True carnivores make their own vitamin C and never need fruit.
Humans cannot make vitamin C and will die without plants.
8. Deficiency Is Not a Vegan Problem
B12 deficiency is widespread among meat-eaters as well, especially after
age 50, and in anyone taking metformin or acid-reducing medication —
because the limiting factor is absorption, not intake. Eating meat
protects no one from it.
In Conclusion
B12 is a bacterial vitamin that modern sanitation removed from everyone's
diet. Humans never produced it, because no animal ever has. We simply sit,
like the gorilla and the horse, on the wrong side of our own fermentation
chamber — and until recently, soil and water filled the gap.
A small, cheap, cruelty-free tablet restores a link that hygiene broke.
That is not a weakness of plant-based living. It is a consequence of
civilization — and the meat industry solves it in exactly the same way,
only by routing it through an animal first.
Sources:
- Watanabe F, Yabuta Y, Bito T, Teng F. (2014). "Vitamin B12-Containing
Plant Food Sources for Vegetarians." Nutrients, 6(5), 1861-1873.
DOI: 10.3390/nu6051861
- Albert MJ, Mathan VI, Baker SJ. (1980). "Vitamin B12 synthesis by human
small intestinal bacteria." Nature, 283, 781-782. DOI: 10.1038/283781a0
- Allen LH. (2009). "How common is vitamin B-12 deficiency?" American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 89(2), 693S-696S.
DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.2008.26947A
- Nishikimi M, et al. (1994). "Cloning and chromosomal mapping of the human
nonfunctional gene for L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase." Journal of
Biological Chemistry, 269(18), 13685-13688.
- Harcourt AH, Stewart KJ. (1978). "Coprophagy by wild mountain gorilla."
African Journal of Ecology, 16(3), 223-225.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science #b12
@GreenPathForAll
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Speciesism and the Geography of Habit: Who Actually Chose Your Plate? 🍀
Before defending your diet, answer one question honestly:
did you ever choose it?
1. The Test
A cow is sacred in India, dinner in Argentina, and a luxury steak in Japan.
A pig is forbidden across the Middle East and a national dish in Spain.
A horse is a companion in Britain and a meal in Kazakhstan.
A dog is family in Europe and food in a few regions of Asia.
A guinea pig is a pet in New York and a traditional meal in Peru.
Same animal. Same nervous system. Same capacity to suffer.
Completely different verdict — depending entirely on where the person
judging it happened to be born.
2. What That Reveals
Notice your own reaction. For most readers, "dog" produced discomfort and
"cow" produced nothing. But nothing about the two animals justifies that
gap. A pig outperforms a dog on most cognitive tests. A cow forms lasting
friendships and grieves when separated from her calf.
The difference is not in the animal. The difference is in which animals
your culture placed inside the circle of concern and which it placed
outside — before you were old enough to have an opinion.
3. The Definition
Speciesism is assigning moral worth based on species membership rather
than on the capacity to suffer. It is the same logical structure as any
other arbitrary in-group preference: a trait irrelevant to suffering is
used to decide whose suffering counts.
4. Geographic Determinism
Here is the uncomfortable part. If you had been born 3,000 kilometers east
or west, you would be defending a completely different diet with exactly
the same confidence you defend this one — and you would find your current
diet disgusting.
That is the definition of conditioning, not conviction.
A belief that changes with longitude was never a conclusion.
It was an inheritance.
Our eating habits are learned by imitation: from parents, from neighbors,
from whatever happened to grow or graze within walking distance of our
ancestors. No research was done. No evidence was weighed. No one in that
chain ever asked whether it was right. They simply copied the people
around them — and so did we.
5. The Invisible System
We are taught to see veganism as an ideology and meat-eating as neutral.
It is the reverse: meat-eating is the belief system so dominant that it
became invisible. The psychologist Melanie Joy named it carnism — the
unexamined framework that teaches us to love some animals, eat others,
and never notice the contradiction.
6. The Four Justifications
Research has shown that when people defend meat consumption, almost every
answer falls into four categories, known as the 4 Ns:
Natural — "Our ancestors did it." (So did infanticide and slavery.)
Normal — "Everyone does it." (Popularity is not ethics.)
Necessary — "We need it to survive." (Major health bodies disagree.)
Nice — "It tastes good." (Pleasure does not justify harm.)
Every one of these defends the habit. Not one of them defends the animal.
7. The Way Out
Awareness is simply the act of asking a question your culture never asked
on your behalf:
If I would not accept this being done to a dog,
what exactly makes it acceptable when done to a pig?
If no answer survives that question except "because that is how I was
raised" — then the choice was never yours. Until now.
Sources:
- Joy, M. (2010). Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An
Introduction to Carnism. Conari Press.
- Piazza J, Ruby MB, Loughnan S, et al. (2015). "Rationalizing meat
consumption. The 4Ns." Appetite, 91, 114-128.
DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2015.04.011
- Singer, P. (1975). Animal Liberation. HarperCollins.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #speciesism #carnism
@GreenPathForAll🍀
Before defending your diet, answer one question honestly:
did you ever choose it?
1. The Test
A cow is sacred in India, dinner in Argentina, and a luxury steak in Japan.
A pig is forbidden across the Middle East and a national dish in Spain.
A horse is a companion in Britain and a meal in Kazakhstan.
A dog is family in Europe and food in a few regions of Asia.
A guinea pig is a pet in New York and a traditional meal in Peru.
Same animal. Same nervous system. Same capacity to suffer.
Completely different verdict — depending entirely on where the person
judging it happened to be born.
2. What That Reveals
Notice your own reaction. For most readers, "dog" produced discomfort and
"cow" produced nothing. But nothing about the two animals justifies that
gap. A pig outperforms a dog on most cognitive tests. A cow forms lasting
friendships and grieves when separated from her calf.
The difference is not in the animal. The difference is in which animals
your culture placed inside the circle of concern and which it placed
outside — before you were old enough to have an opinion.
3. The Definition
Speciesism is assigning moral worth based on species membership rather
than on the capacity to suffer. It is the same logical structure as any
other arbitrary in-group preference: a trait irrelevant to suffering is
used to decide whose suffering counts.
4. Geographic Determinism
Here is the uncomfortable part. If you had been born 3,000 kilometers east
or west, you would be defending a completely different diet with exactly
the same confidence you defend this one — and you would find your current
diet disgusting.
That is the definition of conditioning, not conviction.
A belief that changes with longitude was never a conclusion.
It was an inheritance.
Our eating habits are learned by imitation: from parents, from neighbors,
from whatever happened to grow or graze within walking distance of our
ancestors. No research was done. No evidence was weighed. No one in that
chain ever asked whether it was right. They simply copied the people
around them — and so did we.
5. The Invisible System
We are taught to see veganism as an ideology and meat-eating as neutral.
It is the reverse: meat-eating is the belief system so dominant that it
became invisible. The psychologist Melanie Joy named it carnism — the
unexamined framework that teaches us to love some animals, eat others,
and never notice the contradiction.
6. The Four Justifications
Research has shown that when people defend meat consumption, almost every
answer falls into four categories, known as the 4 Ns:
Natural — "Our ancestors did it." (So did infanticide and slavery.)
Normal — "Everyone does it." (Popularity is not ethics.)
Necessary — "We need it to survive." (Major health bodies disagree.)
Nice — "It tastes good." (Pleasure does not justify harm.)
Every one of these defends the habit. Not one of them defends the animal.
7. The Way Out
Awareness is simply the act of asking a question your culture never asked
on your behalf:
If I would not accept this being done to a dog,
what exactly makes it acceptable when done to a pig?
If no answer survives that question except "because that is how I was
raised" — then the choice was never yours. Until now.
Sources:
- Joy, M. (2010). Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An
Introduction to Carnism. Conari Press.
- Piazza J, Ruby MB, Loughnan S, et al. (2015). "Rationalizing meat
consumption. The 4Ns." Appetite, 91, 114-128.
DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2015.04.011
- Singer, P. (1975). Animal Liberation. HarperCollins.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #speciesism #carnism
@GreenPathForAll
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Plant Protein: Complete, Abundant, and Nothing Like "Just Grass" 🌿
"Where do you get your protein?" is the most repeated question in
nutrition — and the one with the clearest answer.
1. The Word "Incomplete" Is Wrong
Every plant food contains all 20 amino acids, including all 9 essential
ones. Not one is missing from lentils, rice, beans, or broccoli.
"Incomplete" never meant absent. It meant a food has a lower proportion
of one or two amino acids relative to human requirements. That is a
difference of ratio, not of presence — and the word has misled two
generations of people.
2. The Combining Myth — Retracted by Its Own Author
In 1971, the book Diet for a Small Planet popularized the idea that
plant proteins must be carefully combined within a single meal. The claim
spread worldwide.
Its author, Frances Moore Lappé, formally retracted it in the 1981 edition
after the science caught up. The human liver maintains a circulating pool
of amino acids and draws on it for hours. Protein eaten at breakfast is
still available to the body at lunch. There is nothing to combine, time,
or calculate.
3. Plants That Are Complete on Their Own
Soy (tofu, tempeh, edamame, soy milk) — protein quality score of 1.0,
the maximum on the PDCAAS scale, equal to egg white and milk protein
Quinoa
Buckwheat
Amaranth
Hemp seeds
Chia seeds
Pistachios
Potatoes (small amount, but excellent quality)
4. The Pairing Traditional Kitchens Solved Centuries Ago
Legumes are high in lysine and lower in methionine.
Grains are high in methionine and lower in lysine.
Together they are a perfect amino acid profile.
Notice what humanity figured out without any nutrition science at all:
Rice and lentils — Iran, India
Beans and rice — Latin America, the Caribbean
Hummus and bread — the Levant
Tofu and rice — East Asia
Beans and corn — Mesoamerica
Every major food culture on Earth independently arrived at the same
pairing. It was never a problem that needed solving.
5. The Actual Numbers
The adult requirement is 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight.
A 70 kg adult needs about 56 g per day.
Per 100 g, cooked unless noted:
Seitan 25 g
Tempeh 19 g
Tofu, firm 17 g
Lentils 9 g
Chickpeas 9 g
Black beans 9 g
Quinoa 4.4 g
Green peas 5 g
Pumpkin seeds 30 g (raw)
Peanuts 26 g (raw)
Almonds 21 g (raw)
Oats 13-17 g (dry)
Whole wheat bread 13 g
One ordinary day — lentil stew, chickpeas, bread, oats, a handful of nuts
— passes 56 g without any planning at all. Protein deficiency is
essentially unknown in anyone eating enough calories from varied plants.
6. The Question That Answers Itself
A bull weighs a ton and is solid muscle.
An elephant is the largest land animal alive.
A gorilla is roughly six times stronger than a human.
A horse outruns everything we breed it against.
Every one of them is a herbivore. Not one eats meat.
So where does the protein in a steak come from in the first place?
From plants. The cow assembled it from grass. Eating the animal is simply
collecting plant protein after it has passed through a living being —
losing most of the calories, adding cholesterol, and costing a life.
7. What About the Vitamins?
Iron — lentils, chickpeas, tofu, pumpkin seeds, dark leafy greens.
Pair with vitamin C (lemon, pepper, tomato) to multiply
absorption several times over.
Calcium — tahini, fortified plant milk, kale, bok choy, almonds,
tofu set with calcium.
Zinc — legumes, seeds, nuts, whole grains. Soaking and sprouting
increase absorption.
Omega-3 — flaxseed, chia, walnuts; algae oil for direct EPA and DHA.
Fish do not make omega-3 — they accumulate it from algae.
We can take it from the original source.
Vitamin D — sunlight, or supplementation in winter. Meat-eaters need
this just as much.
Iodine — iodized salt or seaweed.
Vitamin A, C, E, K, folate, fiber, antioxidants — overwhelmingly plant
foods. Meat contains no fiber and almost no vitamin C.
B12 is the only genuine addition. One tablet. See our separate post on
why that has nothing to do with being carnivores.
8. It Was Never "Just Grass"
The picture most people hold of plant-based eating — a sad plate of raw
leaves — describes nothing anyone actually eats.
It is lentil stew. Chickpea curry. Bean stew slow-cooked with turmeric,
mushrooms, carrots and local rice. Hummus and warm bread. Falafel. Dal.
Mujadara. Stuffed vegetables. Roasted eggplant with garlic. Lentil soup
in winter. Noodles with tofu and ginger. Grilled mushrooms. Fresh fruit.
Dates and walnuts. Saffron rice.
These are not substitutes for food. For most of human history, for most
of humanity, they were the food. The meat-centered plate is a recent,
local, and expensive invention — not a human default.
In Conclusion
Plant protein is complete, abundant, cheaper, higher in fiber, free of
cholesterol, and does not require a death. The question was never where
vegans get their protein. The question is why anyone believed they
couldn't.
Sources:
- Melina V, Craig W, Levin S. (2016). "Position of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets." Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and
Dietetics, 116(12), 1970-1980. DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2016.09.025
- Young VR, Pellett PL. (1994). "Plant proteins in relation to human protein
and amino acid nutrition." American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
59(5), 1203S-1212S. DOI: 10.1093/ajcn/59.5.1203S
- Mariotti F, Gardner CD. (2019). "Dietary Protein and Amino Acids in
Vegetarian Diets — A Review." Nutrients, 11(11), 2661.
DOI: 10.3390/nu11112661
- Lappé, F.M. (1981). Diet for a Small Planet, 10th Anniversary Edition
(author's retraction of the protein-combining claim).
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#protein
@GreenPathForAll🍀
"Where do you get your protein?" is the most repeated question in
nutrition — and the one with the clearest answer.
1. The Word "Incomplete" Is Wrong
Every plant food contains all 20 amino acids, including all 9 essential
ones. Not one is missing from lentils, rice, beans, or broccoli.
"Incomplete" never meant absent. It meant a food has a lower proportion
of one or two amino acids relative to human requirements. That is a
difference of ratio, not of presence — and the word has misled two
generations of people.
2. The Combining Myth — Retracted by Its Own Author
In 1971, the book Diet for a Small Planet popularized the idea that
plant proteins must be carefully combined within a single meal. The claim
spread worldwide.
Its author, Frances Moore Lappé, formally retracted it in the 1981 edition
after the science caught up. The human liver maintains a circulating pool
of amino acids and draws on it for hours. Protein eaten at breakfast is
still available to the body at lunch. There is nothing to combine, time,
or calculate.
3. Plants That Are Complete on Their Own
Soy (tofu, tempeh, edamame, soy milk) — protein quality score of 1.0,
the maximum on the PDCAAS scale, equal to egg white and milk protein
Quinoa
Buckwheat
Amaranth
Hemp seeds
Chia seeds
Pistachios
Potatoes (small amount, but excellent quality)
4. The Pairing Traditional Kitchens Solved Centuries Ago
Legumes are high in lysine and lower in methionine.
Grains are high in methionine and lower in lysine.
Together they are a perfect amino acid profile.
Notice what humanity figured out without any nutrition science at all:
Rice and lentils — Iran, India
Beans and rice — Latin America, the Caribbean
Hummus and bread — the Levant
Tofu and rice — East Asia
Beans and corn — Mesoamerica
Every major food culture on Earth independently arrived at the same
pairing. It was never a problem that needed solving.
5. The Actual Numbers
The adult requirement is 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight.
A 70 kg adult needs about 56 g per day.
Per 100 g, cooked unless noted:
Seitan 25 g
Tempeh 19 g
Tofu, firm 17 g
Lentils 9 g
Chickpeas 9 g
Black beans 9 g
Quinoa 4.4 g
Green peas 5 g
Pumpkin seeds 30 g (raw)
Peanuts 26 g (raw)
Almonds 21 g (raw)
Oats 13-17 g (dry)
Whole wheat bread 13 g
One ordinary day — lentil stew, chickpeas, bread, oats, a handful of nuts
— passes 56 g without any planning at all. Protein deficiency is
essentially unknown in anyone eating enough calories from varied plants.
6. The Question That Answers Itself
A bull weighs a ton and is solid muscle.
An elephant is the largest land animal alive.
A gorilla is roughly six times stronger than a human.
A horse outruns everything we breed it against.
Every one of them is a herbivore. Not one eats meat.
So where does the protein in a steak come from in the first place?
From plants. The cow assembled it from grass. Eating the animal is simply
collecting plant protein after it has passed through a living being —
losing most of the calories, adding cholesterol, and costing a life.
7. What About the Vitamins?
Iron — lentils, chickpeas, tofu, pumpkin seeds, dark leafy greens.
Pair with vitamin C (lemon, pepper, tomato) to multiply
absorption several times over.
Calcium — tahini, fortified plant milk, kale, bok choy, almonds,
tofu set with calcium.
Zinc — legumes, seeds, nuts, whole grains. Soaking and sprouting
increase absorption.
Omega-3 — flaxseed, chia, walnuts; algae oil for direct EPA and DHA.
Fish do not make omega-3 — they accumulate it from algae.
We can take it from the original source.
Vitamin D — sunlight, or supplementation in winter. Meat-eaters need
this just as much.
Iodine — iodized salt or seaweed.
Vitamin A, C, E, K, folate, fiber, antioxidants — overwhelmingly plant
foods. Meat contains no fiber and almost no vitamin C.
B12 is the only genuine addition. One tablet. See our separate post on
why that has nothing to do with being carnivores.
8. It Was Never "Just Grass"
The picture most people hold of plant-based eating — a sad plate of raw
leaves — describes nothing anyone actually eats.
It is lentil stew. Chickpea curry. Bean stew slow-cooked with turmeric,
mushrooms, carrots and local rice. Hummus and warm bread. Falafel. Dal.
Mujadara. Stuffed vegetables. Roasted eggplant with garlic. Lentil soup
in winter. Noodles with tofu and ginger. Grilled mushrooms. Fresh fruit.
Dates and walnuts. Saffron rice.
These are not substitutes for food. For most of human history, for most
of humanity, they were the food. The meat-centered plate is a recent,
local, and expensive invention — not a human default.
In Conclusion
Plant protein is complete, abundant, cheaper, higher in fiber, free of
cholesterol, and does not require a death. The question was never where
vegans get their protein. The question is why anyone believed they
couldn't.
Sources:
- Melina V, Craig W, Levin S. (2016). "Position of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets." Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and
Dietetics, 116(12), 1970-1980. DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2016.09.025
- Young VR, Pellett PL. (1994). "Plant proteins in relation to human protein
and amino acid nutrition." American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
59(5), 1203S-1212S. DOI: 10.1093/ajcn/59.5.1203S
- Mariotti F, Gardner CD. (2019). "Dietary Protein and Amino Acids in
Vegetarian Diets — A Review." Nutrients, 11(11), 2661.
DOI: 10.3390/nu11112661
- Lappé, F.M. (1981). Diet for a Small Planet, 10th Anniversary Edition
(author's retraction of the protein-combining claim).
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#protein
@GreenPathForAll
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❤1
🍀 THE COMPLETE GUIDE: Every Argument Against Veganism, Answered
Seven posts. Seven of the most common objections. Each one answered with
science, sources, and logic — not opinion.
Save this post. The next time someone repeats one of these, send them
the link.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 1 — "We have canine teeth. Humans are omnivores."
22 Reasons Why Humans Are Herbivores
Jaw movement, intestine length, stomach acid, hands, sweat, instinct —
twenty-two anatomical facts, every one of them pointing the same way.
👉 [LINK]
PART 2 — "Where do you get your protein? Plants aren't complete."
Plant Protein: Complete, Abundant, and Nothing Like "Just Grass"
The "incomplete protein" myth, the combining myth its own author
retracted, the real numbers, and the question that answers itself:
where does the cow get its protein?
👉 [LINK]
PART 3 — "You need supplements. That proves it's unnatural."
The B12 Question: A Lost Vitamin Is Not Proof of a Carnivorous Past
No animal on Earth makes B12 — not even a lion. Why gorillas, horses
and rabbits share our exact "limitation," and why the one gene humans
really did lose proves the opposite of what meat-eaters claim.
👉 [LINK]
PART 4 — "Plants feel pain too."
Do Plants Feel Pain? Science Says No
No brain. No nervous system. No nociceptors. Reaction is not sensation.
👉 [LINK]
PART 5 — "Vegetarians are killers too — crops kill insects."
Are Vegetarians Also "Killers"? A Deeper Look at a Common Excuse
80% of farmland on Earth grows animal feed. Meat-eating is two layers
of killing, not one. The argument collapses on its own arithmetic.
👉 [LINK]
PART 6 — "Meat isn't harmful."
Heterocyclic Amines in Cooked Meat and Their Carcinogenic Potential
What forms in flesh at high temperature, why the WHO classifies it,
and what it does to DNA.
👉 [LINK]
PART 7 — "It's our culture. Everyone eats meat."
Speciesism and the Geography of Habit: Who Actually Chose Your Plate?
A cow is sacred in India and dinner in Argentina. A dog is family in
Europe and food elsewhere. If your ethics change with your postal code,
they were never ethics. They were an inheritance.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Every claim in these seven posts is sourced from peer-reviewed research.
Read them in order, or jump to the one you need.
No one is asking you to be perfect.
Only to stop using excuses you have never examined.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#guide #faq
@GreenPathForAll 🍀
Seven posts. Seven of the most common objections. Each one answered with
science, sources, and logic — not opinion.
Save this post. The next time someone repeats one of these, send them
the link.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 1 — "We have canine teeth. Humans are omnivores."
22 Reasons Why Humans Are Herbivores
Jaw movement, intestine length, stomach acid, hands, sweat, instinct —
twenty-two anatomical facts, every one of them pointing the same way.
👉 [LINK]
PART 2 — "Where do you get your protein? Plants aren't complete."
Plant Protein: Complete, Abundant, and Nothing Like "Just Grass"
The "incomplete protein" myth, the combining myth its own author
retracted, the real numbers, and the question that answers itself:
where does the cow get its protein?
👉 [LINK]
PART 3 — "You need supplements. That proves it's unnatural."
The B12 Question: A Lost Vitamin Is Not Proof of a Carnivorous Past
No animal on Earth makes B12 — not even a lion. Why gorillas, horses
and rabbits share our exact "limitation," and why the one gene humans
really did lose proves the opposite of what meat-eaters claim.
👉 [LINK]
PART 4 — "Plants feel pain too."
Do Plants Feel Pain? Science Says No
No brain. No nervous system. No nociceptors. Reaction is not sensation.
👉 [LINK]
PART 5 — "Vegetarians are killers too — crops kill insects."
Are Vegetarians Also "Killers"? A Deeper Look at a Common Excuse
80% of farmland on Earth grows animal feed. Meat-eating is two layers
of killing, not one. The argument collapses on its own arithmetic.
👉 [LINK]
PART 6 — "Meat isn't harmful."
Heterocyclic Amines in Cooked Meat and Their Carcinogenic Potential
What forms in flesh at high temperature, why the WHO classifies it,
and what it does to DNA.
👉 [LINK]
PART 7 — "It's our culture. Everyone eats meat."
Speciesism and the Geography of Habit: Who Actually Chose Your Plate?
A cow is sacred in India and dinner in Argentina. A dog is family in
Europe and food elsewhere. If your ethics change with your postal code,
they were never ethics. They were an inheritance.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Every claim in these seven posts is sourced from peer-reviewed research.
Read them in order, or jump to the one you need.
No one is asking you to be perfect.
Only to stop using excuses you have never examined.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#guide #faq
@GreenPathForAll 🍀
❤1
📚 PART 8 OF 8 — The Complete Guide
The Fire Test: If Humans Are Carnivores, Why Must We Cook? 🔥
There is one question meat-eaters have never answered, and it requires no
laboratory, no study, and no expert. Just honesty.
1. The Observation
Not a single carnivore on Earth cooks its food.
The lion does not. The wolf, the tiger, the eagle, the shark, the crocodile
— none of them. They tear into raw flesh, still warm, and digest it
without harm, without illness, without preparation of any kind.
Humans cannot. Hand someone a raw chicken breast and watch what happens.
No one eats it. No mother would give it to her child. We do not even want
to touch it without washing our hands afterward.
If we were designed to eat flesh, why is fire mandatory?
2. We Do Not Cook Meat for Flavour. We Cook It to Survive It.
This is the part people avoid. Cooking meat is not a culinary preference.
It is a decontamination procedure.
Heat exists in that process for one purpose: to kill what is living inside
the flesh before it can live inside you.
3. What Is Actually in Raw Flesh
Taenia saginata — the beef tapeworm. Reaches ten metres inside the human
intestine.
Taenia solium — the pork tapeworm. Its larvae do not stay in the gut. They
travel through the bloodstream and form cysts in muscle, in the eye, and
in the brain. The resulting condition, neurocysticercosis, is recognised
by the World Health Organization as the most common preventable cause of
acquired epilepsy in the world.
Trichinella spiralis — larvae that burrow into muscle tissue, including
the diaphragm and the heart.
Toxoplasma gondii — a parasite that crosses the placenta and can damage a
developing child.
Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, E. coli O157:H7.
Read that list again and remember: a wolf eats all of this and walks away
fine. A human eats it and ends up in a hospital.
That is not a small difference. That is two different species of animal.
4. "But Some People Eat Raw Meat!"
Yes — and look closely at what that actually requires.
Steak tartare and sashimi demand extreme freshness, commercial freezing,
veterinary inspection, cold-chain transport, and specific cuts only. Remove
any one of those and people get sick.
Ethiopia, where raw beef is a traditional food, carries one of the highest
tapeworm infection rates on Earth. The tradition and the parasite arrived
together.
Inuit communities eat raw meat and fish — frozen in arctic conditions.
Freezing is itself a parasite-killing step. The cold is doing the work
that fire does elsewhere.
And notice what no culture anywhere on the planet has ever done:
eat raw pork or raw chicken. Not one. Not ever.
A lion needs no refrigerator. No inspector. No freezing standard. No
cooking thermometer. No "sushi-grade" certification.
Humanity built an entire global food-safety infrastructure — and the
overwhelming majority of it exists for one reason only: to make flesh
survivable for a body that was never built to process it.
5. "But You Cook Too! Rice, Bread, Corn — That Is Cooking as Well."
This is the most common reply, and it collapses under one question:
What happens if you skip the fire?
Skip cooking rice — it is hard and unpleasant. You spit it out.
Skip cooking chicken — you may end up in a hospital.
One is an inconvenience. The other is an infection. Calling both of them
"cooking" hides the only detail that matters.
WHY WE HEAT PLANTS | WHY WE HEAT FLESH
----------------------------|------------------------------
To soften fibre | To kill tapeworms
To release starch | To kill bacteria
To improve taste | To kill viruses
|
Destroys a molecule | Destroys a living organism
| that was infecting the animal
|
Skip it: less pleasant | Skip it: parasites, illness,
| sometimes death
|
Produces: nothing harmful | Produces: heterocyclic amines,
when boiled or steamed | classified by the WHO as probable
| human carcinogens
We cook plants to make them better.
We cook flesh to make it survivable.
THE DECISIVE TEST
If the two were truly equivalent, then a 100% raw plant diet and a 100%
raw meat diet would be equally possible. So test it.
Raw veganism exists. It has a name, a community, and people who have lived
on it for decades — apples, dates, grapes, oranges, pomegranates, figs,
lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, almonds, walnuts, pistachios,
sprouted seeds and legumes. No fire at any point. They are alive and well.
Now find the equivalent: a population living on 100% raw flesh with no
freezing, no refrigeration, no inspection. It does not exist anywhere on
Earth, and never has, because it cannot.
Remove fire from a plant-eater's life and they still eat.
Remove fire from a meat-eater's life and they get worms.
LOOK AT THE THREE FOODS YOU JUST NAMED
Corn — sweet corn is eaten raw, straight off the cob, in salads worldwide.
Perfectly safe.
Wheat — wheat is soaked and sprouted and eaten raw across the Middle East,
and has been for thousands of years.
Rice — rice can be soaked and sprouted and eaten without any heat at all.
Not one of them will give you a tapeworm. Not one of them requires a
veterinary inspector. We heat them because heat makes them softer and
tastier — not because they are trying to infect us.
And one detail worth knowing: when raw flour does occasionally carry
E. coli, the contamination comes from animal manure used as fertiliser in
the field. Even the rare danger in raw grain traces back to animals.
AN HONEST ADMISSION
A small number of plants genuinely must be cooked. Raw kidney beans
contain a toxin. Bitter cassava must be processed. That is a handful of
items out of thousands of edible plants — and in every case the danger is
a chemical the plant manufactures, destroyed completely by heat, leaving
nothing behind.
Compare the two failure modes honestly:
Eat a raw kidney bean — you vomit for a few hours and recover.
Eat raw pork — larvae can encyst in your brain and cause epilepsy for
the rest of your life.
Nobody has ever caught a parasite from a bean.
THE CHEMISTRY THAT SETTLES IT
Heterocyclic amines form when creatine reacts with amino acids at high
temperature. Creatine is stored in muscle tissue. It exists only in
animals.
There is no creatine in rice. There is no creatine in wheat or corn.
This is not an opinion or a preference — it is chemistry. The carcinogens
produced by cooking flesh cannot form when you cook a plant, because the
required ingredient is only found in a body.
So the comparison fails at every level:
Most plants need no fire at all. All flesh does.
Plants can be eaten raw for life. Flesh cannot be, for a month.
Heating plants creates no carcinogen. Heating flesh does.
Raw plants cause discomfort. Raw flesh causes infection.
6. The Trap That Closes From Both Sides
Here is where it becomes almost absurd.
Raw, flesh carries parasites and bacteria. So we cook it.
Cooked at the temperatures required to make it safe, it generates
compounds the World Health Organization classifies as probable human
carcinogens. (See Part 6.)
Raw: worms. Cooked: carcinogens.
There is no safe way for a human being to eat flesh. There is only a
choice of which risk to accept. A species' natural food does not force a
trade-off between parasites and cancer.
7. The Timeline Nobody Mentions
The human digestive system is millions of years old. Widespread controlled
use of fire is, at most, a few hundred thousand years old.
Our gut did not evolve expecting a stove.
The stove was invented to compensate for a gut that could not cope.
8. Slow Transit, Long Exposure
Food passes through a cat's digestive tract in roughly twelve hours. In a
human being it takes between twenty-four and seventy-two hours.
A carnivore's gut is a short, fast tube designed to push flesh through
before it putrefies. Ours is long and slow — excellent for fermenting
fibre, catastrophic for holding decomposing animal tissue for three days.
The Fire Test: If Humans Are Carnivores, Why Must We Cook? 🔥
There is one question meat-eaters have never answered, and it requires no
laboratory, no study, and no expert. Just honesty.
1. The Observation
Not a single carnivore on Earth cooks its food.
The lion does not. The wolf, the tiger, the eagle, the shark, the crocodile
— none of them. They tear into raw flesh, still warm, and digest it
without harm, without illness, without preparation of any kind.
Humans cannot. Hand someone a raw chicken breast and watch what happens.
No one eats it. No mother would give it to her child. We do not even want
to touch it without washing our hands afterward.
If we were designed to eat flesh, why is fire mandatory?
2. We Do Not Cook Meat for Flavour. We Cook It to Survive It.
This is the part people avoid. Cooking meat is not a culinary preference.
It is a decontamination procedure.
Heat exists in that process for one purpose: to kill what is living inside
the flesh before it can live inside you.
3. What Is Actually in Raw Flesh
Taenia saginata — the beef tapeworm. Reaches ten metres inside the human
intestine.
Taenia solium — the pork tapeworm. Its larvae do not stay in the gut. They
travel through the bloodstream and form cysts in muscle, in the eye, and
in the brain. The resulting condition, neurocysticercosis, is recognised
by the World Health Organization as the most common preventable cause of
acquired epilepsy in the world.
Trichinella spiralis — larvae that burrow into muscle tissue, including
the diaphragm and the heart.
Toxoplasma gondii — a parasite that crosses the placenta and can damage a
developing child.
Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, E. coli O157:H7.
Read that list again and remember: a wolf eats all of this and walks away
fine. A human eats it and ends up in a hospital.
That is not a small difference. That is two different species of animal.
4. "But Some People Eat Raw Meat!"
Yes — and look closely at what that actually requires.
Steak tartare and sashimi demand extreme freshness, commercial freezing,
veterinary inspection, cold-chain transport, and specific cuts only. Remove
any one of those and people get sick.
Ethiopia, where raw beef is a traditional food, carries one of the highest
tapeworm infection rates on Earth. The tradition and the parasite arrived
together.
Inuit communities eat raw meat and fish — frozen in arctic conditions.
Freezing is itself a parasite-killing step. The cold is doing the work
that fire does elsewhere.
And notice what no culture anywhere on the planet has ever done:
eat raw pork or raw chicken. Not one. Not ever.
A lion needs no refrigerator. No inspector. No freezing standard. No
cooking thermometer. No "sushi-grade" certification.
Humanity built an entire global food-safety infrastructure — and the
overwhelming majority of it exists for one reason only: to make flesh
survivable for a body that was never built to process it.
5. "But You Cook Too! Rice, Bread, Corn — That Is Cooking as Well."
This is the most common reply, and it collapses under one question:
What happens if you skip the fire?
Skip cooking rice — it is hard and unpleasant. You spit it out.
Skip cooking chicken — you may end up in a hospital.
One is an inconvenience. The other is an infection. Calling both of them
"cooking" hides the only detail that matters.
WHY WE HEAT PLANTS | WHY WE HEAT FLESH
----------------------------|------------------------------
To soften fibre | To kill tapeworms
To release starch | To kill bacteria
To improve taste | To kill viruses
|
Destroys a molecule | Destroys a living organism
| that was infecting the animal
|
Skip it: less pleasant | Skip it: parasites, illness,
| sometimes death
|
Produces: nothing harmful | Produces: heterocyclic amines,
when boiled or steamed | classified by the WHO as probable
| human carcinogens
We cook plants to make them better.
We cook flesh to make it survivable.
THE DECISIVE TEST
If the two were truly equivalent, then a 100% raw plant diet and a 100%
raw meat diet would be equally possible. So test it.
Raw veganism exists. It has a name, a community, and people who have lived
on it for decades — apples, dates, grapes, oranges, pomegranates, figs,
lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, almonds, walnuts, pistachios,
sprouted seeds and legumes. No fire at any point. They are alive and well.
Now find the equivalent: a population living on 100% raw flesh with no
freezing, no refrigeration, no inspection. It does not exist anywhere on
Earth, and never has, because it cannot.
Remove fire from a plant-eater's life and they still eat.
Remove fire from a meat-eater's life and they get worms.
LOOK AT THE THREE FOODS YOU JUST NAMED
Corn — sweet corn is eaten raw, straight off the cob, in salads worldwide.
Perfectly safe.
Wheat — wheat is soaked and sprouted and eaten raw across the Middle East,
and has been for thousands of years.
Rice — rice can be soaked and sprouted and eaten without any heat at all.
Not one of them will give you a tapeworm. Not one of them requires a
veterinary inspector. We heat them because heat makes them softer and
tastier — not because they are trying to infect us.
And one detail worth knowing: when raw flour does occasionally carry
E. coli, the contamination comes from animal manure used as fertiliser in
the field. Even the rare danger in raw grain traces back to animals.
AN HONEST ADMISSION
A small number of plants genuinely must be cooked. Raw kidney beans
contain a toxin. Bitter cassava must be processed. That is a handful of
items out of thousands of edible plants — and in every case the danger is
a chemical the plant manufactures, destroyed completely by heat, leaving
nothing behind.
Compare the two failure modes honestly:
Eat a raw kidney bean — you vomit for a few hours and recover.
Eat raw pork — larvae can encyst in your brain and cause epilepsy for
the rest of your life.
Nobody has ever caught a parasite from a bean.
THE CHEMISTRY THAT SETTLES IT
Heterocyclic amines form when creatine reacts with amino acids at high
temperature. Creatine is stored in muscle tissue. It exists only in
animals.
There is no creatine in rice. There is no creatine in wheat or corn.
This is not an opinion or a preference — it is chemistry. The carcinogens
produced by cooking flesh cannot form when you cook a plant, because the
required ingredient is only found in a body.
So the comparison fails at every level:
Most plants need no fire at all. All flesh does.
Plants can be eaten raw for life. Flesh cannot be, for a month.
Heating plants creates no carcinogen. Heating flesh does.
Raw plants cause discomfort. Raw flesh causes infection.
6. The Trap That Closes From Both Sides
Here is where it becomes almost absurd.
Raw, flesh carries parasites and bacteria. So we cook it.
Cooked at the temperatures required to make it safe, it generates
compounds the World Health Organization classifies as probable human
carcinogens. (See Part 6.)
Raw: worms. Cooked: carcinogens.
There is no safe way for a human being to eat flesh. There is only a
choice of which risk to accept. A species' natural food does not force a
trade-off between parasites and cancer.
7. The Timeline Nobody Mentions
The human digestive system is millions of years old. Widespread controlled
use of fire is, at most, a few hundred thousand years old.
Our gut did not evolve expecting a stove.
The stove was invented to compensate for a gut that could not cope.
8. Slow Transit, Long Exposure
Food passes through a cat's digestive tract in roughly twelve hours. In a
human being it takes between twenty-four and seventy-two hours.
A carnivore's gut is a short, fast tube designed to push flesh through
before it putrefies. Ours is long and slow — excellent for fermenting
fibre, catastrophic for holding decomposing animal tissue for three days.
In Conclusion
Every animal on Earth eats its natural food exactly as it finds it.
Only one species must set its food on fire first.
Only one species needs refrigeration, inspection, freezing standards and
cooking temperatures to survive a meal.
Only one species faces a choice between parasites and carcinogens every
time it sits down to eat.
That species is not a carnivore struggling with a difficult food.
It is a herbivore using technology to force down something its body was
never built to receive.
If meat were truly our natural food, we could eat it the way a lion does.
Try it, and you will discover very quickly why we don't.
Sources:
- World Health Organization. Taeniasis/Cysticercosis Fact Sheet — on
Taenia solium as a leading preventable cause of acquired epilepsy.
- International Agency for Research on Cancer (WHO). Monographs on
heterocyclic aromatic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
- Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
Basic Books. (On human dependence on cooked food — a dependence no
other animal shares.)
- Carmody RN, Wrangham RW. (2009). "The energetic significance of
cooking." Journal of Human Evolution, 57(4), 379-391.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.02.011
← Previous: [Part 7 — Speciesism and the Geography of Habit]
📚 All eight: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#rawmeat #cooking
@GreenPathForAll🍀
Every animal on Earth eats its natural food exactly as it finds it.
Only one species must set its food on fire first.
Only one species needs refrigeration, inspection, freezing standards and
cooking temperatures to survive a meal.
Only one species faces a choice between parasites and carcinogens every
time it sits down to eat.
That species is not a carnivore struggling with a difficult food.
It is a herbivore using technology to force down something its body was
never built to receive.
If meat were truly our natural food, we could eat it the way a lion does.
Try it, and you will discover very quickly why we don't.
Sources:
- World Health Organization. Taeniasis/Cysticercosis Fact Sheet — on
Taenia solium as a leading preventable cause of acquired epilepsy.
- International Agency for Research on Cancer (WHO). Monographs on
heterocyclic aromatic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
- Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
Basic Books. (On human dependence on cooked food — a dependence no
other animal shares.)
- Carmody RN, Wrangham RW. (2009). "The energetic significance of
cooking." Journal of Human Evolution, 57(4), 379-391.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.02.011
← Previous: [Part 7 — Speciesism and the Geography of Habit]
📚 All eight: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#rawmeat #cooking
@GreenPathForAll
Please open Telegram to view this post
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📚 PART 9 OF 15 — The Complete Guide
"It's Natural — Animals Eat Each Other" 🦁
This is the oldest defence of meat, and it fails for a reason most people
have never stopped to consider.
1. Look at What Else Is "Natural"
A male lion taking over a pride kills the existing cubs so the females
come into heat sooner. Male ducks forcibly mate with females. Chimpanzees
raid neighbouring groups and kill the infants. Some animals eat their own
young. Disease, parasites, and starvation are natural. So is dying at
twenty-five from an infected tooth.
Nature is not a moral instruction manual. It is a description of what
happens, not a statement of what is right.
If "animals do it" justified an action, it would justify all of these.
Nobody accepts that — which means nobody actually believes the argument.
They only use it for meat.
2. The Asymmetry Nobody Mentions
A lion is an obligate carnivore. It physically cannot survive on plants.
It cannot synthesise taurine, cannot convert beta-carotene into vitamin A,
and cannot produce arachidonic acid. A lion fed only plants goes blind,
develops heart failure, and dies.
A lion has no alternative. It has no moral choice to make, and therefore
no moral responsibility. A lion is not immoral — it is amoral.
Now look at yourself.
You are not starving on a savannah. You are standing in a supermarket
surrounded by rice, lentils, beans, bread, fruit, vegetables, nuts, and
oil. You will not go blind without flesh. You will not die.
You have what the lion does not have: a choice.
And where there is a choice, there is responsibility.
Comparing yourself to a predator is not an argument. It is a confession
that you would prefer not to have options.
3. "We Are at the Top of the Food Chain"
We are not in the food chain at all. We removed ourselves from it with
walls, weapons, and agriculture. Place an unarmed human in a forest with
a tiger and watch where they rank.
But set that aside, because the real problem with this sentence is what
it actually says: that power justifies use. That being stronger makes
something permissible.
Apply that standard honestly. It would justify the strong harming the
weak in every human context too — and you would reject it instantly if
it were pointed at you or your family.
A principle you refuse to accept when it is aimed at you is not a
principle. It is a convenience.
4. The Test That Exposes It
If "natural" is genuinely your standard, apply it consistently:
Give up antibiotics. Not natural.
Give up surgery, glasses, dentistry, vaccines. Not natural.
Give up clothing, housing, heating, electricity. Not natural.
Give up your phone, your car, cooked food. Not natural.
Nobody does this. We fight nature every single day of our lives — we
built civilisation specifically to escape it.
"It's natural" appears exactly once in a person's reasoning: at the moment
they are asked to justify something they already wanted to do.
That is not a principle. It is an excuse wearing the costume of one.
5. "But Meat Made Our Brains Grow"
Two answers.
First, the science is genuinely contested. The leading alternative
explanation credits cooking in general — including starchy tubers and
roots — with unlocking the calories that fuelled brain growth, not flesh
specifically.
Second, and more importantly: even if it were entirely true, it is an
argument about the past, not a justification for the present.
Our ancestors also died at thirty, lost most of their children in infancy,
and had no medicine. We do not organise modern life around copying them.
What was once necessary for survival is not automatically right once the
necessity is gone.
Slavery built economies. Necessity is not morality, and history is not
permission.
In Conclusion
The lion kills because it must. You buy because you prefer to.
Those are not the same act, and no amount of appealing to nature will
make them the same.
The moment you have a choice, "it's natural" stops being a description
of biology and becomes a description of your own unwillingness to look
at what you are choosing.
Sources:
- Packer C, Pusey AE. (1983). "Adaptations of Female Lions to Infanticide
by Incoming Males." The American Naturalist, 121(5), 716-728.
- Hayes KC, Carey RE, Schmidt SY. (1975). "Retinal degeneration associated
with taurine deficiency in the cat." Science, 188(4191), 949-951.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1138364
- Hume, D. (1739). A Treatise of Human Nature. (The is/ought distinction —
the origin of the naturalistic fallacy.)
- Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
← Previous: [Part 8 — The Fire Test]
→ Next: [Part 10 — "But My Meat Is Humane"]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#natural #foodchain
@GreenPathForAll🍀
"It's Natural — Animals Eat Each Other" 🦁
This is the oldest defence of meat, and it fails for a reason most people
have never stopped to consider.
1. Look at What Else Is "Natural"
A male lion taking over a pride kills the existing cubs so the females
come into heat sooner. Male ducks forcibly mate with females. Chimpanzees
raid neighbouring groups and kill the infants. Some animals eat their own
young. Disease, parasites, and starvation are natural. So is dying at
twenty-five from an infected tooth.
Nature is not a moral instruction manual. It is a description of what
happens, not a statement of what is right.
If "animals do it" justified an action, it would justify all of these.
Nobody accepts that — which means nobody actually believes the argument.
They only use it for meat.
2. The Asymmetry Nobody Mentions
A lion is an obligate carnivore. It physically cannot survive on plants.
It cannot synthesise taurine, cannot convert beta-carotene into vitamin A,
and cannot produce arachidonic acid. A lion fed only plants goes blind,
develops heart failure, and dies.
A lion has no alternative. It has no moral choice to make, and therefore
no moral responsibility. A lion is not immoral — it is amoral.
Now look at yourself.
You are not starving on a savannah. You are standing in a supermarket
surrounded by rice, lentils, beans, bread, fruit, vegetables, nuts, and
oil. You will not go blind without flesh. You will not die.
You have what the lion does not have: a choice.
And where there is a choice, there is responsibility.
Comparing yourself to a predator is not an argument. It is a confession
that you would prefer not to have options.
3. "We Are at the Top of the Food Chain"
We are not in the food chain at all. We removed ourselves from it with
walls, weapons, and agriculture. Place an unarmed human in a forest with
a tiger and watch where they rank.
But set that aside, because the real problem with this sentence is what
it actually says: that power justifies use. That being stronger makes
something permissible.
Apply that standard honestly. It would justify the strong harming the
weak in every human context too — and you would reject it instantly if
it were pointed at you or your family.
A principle you refuse to accept when it is aimed at you is not a
principle. It is a convenience.
4. The Test That Exposes It
If "natural" is genuinely your standard, apply it consistently:
Give up antibiotics. Not natural.
Give up surgery, glasses, dentistry, vaccines. Not natural.
Give up clothing, housing, heating, electricity. Not natural.
Give up your phone, your car, cooked food. Not natural.
Nobody does this. We fight nature every single day of our lives — we
built civilisation specifically to escape it.
"It's natural" appears exactly once in a person's reasoning: at the moment
they are asked to justify something they already wanted to do.
That is not a principle. It is an excuse wearing the costume of one.
5. "But Meat Made Our Brains Grow"
Two answers.
First, the science is genuinely contested. The leading alternative
explanation credits cooking in general — including starchy tubers and
roots — with unlocking the calories that fuelled brain growth, not flesh
specifically.
Second, and more importantly: even if it were entirely true, it is an
argument about the past, not a justification for the present.
Our ancestors also died at thirty, lost most of their children in infancy,
and had no medicine. We do not organise modern life around copying them.
What was once necessary for survival is not automatically right once the
necessity is gone.
Slavery built economies. Necessity is not morality, and history is not
permission.
In Conclusion
The lion kills because it must. You buy because you prefer to.
Those are not the same act, and no amount of appealing to nature will
make them the same.
The moment you have a choice, "it's natural" stops being a description
of biology and becomes a description of your own unwillingness to look
at what you are choosing.
Sources:
- Packer C, Pusey AE. (1983). "Adaptations of Female Lions to Infanticide
by Incoming Males." The American Naturalist, 121(5), 716-728.
- Hayes KC, Carey RE, Schmidt SY. (1975). "Retinal degeneration associated
with taurine deficiency in the cat." Science, 188(4191), 949-951.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1138364
- Hume, D. (1739). A Treatise of Human Nature. (The is/ought distinction —
the origin of the naturalistic fallacy.)
- Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
← Previous: [Part 8 — The Fire Test]
→ Next: [Part 10 — "But My Meat Is Humane"]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#natural #foodchain
@GreenPathForAll
Please open Telegram to view this post
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📚 PART 10 OF 15 — The Complete Guide
"But My Meat Is Humane, Free-Range and Grass-Fed" 🏷️
This is the most comfortable belief in modern eating, and the most
carefully manufactured one.
1. What the Labels Actually Mean
"Free-range" — for chickens, this generally requires access to an outdoor
area. It does not specify that the birds use it, and in large sheds
housing tens of thousands of birds, most never find the openings or
reach them. Access is not the same as a life outdoors.
"Cage-free" — not a cage. Still a crowded indoor shed.
"Grass-fed" — describes diet only. It says nothing about living
conditions, about separation of mothers and young, or about slaughter.
Most grass-fed cattle are still grain-finished before killing.
"Organic" — regulates feed, medication and chemicals. It regulates the
product, not the animal's experience.
"Humanely raised" — in most jurisdictions this is a marketing phrase, not
a legally enforced standard with inspections.
Every one of these labels describes a slightly modified beginning.
Not one of them changes the ending.
2. The Ending Is Identical
There is no humane abattoir that sends animals home.
The free-range chicken and the caged chicken arrive at the same facility,
in the same truck, and meet the same blade. The grass-fed cow and the
feedlot cow die in the same room. The label changes the price and it
changes how you feel. It does not change what happens on the final day.
3. The Numbers That End the Conversation
Killed at Natural lifespan
Chicken 6 weeks 6-8 years
Pig 6 months 15-20 years
Lamb 6-8 months 12 years
Beef cattle 18 months 20 years
Dairy cow 4-6 years 20 years
Laying hen 18 months 8+ years
Look at that first column again. Every single animal in the food system
is killed in infancy or adolescence. A six-week-old chicken is a baby. A
six-month-old pig is a child.
"Humane" never once includes growing old. There is no farm anywhere
selling meat from an animal that died of old age, because an old animal
is an unprofitable animal.
Whatever "humane" means, it does not mean a full life.
4. The Contradiction Inside the Phrase
Set aside the conditions entirely and consider what is being claimed:
that it is humane to kill a healthy young individual who is not sick, not
suffering, and wants to continue living.
Ask yourself a simple question.
If someone took your dog, gave her a comfortable field, treated her
kindly for a year, and then killed her painlessly at the age of two —
would you accept "but it was humane" as an answer?
You would not. And the reason you would not is that the harm of killing
is not only the pain of dying. It is the removal of everything that
would have come after.
A painless death is still a death. It erases every day the individual
would have had. Kindness before an unnecessary killing does not cancel
the killing — it just makes the person doing it feel better about it.
5. Even the Painless Part Is Not Guaranteed
Stunning is designed to render animals unconscious before slaughter, and
when it works it does. But industry audits conducted by animal-welfare
specialists themselves have repeatedly documented stunning failures —
animals mis-stunned, animals regaining consciousness, animals reaching
the bleed stage still aware.
At the speeds modern slaughter lines run, with thousands of animals per
hour, errors are not rare accidents. They are a statistical certainty.
6. Who the Label Is Really For
Here is the honest answer: the label is not for the animal. It is for you.
"Humane" is not a welfare standard. It is a product feature, developed
by marketing departments the moment consumers began feeling uneasy. It
was created to solve a problem in your conscience, not a problem in the
animal's life.
It works beautifully. It allows a person to keep doing exactly what they
were doing, at a slightly higher price, while feeling that they have
addressed the issue.
7. The Question That Settles It
Imagine a dog farm.
Spacious. Clean. Outdoor access. Kind staff. The dogs are well treated for
six months, then killed quickly and painlessly, and sold as meat. The
packaging says Humane, Free-Range, Certified Welfare.
Would you buy it?
If the answer is no — then your objection was never about the conditions.
It was about the killing. You already understand the argument perfectly.
You simply apply it to one species and not another.
That is Part 7 of this guide, arriving again by a different road.
In Conclusion
Better conditions are genuinely better than worse conditions, and nobody
should pretend otherwise. A larger space matters. Less pain matters.
But "humane" answers the question of HOW an animal is treated while we
wait to kill them. It has never once answered the question of WHETHER
they needed to be killed at all.
And when you are standing in a supermarket with a thousand alternatives
behind you, that is the only question on the table.
Sources:
- Grandin, T. (2017). "On-farm conditions that compromise animal welfare
that can be monitored at the slaughter plant." Meat Science, 132, 52-58.
DOI: 10.1016/j.meatsci.2017.05.004
- Grandin, T. (2010). "Auditing animal welfare at slaughter plants."
Meat Science, 86(1), 56-65. DOI: 10.1016/j.meatsci.2010.04.022
- USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service — label definitions for
"free-range," "cage-free," "grass-fed," and "natural."
← Previous: [Part 9 — "It's Natural"]
→ Next: [Part 11 — Dairy and Eggs]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #humanewashing
#freerange #grassfed
@GreenPathForAll🍀
"But My Meat Is Humane, Free-Range and Grass-Fed" 🏷️
This is the most comfortable belief in modern eating, and the most
carefully manufactured one.
1. What the Labels Actually Mean
"Free-range" — for chickens, this generally requires access to an outdoor
area. It does not specify that the birds use it, and in large sheds
housing tens of thousands of birds, most never find the openings or
reach them. Access is not the same as a life outdoors.
"Cage-free" — not a cage. Still a crowded indoor shed.
"Grass-fed" — describes diet only. It says nothing about living
conditions, about separation of mothers and young, or about slaughter.
Most grass-fed cattle are still grain-finished before killing.
"Organic" — regulates feed, medication and chemicals. It regulates the
product, not the animal's experience.
"Humanely raised" — in most jurisdictions this is a marketing phrase, not
a legally enforced standard with inspections.
Every one of these labels describes a slightly modified beginning.
Not one of them changes the ending.
2. The Ending Is Identical
There is no humane abattoir that sends animals home.
The free-range chicken and the caged chicken arrive at the same facility,
in the same truck, and meet the same blade. The grass-fed cow and the
feedlot cow die in the same room. The label changes the price and it
changes how you feel. It does not change what happens on the final day.
3. The Numbers That End the Conversation
Killed at Natural lifespan
Chicken 6 weeks 6-8 years
Pig 6 months 15-20 years
Lamb 6-8 months 12 years
Beef cattle 18 months 20 years
Dairy cow 4-6 years 20 years
Laying hen 18 months 8+ years
Look at that first column again. Every single animal in the food system
is killed in infancy or adolescence. A six-week-old chicken is a baby. A
six-month-old pig is a child.
"Humane" never once includes growing old. There is no farm anywhere
selling meat from an animal that died of old age, because an old animal
is an unprofitable animal.
Whatever "humane" means, it does not mean a full life.
4. The Contradiction Inside the Phrase
Set aside the conditions entirely and consider what is being claimed:
that it is humane to kill a healthy young individual who is not sick, not
suffering, and wants to continue living.
Ask yourself a simple question.
If someone took your dog, gave her a comfortable field, treated her
kindly for a year, and then killed her painlessly at the age of two —
would you accept "but it was humane" as an answer?
You would not. And the reason you would not is that the harm of killing
is not only the pain of dying. It is the removal of everything that
would have come after.
A painless death is still a death. It erases every day the individual
would have had. Kindness before an unnecessary killing does not cancel
the killing — it just makes the person doing it feel better about it.
5. Even the Painless Part Is Not Guaranteed
Stunning is designed to render animals unconscious before slaughter, and
when it works it does. But industry audits conducted by animal-welfare
specialists themselves have repeatedly documented stunning failures —
animals mis-stunned, animals regaining consciousness, animals reaching
the bleed stage still aware.
At the speeds modern slaughter lines run, with thousands of animals per
hour, errors are not rare accidents. They are a statistical certainty.
6. Who the Label Is Really For
Here is the honest answer: the label is not for the animal. It is for you.
"Humane" is not a welfare standard. It is a product feature, developed
by marketing departments the moment consumers began feeling uneasy. It
was created to solve a problem in your conscience, not a problem in the
animal's life.
It works beautifully. It allows a person to keep doing exactly what they
were doing, at a slightly higher price, while feeling that they have
addressed the issue.
7. The Question That Settles It
Imagine a dog farm.
Spacious. Clean. Outdoor access. Kind staff. The dogs are well treated for
six months, then killed quickly and painlessly, and sold as meat. The
packaging says Humane, Free-Range, Certified Welfare.
Would you buy it?
If the answer is no — then your objection was never about the conditions.
It was about the killing. You already understand the argument perfectly.
You simply apply it to one species and not another.
That is Part 7 of this guide, arriving again by a different road.
In Conclusion
Better conditions are genuinely better than worse conditions, and nobody
should pretend otherwise. A larger space matters. Less pain matters.
But "humane" answers the question of HOW an animal is treated while we
wait to kill them. It has never once answered the question of WHETHER
they needed to be killed at all.
And when you are standing in a supermarket with a thousand alternatives
behind you, that is the only question on the table.
Sources:
- Grandin, T. (2017). "On-farm conditions that compromise animal welfare
that can be monitored at the slaughter plant." Meat Science, 132, 52-58.
DOI: 10.1016/j.meatsci.2017.05.004
- Grandin, T. (2010). "Auditing animal welfare at slaughter plants."
Meat Science, 86(1), 56-65. DOI: 10.1016/j.meatsci.2010.04.022
- USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service — label definitions for
"free-range," "cage-free," "grass-fed," and "natural."
← Previous: [Part 9 — "It's Natural"]
→ Next: [Part 11 — Dairy and Eggs]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #humanewashing
#freerange #grassfed
@GreenPathForAll
Please open Telegram to view this post
VIEW IN TELEGRAM
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📚 PART 11 OF 15 — The Complete Guide
Dairy and Eggs: "But Nobody Dies for Milk" 🥛
Most people who reduce meat keep dairy and eggs, believing these cause no
death. This post exists because that belief is the single most widespread
misunderstanding in the entire subject — and because the truth is worse
than the meat industry, not better.
PART ONE: MILK
1. The Fact Everyone Forgets
A cow does not produce milk because she is a cow. She produces milk
because she has given birth.
Exactly like a human mother. No pregnancy, no milk. Milk is not a
substance cows generate continuously for us to collect — it is food made
by a mother, for her newborn.
Once you remember that single biological fact, the entire industry
explains itself.
2. The Cycle
To keep milk flowing, a dairy cow must be kept almost permanently
pregnant. She is impregnated — in modern dairy, usually by artificial
insemination — and gives birth roughly once a year, every year, for her
entire productive life.
3. The Calf
Her calf is taken from her, typically within hours of birth, occasionally
within a day. It has to be. The milk she produced for that calf is the
product being sold.
Mothers call for their calves for days afterward. Dairy farmers know this
well; it is one of the most commonly described experiences of the job.
What happens to the calf depends on its sex:
Female — she is raised to replace her mother, and enters the identical
cycle: inseminated, pregnant, separated from her own calf.
Male — he cannot give milk and he is the wrong breed for efficient beef.
He is economically worthless to the dairy. He is killed shortly after
birth, or raised a few months in confinement and sold as veal.
Veal is not a separate cruel industry that exists alongside dairy.
Veal is a by-product OF dairy. The two cannot be separated.
4. The Mother
When her yield declines — around four to six years of age — she is no
longer profitable. She is sent to slaughter. Her natural lifespan is
twenty years or more.
She dies at roughly a quarter of her life, worn out by repeated
pregnancies, and her body enters the meat supply. A very large share of
processed beef and ground beef worldwide comes from retired dairy cows.
5. What This Means
"Nobody dies for milk" is simply false.
Her calf dies. She dies. The only difference between the dairy industry
and the meat industry is the length of the delay and the amount of
suffering that happens in between.
Dairy is not an alternative to meat. Dairy is a meat industry with a
longer first act.
PART TWO: EGGS
6. The Hen's Body
Wild junglefowl, the ancestor of the domestic chicken, lays roughly ten to
fifteen eggs per year.
A modern laying hen has been selectively bred to lay around three hundred.
That is not a natural capacity. It is an engineered one, and her body pays
for it continuously. Producing an eggshell drains enormous quantities of
calcium — which is why laying hens suffer from osteoporosis, bone
fractures, prolapse, and reproductive tract disease at rates that have no
parallel in wild birds.
Many hens in sanctuaries are given hormonal implants to stop them laying,
purely to save their lives.
7. The Male Chicks
A male chick cannot lay eggs. He is also the wrong breed to be raised
profitably for meat, because laying breeds have been bred for egg
production, not muscle.
He is therefore worthless to the industry on the day he hatches.
Around seven billion male chicks are killed worldwide every year, within
hours of hatching — ground up alive in industrial macerators, or gassed.
Seven billion. Every year. For eggs.
8. This Includes Free-Range and Organic
There is no commercial egg supply without hatcheries, and no hatchery
without male chicks. Free-range, organic, pasture-raised, backyard
cooperative, premium — all of them source hens from the same hatcheries,
and all of those hatcheries dispose of the males.
In recent years a small number of countries, notably Germany and France,
have banned the practice and begun using in-ovo sex determination to
identify males before hatching. This is genuine progress and deserves to
be acknowledged honestly. It also currently covers a very small fraction
of global egg production. For the overwhelming majority of eggs sold on
Earth today, the male chicks were killed.
9. The Hen's Ending
When her laying rate drops — at around eighteen months — she is
slaughtered. Her natural lifespan is eight years or more.
Her body is usually too damaged and depleted for prime cuts, so she
typically ends up in processed products: soup, stock, pet food, nuggets.
In Conclusion
The belief that dairy and eggs are the gentle option survives only because
the deaths involved happen out of sight and in a different sequence.
Milk requires a mother to be made pregnant every year and her baby taken
away every year, and it ends with her slaughter at a quarter of her
lifespan.
Eggs require a bird bred into a body that destroys itself, and the
killing of her brothers on the day they were born.
Neither of these is a by-product of a system we could reform. They are the
system. The economics do not work any other way.
If your reason for reducing meat was that you did not want animals to
suffer and die — then dairy and eggs were never the exception.
They were simply the part you had not been shown.
Sources:
- Flower FC, Weary DM. (2001). "Effects of early separation on the dairy
cow and calf." Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 70(4), 275-284.
DOI: 10.1016/S0168-1591(00)00164-7
- Weary DM, Chua B. (2000). "Effects of early separation on the dairy cow
and calf: separation at 6 h, 1 day and 4 days after birth." Applied
Animal Behaviour Science, 69(3), 177-188.
- Krautwald-Junghanns ME, et al. (2018). "Current approaches to avoid the
culling of day-old male chicks in the layer industry." Poultry Science,
97(3), 749-757. DOI: 10.3382/ps/pex389
- Whitehead CC, Fleming RH. (2000). "Osteoporosis in cage layers."
Poultry Science, 79(7), 1033-1041. DOI: 10.1093/ps/79.7.1033
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — dairy herd
statistics and cull-cow beef data.
← Previous: [Part 10 — "But My Meat Is Humane"]
→ Next: [Part 12 — "Fish Don't Feel Pain"]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #dairy #eggs
#scientific #science
@GreenPathForAll🍀
Dairy and Eggs: "But Nobody Dies for Milk" 🥛
Most people who reduce meat keep dairy and eggs, believing these cause no
death. This post exists because that belief is the single most widespread
misunderstanding in the entire subject — and because the truth is worse
than the meat industry, not better.
PART ONE: MILK
1. The Fact Everyone Forgets
A cow does not produce milk because she is a cow. She produces milk
because she has given birth.
Exactly like a human mother. No pregnancy, no milk. Milk is not a
substance cows generate continuously for us to collect — it is food made
by a mother, for her newborn.
Once you remember that single biological fact, the entire industry
explains itself.
2. The Cycle
To keep milk flowing, a dairy cow must be kept almost permanently
pregnant. She is impregnated — in modern dairy, usually by artificial
insemination — and gives birth roughly once a year, every year, for her
entire productive life.
3. The Calf
Her calf is taken from her, typically within hours of birth, occasionally
within a day. It has to be. The milk she produced for that calf is the
product being sold.
Mothers call for their calves for days afterward. Dairy farmers know this
well; it is one of the most commonly described experiences of the job.
What happens to the calf depends on its sex:
Female — she is raised to replace her mother, and enters the identical
cycle: inseminated, pregnant, separated from her own calf.
Male — he cannot give milk and he is the wrong breed for efficient beef.
He is economically worthless to the dairy. He is killed shortly after
birth, or raised a few months in confinement and sold as veal.
Veal is not a separate cruel industry that exists alongside dairy.
Veal is a by-product OF dairy. The two cannot be separated.
4. The Mother
When her yield declines — around four to six years of age — she is no
longer profitable. She is sent to slaughter. Her natural lifespan is
twenty years or more.
She dies at roughly a quarter of her life, worn out by repeated
pregnancies, and her body enters the meat supply. A very large share of
processed beef and ground beef worldwide comes from retired dairy cows.
5. What This Means
"Nobody dies for milk" is simply false.
Her calf dies. She dies. The only difference between the dairy industry
and the meat industry is the length of the delay and the amount of
suffering that happens in between.
Dairy is not an alternative to meat. Dairy is a meat industry with a
longer first act.
PART TWO: EGGS
6. The Hen's Body
Wild junglefowl, the ancestor of the domestic chicken, lays roughly ten to
fifteen eggs per year.
A modern laying hen has been selectively bred to lay around three hundred.
That is not a natural capacity. It is an engineered one, and her body pays
for it continuously. Producing an eggshell drains enormous quantities of
calcium — which is why laying hens suffer from osteoporosis, bone
fractures, prolapse, and reproductive tract disease at rates that have no
parallel in wild birds.
Many hens in sanctuaries are given hormonal implants to stop them laying,
purely to save their lives.
7. The Male Chicks
A male chick cannot lay eggs. He is also the wrong breed to be raised
profitably for meat, because laying breeds have been bred for egg
production, not muscle.
He is therefore worthless to the industry on the day he hatches.
Around seven billion male chicks are killed worldwide every year, within
hours of hatching — ground up alive in industrial macerators, or gassed.
Seven billion. Every year. For eggs.
8. This Includes Free-Range and Organic
There is no commercial egg supply without hatcheries, and no hatchery
without male chicks. Free-range, organic, pasture-raised, backyard
cooperative, premium — all of them source hens from the same hatcheries,
and all of those hatcheries dispose of the males.
In recent years a small number of countries, notably Germany and France,
have banned the practice and begun using in-ovo sex determination to
identify males before hatching. This is genuine progress and deserves to
be acknowledged honestly. It also currently covers a very small fraction
of global egg production. For the overwhelming majority of eggs sold on
Earth today, the male chicks were killed.
9. The Hen's Ending
When her laying rate drops — at around eighteen months — she is
slaughtered. Her natural lifespan is eight years or more.
Her body is usually too damaged and depleted for prime cuts, so she
typically ends up in processed products: soup, stock, pet food, nuggets.
In Conclusion
The belief that dairy and eggs are the gentle option survives only because
the deaths involved happen out of sight and in a different sequence.
Milk requires a mother to be made pregnant every year and her baby taken
away every year, and it ends with her slaughter at a quarter of her
lifespan.
Eggs require a bird bred into a body that destroys itself, and the
killing of her brothers on the day they were born.
Neither of these is a by-product of a system we could reform. They are the
system. The economics do not work any other way.
If your reason for reducing meat was that you did not want animals to
suffer and die — then dairy and eggs were never the exception.
They were simply the part you had not been shown.
Sources:
- Flower FC, Weary DM. (2001). "Effects of early separation on the dairy
cow and calf." Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 70(4), 275-284.
DOI: 10.1016/S0168-1591(00)00164-7
- Weary DM, Chua B. (2000). "Effects of early separation on the dairy cow
and calf: separation at 6 h, 1 day and 4 days after birth." Applied
Animal Behaviour Science, 69(3), 177-188.
- Krautwald-Junghanns ME, et al. (2018). "Current approaches to avoid the
culling of day-old male chicks in the layer industry." Poultry Science,
97(3), 749-757. DOI: 10.3382/ps/pex389
- Whitehead CC, Fleming RH. (2000). "Osteoporosis in cage layers."
Poultry Science, 79(7), 1033-1041. DOI: 10.1093/ps/79.7.1033
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — dairy herd
statistics and cull-cow beef data.
← Previous: [Part 10 — "But My Meat Is Humane"]
→ Next: [Part 12 — "Fish Don't Feel Pain"]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #dairy #eggs
#scientific #science
@GreenPathForAll
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📚 PART 12 OF 15 — The Complete Guide
"Fish Don't Feel Pain" 🐟
More animals are killed for food from the sea than from the land — by an
enormous margin — and almost none of them are protected by any welfare law
anywhere on Earth. This post explains why that happened, and why the
reason given for it is not true.
1. Fish Have Pain Receptors
This was settled experimentally. Researchers identified nociceptors —
the specialised nerve endings that detect tissue damage — in the head and
face of rainbow trout, responding to pressure, heat, and chemical
irritation, with properties closely resembling those found in mammals.
The hardware for detecting pain is present. That is not disputed.
2. They Behave Like Beings in Pain, Not Like Reflexes
This is the part that matters, because a reflex and an experience are
different things.
Trout given a painful stimulus to the lips rocked from side to side,
rubbed their lips against the gravel and the tank walls, and stopped
eating for hours. Their breathing rate nearly doubled.
Then researchers administered morphine.
The behaviours stopped. The fish resumed eating.
A reflex cannot be switched off by a painkiller. A reflex is not sensitive
to analgesia — only a centrally processed experience is. That single
result separates "automatic reaction" from "suffering," and fish land on
the wrong side of it.
3. They Will Pay a Price to Escape It
Zebrafish given a choice between a preferred environment and a barren one
will normally choose the preferred. But if they have been given a painful
stimulus and the barren chamber contains dissolved painkiller, they move
to the barren chamber and stay there.
They gave up something they wanted in order to obtain relief. That is a
trade-off, a weighing of one state against another. Reflexes do not make
trade-offs.
4. "But Fish Have No Neocortex"
This is the standard objection, and it contains a hidden assumption: that
the specific brain structure mammals use for pain is the only structure
capable of producing it.
Birds have no neocortex either. Nobody argues that a parrot feels nothing,
or that a crow solving a multi-step puzzle is an unthinking machine.
Evolution routinely builds the same capability from different components.
In fish, the pallium appears to perform analogous functions. Requiring
fish to have a mammal's anatomy before we grant them a mammal's experience
is not science. It is a demand that other species resemble us before we
extend them consideration.
5. They Are Also Far More Intelligent Than Assumed
Cleaner wrasse have passed the mirror mark test — attempting to remove a
mark on their own body visible only in a reflection, a test long treated
as a benchmark for self-recognition and passed by very few species.
Fish use tools, build structures, recognise individual companions, learn
by watching others, cooperate across species while hunting, and retain
memories for months and years. The "three-second memory" is folklore with
no basis whatsoever.
6. The Scale
Estimates put the number of wild fish killed for food each year between
roughly one and three trillion, with tens of billions more raised in
aquaculture.
Trillion. It is the largest-scale killing human beings carry out, and most
people have never once pictured it.
7. How They Die
Nearly all land animals are legally required to be stunned before
slaughter. Fish, in most of the world, are not covered by any such
requirement.
Wild-caught fish typically die by suffocating in air on the deck of a
boat, over a period of minutes to hours. Others are crushed under the
accumulated weight of the catch in the net as it is hauled. Many are
gutted while still conscious. Deep-sea species suffer decompression
injuries as they are dragged up, with internal organs forced out of the
body.
If this were done to any land animal in any developed country, it would be
prosecuted.
8. And Everything Else in the Net
Industrial fishing does not catch only its target. Dolphins, sea turtles,
sharks, rays, and seabirds are hauled up as bycatch and thrown back dead
or dying. Bottom trawling drags weighted nets across the seafloor,
flattening ecosystems that took centuries to form.
You cannot eat ocean fish without funding this. It is not an occasional
accident of the industry; it is its ordinary daily operation.
9. So Why Do We Believe They Feel Nothing?
Be honest about the real reason. It has nothing to do with neuroscience.
A fish does not scream, because it cannot vocalise in air.
A fish has no facial expression — no eyebrows, no mouth that curves.
A fish does not bleed visibly in water.
A fish does not have a face that resembles ours.
We calibrate our empathy by resemblance. The more an animal looks and
sounds like us, the more we assume it feels. A fish fails every one of
those tests while possessing the nervous system that matters.
That is not an observation about fish. It is an observation about the
limits of human empathy — and it is exactly the mechanism described in
Part 7 of this guide.
In Conclusion
A fish detects injury, suffers from it, responds to painkillers, and will
sacrifice comfort to escape it.
It dies by suffocation, with no legal protection, in numbers measured in
trillions, inside an industry that destroys the seafloor and kills
dolphins and turtles as routine waste.
The silence of a fish has been mistaken for the absence of suffering.
It was never evidence of anything except that we cannot hear it.
Sources:
- Sneddon LU, Braithwaite VA, Gentle MJ. (2003). "Do fishes have
nociceptors? Evidence for the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system."
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 270(1520), 1115-1121.
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2003.2349
- Sneddon LU. (2019). "Evolution of nociception and pain: evidence from
fish models." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,
374(1785). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0290
- Brown C. (2015). "Fish intelligence, sentience and ethics." Animal
Cognition, 18(1), 1-17. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-014-0761-0
- Kohda M, et al. (2019). "If a fish can pass the mark test, what are the
implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals?"
PLoS Biology, 17(2), e3000021. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021
- Mood A, Brooke P. Estimates of global numbers of fish caught annually.
fishcount.org.uk
← Previous: [Part 11 — Dairy and Eggs]
→ Next: [Part 13 — "A Vegan Diet Is Dangerous for Children"]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #fish #scientific
#science #ocean
@GreenPathForAll🍀
"Fish Don't Feel Pain" 🐟
More animals are killed for food from the sea than from the land — by an
enormous margin — and almost none of them are protected by any welfare law
anywhere on Earth. This post explains why that happened, and why the
reason given for it is not true.
1. Fish Have Pain Receptors
This was settled experimentally. Researchers identified nociceptors —
the specialised nerve endings that detect tissue damage — in the head and
face of rainbow trout, responding to pressure, heat, and chemical
irritation, with properties closely resembling those found in mammals.
The hardware for detecting pain is present. That is not disputed.
2. They Behave Like Beings in Pain, Not Like Reflexes
This is the part that matters, because a reflex and an experience are
different things.
Trout given a painful stimulus to the lips rocked from side to side,
rubbed their lips against the gravel and the tank walls, and stopped
eating for hours. Their breathing rate nearly doubled.
Then researchers administered morphine.
The behaviours stopped. The fish resumed eating.
A reflex cannot be switched off by a painkiller. A reflex is not sensitive
to analgesia — only a centrally processed experience is. That single
result separates "automatic reaction" from "suffering," and fish land on
the wrong side of it.
3. They Will Pay a Price to Escape It
Zebrafish given a choice between a preferred environment and a barren one
will normally choose the preferred. But if they have been given a painful
stimulus and the barren chamber contains dissolved painkiller, they move
to the barren chamber and stay there.
They gave up something they wanted in order to obtain relief. That is a
trade-off, a weighing of one state against another. Reflexes do not make
trade-offs.
4. "But Fish Have No Neocortex"
This is the standard objection, and it contains a hidden assumption: that
the specific brain structure mammals use for pain is the only structure
capable of producing it.
Birds have no neocortex either. Nobody argues that a parrot feels nothing,
or that a crow solving a multi-step puzzle is an unthinking machine.
Evolution routinely builds the same capability from different components.
In fish, the pallium appears to perform analogous functions. Requiring
fish to have a mammal's anatomy before we grant them a mammal's experience
is not science. It is a demand that other species resemble us before we
extend them consideration.
5. They Are Also Far More Intelligent Than Assumed
Cleaner wrasse have passed the mirror mark test — attempting to remove a
mark on their own body visible only in a reflection, a test long treated
as a benchmark for self-recognition and passed by very few species.
Fish use tools, build structures, recognise individual companions, learn
by watching others, cooperate across species while hunting, and retain
memories for months and years. The "three-second memory" is folklore with
no basis whatsoever.
6. The Scale
Estimates put the number of wild fish killed for food each year between
roughly one and three trillion, with tens of billions more raised in
aquaculture.
Trillion. It is the largest-scale killing human beings carry out, and most
people have never once pictured it.
7. How They Die
Nearly all land animals are legally required to be stunned before
slaughter. Fish, in most of the world, are not covered by any such
requirement.
Wild-caught fish typically die by suffocating in air on the deck of a
boat, over a period of minutes to hours. Others are crushed under the
accumulated weight of the catch in the net as it is hauled. Many are
gutted while still conscious. Deep-sea species suffer decompression
injuries as they are dragged up, with internal organs forced out of the
body.
If this were done to any land animal in any developed country, it would be
prosecuted.
8. And Everything Else in the Net
Industrial fishing does not catch only its target. Dolphins, sea turtles,
sharks, rays, and seabirds are hauled up as bycatch and thrown back dead
or dying. Bottom trawling drags weighted nets across the seafloor,
flattening ecosystems that took centuries to form.
You cannot eat ocean fish without funding this. It is not an occasional
accident of the industry; it is its ordinary daily operation.
9. So Why Do We Believe They Feel Nothing?
Be honest about the real reason. It has nothing to do with neuroscience.
A fish does not scream, because it cannot vocalise in air.
A fish has no facial expression — no eyebrows, no mouth that curves.
A fish does not bleed visibly in water.
A fish does not have a face that resembles ours.
We calibrate our empathy by resemblance. The more an animal looks and
sounds like us, the more we assume it feels. A fish fails every one of
those tests while possessing the nervous system that matters.
That is not an observation about fish. It is an observation about the
limits of human empathy — and it is exactly the mechanism described in
Part 7 of this guide.
In Conclusion
A fish detects injury, suffers from it, responds to painkillers, and will
sacrifice comfort to escape it.
It dies by suffocation, with no legal protection, in numbers measured in
trillions, inside an industry that destroys the seafloor and kills
dolphins and turtles as routine waste.
The silence of a fish has been mistaken for the absence of suffering.
It was never evidence of anything except that we cannot hear it.
Sources:
- Sneddon LU, Braithwaite VA, Gentle MJ. (2003). "Do fishes have
nociceptors? Evidence for the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system."
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 270(1520), 1115-1121.
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2003.2349
- Sneddon LU. (2019). "Evolution of nociception and pain: evidence from
fish models." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,
374(1785). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0290
- Brown C. (2015). "Fish intelligence, sentience and ethics." Animal
Cognition, 18(1), 1-17. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-014-0761-0
- Kohda M, et al. (2019). "If a fish can pass the mark test, what are the
implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals?"
PLoS Biology, 17(2), e3000021. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021
- Mood A, Brooke P. Estimates of global numbers of fish caught annually.
fishcount.org.uk
← Previous: [Part 11 — Dairy and Eggs]
→ Next: [Part 13 — "A Vegan Diet Is Dangerous for Children"]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #fish #scientific
#science #ocean
@GreenPathForAll
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📚 PART 13 OF 15 — The Complete Guide
"A Vegan Diet Is Dangerous — Especially for Children" 👶
This objection carries more emotional weight than any other, because it
comes wrapped in concern for a child. It deserves a direct, evidence-based
answer rather than reassurance.
1. What the Dietetic Profession Actually Says
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics — the largest organisation of food
and nutrition professionals in the world — states in its official position
paper that appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan diets are healthful,
nutritionally adequate, and appropriate for individuals during ALL stages
of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood,
adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.
Comparable positions have been issued by the British Dietetic Association,
Dietitians of Canada, and dietetic bodies in several other countries.
This is not an activist claim. It is the formal position of the
professional bodies who certify the dietitians your doctor refers you to.
2. The Words "Well Planned" Cut Both Ways
Critics seize on that phrase as though it were a warning unique to plant-
based eating. It is not. Every diet requires planning to be adequate.
Consider what an unplanned omnivorous childhood diet looks like across
much of the world: nuggets, white bread, sugary drinks, processed meat,
almost no vegetables. Childhood obesity has reached levels previously
unseen in human history. Type 2 diabetes — once called adult-onset
diabetes because children did not get it — now appears routinely in
teenagers.
Nobody calls that diet dangerous. Nobody demands that those parents
justify themselves.
A single vegan child with an iron deficiency becomes a news story.
Millions of children on a diet that is measurably harming them is simply
called normal.
That is not concern for children's health. That is a double standard.
3. The Nutrients, Named Directly
Protein — lentils, chickpeas, beans, tofu, tempeh, peanuts, oats,
whole grains, seeds. (See Part 2.)
Iron — legumes, tofu, pumpkin seeds, dark leafy greens, dried
fruit. Serve with a source of vitamin C to multiply
absorption several-fold.
Calcium — fortified plant milk, calcium-set tofu, tahini, almonds,
kale, bok choy.
Zinc — legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains; soaking and sprouting
improve absorption.
Iodine — iodised salt or seaweed.
Omega-3 — flax, chia, walnuts; algae oil for direct EPA and DHA.
Vitamin D — sunlight, supplemented in winter — advised for the general
population regardless of diet.
Vitamin B12 — supplement. Simple, cheap, non-negotiable. (See Part 3.)
That is the complete list. One supplement is genuinely required. The rest
is ordinary food.
4. "But Children Need Meat to Grow"
Children need calories, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals. Every one of
these is available from plants, and children have been raised on
predominantly plant-based diets across enormous regions of the world for
thousands of years.
What children do not need is any specific animal product. There is not one
nutrient in meat that a child can obtain from no other source.
5. "Vegans Are Weak"
Patrik Baboumian — strongman, world record holder in the log lift, vegan.
Scott Jurek — one of the greatest ultramarathon runners in history, vegan.
Carl Lewis — nine Olympic gold medals, and has stated his best competitive
season came after switching to a plant-based diet.
Lewis Hamilton — seven-time Formula One world champion, vegan.
Venus Williams — plant-based since her autoimmune diagnosis, and still
competing at elite level afterwards.
And beyond human athletes, the point made in Part 2 still stands: the
strongest and largest land animals on Earth — the gorilla, the elephant,
the bull, the horse — are all herbivores. Muscle is built from amino
acids, and amino acids are built by plants.
6. "Soy Will Give Men Breasts"
This myth comes from the word "phytoestrogen," which sounds alarming and
means something quite different from what people assume.
Phytoestrogens are plant compounds that are structurally similar to human
oestrogen but are not human oestrogen. They bind weakly, and preferentially
to a different receptor subtype, producing effects that are frequently the
opposite of oestrogen rather than the same.
Meta-analyses of the clinical trials consistently find that neither soy
foods nor isoflavone supplements have any measurable effect on
testosterone, oestrogen, or any other reproductive hormone in men.
And there is an irony worth stating plainly: the milk of a dairy cow
contains actual mammalian oestrogen and progesterone, at biologically
meaningful levels, because she is pregnant for most of the time she is
producing it.
The drink containing real mammal hormones is the one marketed to children
as healthy. The bean containing plant compounds that do nothing to human
hormones is the one treated as suspicious.
7. The Honest Part
A badly constructed vegan diet can harm a child. So can a badly
constructed omnivorous one. Nobody should pretend otherwise, and the rare
tragic cases that reach the news always involve parents who fed an infant
something that was not food — not parents who followed dietetic guidance.
The requirements are genuinely simple: adequate calories, a variety of
whole plant foods, and a B12 supplement. Children raised this way grow
normally, and tend to eat more fruit, more vegetables, and more fibre than
their peers.
In Conclusion
The official position of the world's dietetic associations is that
plant-based diets are appropriate at every stage of human life, including
infancy and pregnancy.
A diet of nuggets and soda is treated as normal and a diet of lentils,
fruit and vegetables as reckless. Examine which of those two is actually
producing the health crisis in children right now, and the concern starts
to look like something other than concern.
Plan it properly, take the B12, and a plant-based child is not at risk.
They are, on current evidence, eating better than most of their classmates.
Sources:
- Melina V, Craig W, Levin S. (2016). "Position of the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets." Journal of the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics, 116(12), 1970-1980.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2016.09.025
- Messina M. (2010). "Soybean isoflavone exposure does not have feminizing
effects on men: a critical examination of the clinical evidence."
Fertility and Sterility, 93(7), 2095-2104.
DOI: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2010.03.002
- Reed KE, Camargo J, Hamilton-Reeves J, Kurzer M, Messina M. (2021).
"Neither soy nor isoflavone intake affects male reproductive hormones:
An expanded and updated meta-analysis of clinical studies."
Reproductive Toxicology, 100, 60-67.
DOI: 10.1016/j.reprotox.2020.12.019
- British Dietetic Association. Food Fact Sheet: Vegetarian, vegan and
plant-based diet.
← Previous: [Part 12 — "Fish Don't Feel Pain"]
→ Next: [Part 14 — The Environment]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#children #nutrition #soy
@GreenPathForAll🍀
"A Vegan Diet Is Dangerous — Especially for Children" 👶
This objection carries more emotional weight than any other, because it
comes wrapped in concern for a child. It deserves a direct, evidence-based
answer rather than reassurance.
1. What the Dietetic Profession Actually Says
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics — the largest organisation of food
and nutrition professionals in the world — states in its official position
paper that appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan diets are healthful,
nutritionally adequate, and appropriate for individuals during ALL stages
of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood,
adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.
Comparable positions have been issued by the British Dietetic Association,
Dietitians of Canada, and dietetic bodies in several other countries.
This is not an activist claim. It is the formal position of the
professional bodies who certify the dietitians your doctor refers you to.
2. The Words "Well Planned" Cut Both Ways
Critics seize on that phrase as though it were a warning unique to plant-
based eating. It is not. Every diet requires planning to be adequate.
Consider what an unplanned omnivorous childhood diet looks like across
much of the world: nuggets, white bread, sugary drinks, processed meat,
almost no vegetables. Childhood obesity has reached levels previously
unseen in human history. Type 2 diabetes — once called adult-onset
diabetes because children did not get it — now appears routinely in
teenagers.
Nobody calls that diet dangerous. Nobody demands that those parents
justify themselves.
A single vegan child with an iron deficiency becomes a news story.
Millions of children on a diet that is measurably harming them is simply
called normal.
That is not concern for children's health. That is a double standard.
3. The Nutrients, Named Directly
Protein — lentils, chickpeas, beans, tofu, tempeh, peanuts, oats,
whole grains, seeds. (See Part 2.)
Iron — legumes, tofu, pumpkin seeds, dark leafy greens, dried
fruit. Serve with a source of vitamin C to multiply
absorption several-fold.
Calcium — fortified plant milk, calcium-set tofu, tahini, almonds,
kale, bok choy.
Zinc — legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains; soaking and sprouting
improve absorption.
Iodine — iodised salt or seaweed.
Omega-3 — flax, chia, walnuts; algae oil for direct EPA and DHA.
Vitamin D — sunlight, supplemented in winter — advised for the general
population regardless of diet.
Vitamin B12 — supplement. Simple, cheap, non-negotiable. (See Part 3.)
That is the complete list. One supplement is genuinely required. The rest
is ordinary food.
4. "But Children Need Meat to Grow"
Children need calories, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals. Every one of
these is available from plants, and children have been raised on
predominantly plant-based diets across enormous regions of the world for
thousands of years.
What children do not need is any specific animal product. There is not one
nutrient in meat that a child can obtain from no other source.
5. "Vegans Are Weak"
Patrik Baboumian — strongman, world record holder in the log lift, vegan.
Scott Jurek — one of the greatest ultramarathon runners in history, vegan.
Carl Lewis — nine Olympic gold medals, and has stated his best competitive
season came after switching to a plant-based diet.
Lewis Hamilton — seven-time Formula One world champion, vegan.
Venus Williams — plant-based since her autoimmune diagnosis, and still
competing at elite level afterwards.
And beyond human athletes, the point made in Part 2 still stands: the
strongest and largest land animals on Earth — the gorilla, the elephant,
the bull, the horse — are all herbivores. Muscle is built from amino
acids, and amino acids are built by plants.
6. "Soy Will Give Men Breasts"
This myth comes from the word "phytoestrogen," which sounds alarming and
means something quite different from what people assume.
Phytoestrogens are plant compounds that are structurally similar to human
oestrogen but are not human oestrogen. They bind weakly, and preferentially
to a different receptor subtype, producing effects that are frequently the
opposite of oestrogen rather than the same.
Meta-analyses of the clinical trials consistently find that neither soy
foods nor isoflavone supplements have any measurable effect on
testosterone, oestrogen, or any other reproductive hormone in men.
And there is an irony worth stating plainly: the milk of a dairy cow
contains actual mammalian oestrogen and progesterone, at biologically
meaningful levels, because she is pregnant for most of the time she is
producing it.
The drink containing real mammal hormones is the one marketed to children
as healthy. The bean containing plant compounds that do nothing to human
hormones is the one treated as suspicious.
7. The Honest Part
A badly constructed vegan diet can harm a child. So can a badly
constructed omnivorous one. Nobody should pretend otherwise, and the rare
tragic cases that reach the news always involve parents who fed an infant
something that was not food — not parents who followed dietetic guidance.
The requirements are genuinely simple: adequate calories, a variety of
whole plant foods, and a B12 supplement. Children raised this way grow
normally, and tend to eat more fruit, more vegetables, and more fibre than
their peers.
In Conclusion
The official position of the world's dietetic associations is that
plant-based diets are appropriate at every stage of human life, including
infancy and pregnancy.
A diet of nuggets and soda is treated as normal and a diet of lentils,
fruit and vegetables as reckless. Examine which of those two is actually
producing the health crisis in children right now, and the concern starts
to look like something other than concern.
Plan it properly, take the B12, and a plant-based child is not at risk.
They are, on current evidence, eating better than most of their classmates.
Sources:
- Melina V, Craig W, Levin S. (2016). "Position of the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets." Journal of the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics, 116(12), 1970-1980.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2016.09.025
- Messina M. (2010). "Soybean isoflavone exposure does not have feminizing
effects on men: a critical examination of the clinical evidence."
Fertility and Sterility, 93(7), 2095-2104.
DOI: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2010.03.002
- Reed KE, Camargo J, Hamilton-Reeves J, Kurzer M, Messina M. (2021).
"Neither soy nor isoflavone intake affects male reproductive hormones:
An expanded and updated meta-analysis of clinical studies."
Reproductive Toxicology, 100, 60-67.
DOI: 10.1016/j.reprotox.2020.12.019
- British Dietetic Association. Food Fact Sheet: Vegetarian, vegan and
plant-based diet.
← Previous: [Part 12 — "Fish Don't Feel Pain"]
→ Next: [Part 14 — The Environment]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#children #nutrition #soy
@GreenPathForAll
Please open Telegram to view this post
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📚 PART 14 OF 15 — The Complete Guide
The Land, the Water and the Air: What Animal Farming Actually Costs 🌍
Set ethics aside completely for this post. Assume, for the length of this
text, that animals do not matter at all. The numbers still do not work.
1. The Single Most Important Statistic in Food
The largest study ever conducted on the environmental impact of food —
covering roughly forty thousand farms across one hundred and nineteen
countries — found this:
Livestock occupies about 80% of global agricultural land.
Livestock provides about 18% of the world's calories.
Livestock provides about 37% of the world's protein.
Four fifths of all farmland on Earth, for less than a fifth of the food.
If any other system delivered 18% of an output while consuming 80% of the
input, it would be shut down as broken. In food we call it dinner.
2. Why the Loss Is Unavoidable
This is not inefficiency that better farming could fix. It is a law of
energy.
At every step up a food chain, roughly 90% of the energy is lost — spent
on the animal's movement, body heat, breathing, and the parts nobody eats.
Grow crops and feed them to an animal, and you throw away the great
majority of the food you grew in order to produce a smaller amount of
different food. You cannot engineer around thermodynamics.
3. Emissions
Food production accounts for roughly a quarter of all global greenhouse
gas emissions, and animal products are responsible for well over half of
food's total — while supplying a fraction of its calories.
The same landmark study calculated that a global shift away from animal
products would reduce food's land use by around 76%, its greenhouse gas
emissions by around 49%, acidification by around 50%, and eutrophication
by around 49%.
Three quarters of the farmland on this planet could be returned to forest
and grassland. There is no other single decision available to an
individual with an effect of that size.
4. Water
Litres of water required to produce one kilogram:
Beef about 15,400
Pork about 6,000
Chicken about 4,300
Pulses about 4,000
Cereals about 1,600
Fruit about 960
Vegetables about 320
A single kilogram of beef consumes roughly as much water as fifty
kilograms of vegetables.
Shortening your shower is a reasonable habit. It is not in the same
category of magnitude as what is on the plate.
5. The Forest
Cattle ranching is the largest single driver of deforestation in the
Amazon. Land is cleared, burned, and converted to pasture, and more is
cleared to grow feed for animals elsewhere.
This is not a side effect of beef production. It is how new beef
production is created.
6. "But Vegans Destroy the Amazon With Soy"
This argument gets repeated constantly, and it is precisely backwards.
Roughly 77% of the world's soy is fed to farmed animals.
Roughly 7% is eaten directly by humans as tofu, tempeh, soy milk and
similar foods.
The remainder goes mainly to oil and industrial uses.
Soy is not primarily a human food. It is primarily animal feed. The
expansion of soy across South America was driven by demand for meat, not
by demand for tofu.
The person eating tofu is responsible for a sliver of that 7%.
The person eating beef is the market for the 77%.
If you are genuinely worried about soy and the Amazon, the single most
effective action available is to stop eating the animals that the soy is
grown to feed.
7. The Ocean
Industrial fishing has driven a large proportion of assessed fish stocks
to their biological limits or beyond. Bottom trawling flattens seafloor
ecosystems. Bycatch kills dolphins, turtles, sharks and seabirds as
routine waste. (See Part 12.)
Meanwhile, fertiliser runoff — much of it applied to feed crops — creates
oxygen-depleted dead zones at river mouths, some of them thousands of
square kilometres in size, where almost nothing can live.
8. The Honest Counterpoint
One objection deserves a fair hearing: some grazing land genuinely cannot
grow crops — steep terrain, arid rangeland, marginal soils — and animals
there convert inedible vegetation into food.
That is true, and it describes a real form of pastoral farming. But it
describes a small minority of global animal production, nothing close to
the volume the world currently consumes, and it cannot be scaled to meet
industrial demand. The overwhelming majority of meat comes from animals
fed on crops grown specifically for them, on land that could have grown
food for people.
It is an argument for a small amount of meat in specific geographies. It
is not a defence of the supermarket.
In Conclusion
You can recycle every container, replace every bulb, shorten every shower,
and refuse every plastic bag — and still have a smaller effect than
changing what is on your plate.
Four fifths of the farmland on Earth, for less than a fifth of the food.
Three quarters of that land could be given back.
The environmental case does not require you to care about animals at all.
It only requires you to look at the arithmetic.
Sources:
- Poore J, Nemecek T. (2018). "Reducing food's environmental impacts
through producers and consumers." Science, 360(6392), 987-992.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaq0216
- Mekonnen MM, Hoekstra AY. (2012). "A Global Assessment of the Water
Footprint of Farm Animal Products." Ecosystems, 15, 401-415.
DOI: 10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8
- Gerber PJ, et al. (2013). Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
- Ritchie H, Roser M. "Soy." Our World in Data — global soy use by
destination.
- Food and Agriculture Organization. The State of World Fisheries and
Aquaculture.
← Previous: [Part 13 — "A Vegan Diet Is Dangerous for Children"]
→ Next: [Part 15 — "It's My Personal Choice"]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #environment #climate
#scientific #science #amazon
@GreenPathForAll🍀
The Land, the Water and the Air: What Animal Farming Actually Costs 🌍
Set ethics aside completely for this post. Assume, for the length of this
text, that animals do not matter at all. The numbers still do not work.
1. The Single Most Important Statistic in Food
The largest study ever conducted on the environmental impact of food —
covering roughly forty thousand farms across one hundred and nineteen
countries — found this:
Livestock occupies about 80% of global agricultural land.
Livestock provides about 18% of the world's calories.
Livestock provides about 37% of the world's protein.
Four fifths of all farmland on Earth, for less than a fifth of the food.
If any other system delivered 18% of an output while consuming 80% of the
input, it would be shut down as broken. In food we call it dinner.
2. Why the Loss Is Unavoidable
This is not inefficiency that better farming could fix. It is a law of
energy.
At every step up a food chain, roughly 90% of the energy is lost — spent
on the animal's movement, body heat, breathing, and the parts nobody eats.
Grow crops and feed them to an animal, and you throw away the great
majority of the food you grew in order to produce a smaller amount of
different food. You cannot engineer around thermodynamics.
3. Emissions
Food production accounts for roughly a quarter of all global greenhouse
gas emissions, and animal products are responsible for well over half of
food's total — while supplying a fraction of its calories.
The same landmark study calculated that a global shift away from animal
products would reduce food's land use by around 76%, its greenhouse gas
emissions by around 49%, acidification by around 50%, and eutrophication
by around 49%.
Three quarters of the farmland on this planet could be returned to forest
and grassland. There is no other single decision available to an
individual with an effect of that size.
4. Water
Litres of water required to produce one kilogram:
Beef about 15,400
Pork about 6,000
Chicken about 4,300
Pulses about 4,000
Cereals about 1,600
Fruit about 960
Vegetables about 320
A single kilogram of beef consumes roughly as much water as fifty
kilograms of vegetables.
Shortening your shower is a reasonable habit. It is not in the same
category of magnitude as what is on the plate.
5. The Forest
Cattle ranching is the largest single driver of deforestation in the
Amazon. Land is cleared, burned, and converted to pasture, and more is
cleared to grow feed for animals elsewhere.
This is not a side effect of beef production. It is how new beef
production is created.
6. "But Vegans Destroy the Amazon With Soy"
This argument gets repeated constantly, and it is precisely backwards.
Roughly 77% of the world's soy is fed to farmed animals.
Roughly 7% is eaten directly by humans as tofu, tempeh, soy milk and
similar foods.
The remainder goes mainly to oil and industrial uses.
Soy is not primarily a human food. It is primarily animal feed. The
expansion of soy across South America was driven by demand for meat, not
by demand for tofu.
The person eating tofu is responsible for a sliver of that 7%.
The person eating beef is the market for the 77%.
If you are genuinely worried about soy and the Amazon, the single most
effective action available is to stop eating the animals that the soy is
grown to feed.
7. The Ocean
Industrial fishing has driven a large proportion of assessed fish stocks
to their biological limits or beyond. Bottom trawling flattens seafloor
ecosystems. Bycatch kills dolphins, turtles, sharks and seabirds as
routine waste. (See Part 12.)
Meanwhile, fertiliser runoff — much of it applied to feed crops — creates
oxygen-depleted dead zones at river mouths, some of them thousands of
square kilometres in size, where almost nothing can live.
8. The Honest Counterpoint
One objection deserves a fair hearing: some grazing land genuinely cannot
grow crops — steep terrain, arid rangeland, marginal soils — and animals
there convert inedible vegetation into food.
That is true, and it describes a real form of pastoral farming. But it
describes a small minority of global animal production, nothing close to
the volume the world currently consumes, and it cannot be scaled to meet
industrial demand. The overwhelming majority of meat comes from animals
fed on crops grown specifically for them, on land that could have grown
food for people.
It is an argument for a small amount of meat in specific geographies. It
is not a defence of the supermarket.
In Conclusion
You can recycle every container, replace every bulb, shorten every shower,
and refuse every plastic bag — and still have a smaller effect than
changing what is on your plate.
Four fifths of the farmland on Earth, for less than a fifth of the food.
Three quarters of that land could be given back.
The environmental case does not require you to care about animals at all.
It only requires you to look at the arithmetic.
Sources:
- Poore J, Nemecek T. (2018). "Reducing food's environmental impacts
through producers and consumers." Science, 360(6392), 987-992.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaq0216
- Mekonnen MM, Hoekstra AY. (2012). "A Global Assessment of the Water
Footprint of Farm Animal Products." Ecosystems, 15, 401-415.
DOI: 10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8
- Gerber PJ, et al. (2013). Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
- Ritchie H, Roser M. "Soy." Our World in Data — global soy use by
destination.
- Food and Agriculture Organization. The State of World Fisheries and
Aquaculture.
← Previous: [Part 13 — "A Vegan Diet Is Dangerous for Children"]
→ Next: [Part 15 — "It's My Personal Choice"]
📚 All fifteen: [The Complete Guide]
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #environment #climate
#scientific #science #amazon
@GreenPathForAll
Please open Telegram to view this post
VIEW IN TELEGRAM
📚 PART 15 OF 15 — The Complete Guide
"It's My Personal Choice" — and Every Remaining Excuse 🍀
This is the final post in the series, and it answers the arguments people
reach for once the others have run out.
1. "It's a personal choice. Stop pushing your views."
A personal choice is one whose consequences fall on the person making it.
Your clothes, your music, your religion, your career — all personal.
A choice stops being personal the moment there is a second party in it who
did not consent and does not survive.
You are not being asked to justify a preference. You are being asked to
justify an outcome that happens to someone else.
And consider who is actually having something imposed on them here. It is
not the person being asked an uncomfortable question at dinner.
2. "Don't preach at me."
Fair enough — nobody enjoys being lectured, and self-righteousness has
probably cost this movement more people than it has gained.
But notice the shape of the objection. It is about tone, not about
content. It is a complaint about how the argument was delivered, offered
in place of a reply to what the argument actually said.
If the case is wrong, say why. If the only available criticism is that it
was raised impolitely, then the case was not wrong.
3. "What would happen to all the animals if everyone went vegan?"
There is no population of farmed animals waiting to be released.
Around eighty billion land animals are brought into existence every year
by deliberate breeding and artificial insemination, because they have been
ordered in advance by demand.
Demand does not vanish overnight; it declines gradually. As it declines,
fewer animals are bred. That is the entire mechanism. Nobody opens the
gates and floods the countryside with cattle.
The question assumes these animals exist independently of us. They do not.
They exist because we make them, at exactly the rate we intend to eat them.
4. "Farmers would lose their jobs."
Demand shifts; it does not disappear. People will still eat — they will
eat more grains, legumes, vegetables, fruit, and oils, all of which are
grown by farmers. Agricultural transitions have happened repeatedly
throughout history, and they are managed with policy, retraining and
investment.
But examine the principle underneath the sentence. "People earn a living
from it" has never, in any other context, been accepted as sufficient
justification on its own. Every industry that has ever been ended on
ethical grounds employed people. That fact mattered, and it was addressed —
but it was never treated as the end of the discussion.
5. "My grandfather ate meat every day and lived to ninety-five."
Someone's grandfather also smoked for sixty years and lived to ninety-five.
That is how statistics work: individual outcomes vary enormously, and a
single long life tells you nothing about population-level risk.
The relevant evidence is what happens across millions of people over
decades, not what happened to one person who also had good genes, an
active life, and food that bore little resemblance to what is sold today.
6. "Vegan food is expensive."
The cheapest calories available anywhere on Earth are plant foods: rice,
lentils, beans, chickpeas, oats, potatoes, flour, seasonal vegetables.
This is precisely why they form the foundation of traditional cooking in
nearly every culture, especially among people with little money.
What is expensive is meat, and what is expensive is the new category of
processed vegan replacement products — the burgers, the cheeses, the
packaged substitutes. Those are entirely optional, and they are not what
plant-based eating is built on.
A pot of lentil stew with rice is among the cheapest meals a human being
can make.
7. "But people in deserts and the Arctic can't farm."
Correct. And entirely irrelevant to anyone reading this on a phone with a
supermarket nearby.
Ethics addresses those who have a choice. If you genuinely have no
alternative, this conversation was never aimed at you. If you are
selecting between fifteen options in a refrigerated aisle, you are not in
that situation, and borrowing the circumstances of someone who is does not
transfer to you.
8. "Nobody is perfect. I could never be 100%."
Nobody is asking for perfection, and anyone who demands it has
misunderstood the point entirely.
There is no membership card and no purity test. The question has never
been whether you can achieve zero harm — nobody can. The question is
whether, knowing what you now know, you are willing to reduce it.
Perfection is not available. Direction is.
9. "I've already cut down."
Then you have done something real, and you should hear that plainly rather
than be told it is insufficient. Every meal counts on its own. A person
who halves their consumption has halved their contribution, and that is
not nothing — it is arithmetic.
Nobody who is moving in this direction needs to be attacked for not having
arrived.
In Conclusion — All Fifteen Parts in One Paragraph
Our anatomy is that of a plant-eater. Plant protein is complete and
abundant. B12 is a bacterial vitamin that sanitation removed from
everyone. Plants have no nervous system and cannot suffer. Most farmland
feeds livestock, so meat-eating causes more crop deaths, not fewer.
Cooked flesh produces carcinogens, and raw flesh produces parasites. Which
animals we eat is decided by geography, not by ethics. Fire is required to
make meat survivable and optional for almost every plant. Nature is a
description, not a permission. Humane labels change the beginning and
never the ending. Dairy and eggs kill the calf, the male chick, and
eventually the mother. Fish feel pain and die in trillions without
protection. Plant-based diets are endorsed for every stage of human life.
And four fifths of the world's farmland produces less than a fifth of its
food.
That is the whole case. Every piece of it is sourced, and none of it
depends on believing anything unusual.
The Only Thing Left
After all fifteen parts, one thing remains that no article can supply.
You already know that you would not want this done to a dog. You already
know that you could not watch it happen and continue eating. You already
know that the animal wanted to live.
The arguments in this series exist only to remove the excuses that were
standing between you and something you already understood.
Nobody is asking you to be perfect.
Only to stop using reasons you have never examined.
Start with one meal.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #personalchoice
#scientific #science #guide
@GreenPathForAll🍀
"It's My Personal Choice" — and Every Remaining Excuse 🍀
This is the final post in the series, and it answers the arguments people
reach for once the others have run out.
1. "It's a personal choice. Stop pushing your views."
A personal choice is one whose consequences fall on the person making it.
Your clothes, your music, your religion, your career — all personal.
A choice stops being personal the moment there is a second party in it who
did not consent and does not survive.
You are not being asked to justify a preference. You are being asked to
justify an outcome that happens to someone else.
And consider who is actually having something imposed on them here. It is
not the person being asked an uncomfortable question at dinner.
2. "Don't preach at me."
Fair enough — nobody enjoys being lectured, and self-righteousness has
probably cost this movement more people than it has gained.
But notice the shape of the objection. It is about tone, not about
content. It is a complaint about how the argument was delivered, offered
in place of a reply to what the argument actually said.
If the case is wrong, say why. If the only available criticism is that it
was raised impolitely, then the case was not wrong.
3. "What would happen to all the animals if everyone went vegan?"
There is no population of farmed animals waiting to be released.
Around eighty billion land animals are brought into existence every year
by deliberate breeding and artificial insemination, because they have been
ordered in advance by demand.
Demand does not vanish overnight; it declines gradually. As it declines,
fewer animals are bred. That is the entire mechanism. Nobody opens the
gates and floods the countryside with cattle.
The question assumes these animals exist independently of us. They do not.
They exist because we make them, at exactly the rate we intend to eat them.
4. "Farmers would lose their jobs."
Demand shifts; it does not disappear. People will still eat — they will
eat more grains, legumes, vegetables, fruit, and oils, all of which are
grown by farmers. Agricultural transitions have happened repeatedly
throughout history, and they are managed with policy, retraining and
investment.
But examine the principle underneath the sentence. "People earn a living
from it" has never, in any other context, been accepted as sufficient
justification on its own. Every industry that has ever been ended on
ethical grounds employed people. That fact mattered, and it was addressed —
but it was never treated as the end of the discussion.
5. "My grandfather ate meat every day and lived to ninety-five."
Someone's grandfather also smoked for sixty years and lived to ninety-five.
That is how statistics work: individual outcomes vary enormously, and a
single long life tells you nothing about population-level risk.
The relevant evidence is what happens across millions of people over
decades, not what happened to one person who also had good genes, an
active life, and food that bore little resemblance to what is sold today.
6. "Vegan food is expensive."
The cheapest calories available anywhere on Earth are plant foods: rice,
lentils, beans, chickpeas, oats, potatoes, flour, seasonal vegetables.
This is precisely why they form the foundation of traditional cooking in
nearly every culture, especially among people with little money.
What is expensive is meat, and what is expensive is the new category of
processed vegan replacement products — the burgers, the cheeses, the
packaged substitutes. Those are entirely optional, and they are not what
plant-based eating is built on.
A pot of lentil stew with rice is among the cheapest meals a human being
can make.
7. "But people in deserts and the Arctic can't farm."
Correct. And entirely irrelevant to anyone reading this on a phone with a
supermarket nearby.
Ethics addresses those who have a choice. If you genuinely have no
alternative, this conversation was never aimed at you. If you are
selecting between fifteen options in a refrigerated aisle, you are not in
that situation, and borrowing the circumstances of someone who is does not
transfer to you.
8. "Nobody is perfect. I could never be 100%."
Nobody is asking for perfection, and anyone who demands it has
misunderstood the point entirely.
There is no membership card and no purity test. The question has never
been whether you can achieve zero harm — nobody can. The question is
whether, knowing what you now know, you are willing to reduce it.
Perfection is not available. Direction is.
9. "I've already cut down."
Then you have done something real, and you should hear that plainly rather
than be told it is insufficient. Every meal counts on its own. A person
who halves their consumption has halved their contribution, and that is
not nothing — it is arithmetic.
Nobody who is moving in this direction needs to be attacked for not having
arrived.
In Conclusion — All Fifteen Parts in One Paragraph
Our anatomy is that of a plant-eater. Plant protein is complete and
abundant. B12 is a bacterial vitamin that sanitation removed from
everyone. Plants have no nervous system and cannot suffer. Most farmland
feeds livestock, so meat-eating causes more crop deaths, not fewer.
Cooked flesh produces carcinogens, and raw flesh produces parasites. Which
animals we eat is decided by geography, not by ethics. Fire is required to
make meat survivable and optional for almost every plant. Nature is a
description, not a permission. Humane labels change the beginning and
never the ending. Dairy and eggs kill the calf, the male chick, and
eventually the mother. Fish feel pain and die in trillions without
protection. Plant-based diets are endorsed for every stage of human life.
And four fifths of the world's farmland produces less than a fifth of its
food.
That is the whole case. Every piece of it is sourced, and none of it
depends on believing anything unusual.
The Only Thing Left
After all fifteen parts, one thing remains that no article can supply.
You already know that you would not want this done to a dog. You already
know that you could not watch it happen and continue eating. You already
know that the animal wanted to live.
The arguments in this series exist only to remove the excuses that were
standing between you and something you already understood.
Nobody is asking you to be perfect.
Only to stop using reasons you have never examined.
Start with one meal.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #personalchoice
#scientific #science #guide
@GreenPathForAll
Please open Telegram to view this post
VIEW IN TELEGRAM
❤1
🍀 THE COMPLETE GUIDE: Every Argument Against Veganism, Answered
Fifteen posts. The fifteen objections people actually raise — every one
answered with science, sources, and logic, not opinion.
Save this post. The next time someone repeats one of these, send them
the link.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🦷 THE HUMAN BODY — Are we built for meat?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 1 — "We have canine teeth. Humans are omnivores."
22 Reasons Why Humans Are Herbivores
Jaw movement, intestine length, hands, sweat, instinct — twenty-two
anatomical facts, every one of them pointing the same way.
👉 [LINK]
PART 2 — "Where do you get your protein? Plants aren't complete."
Plant Protein: Complete, Abundant, and Nothing Like "Just Grass"
The "incomplete protein" myth, the combining myth its own author
retracted, the real numbers, and the question that answers itself:
where does the cow get its protein?
👉 [LINK]
PART 3 — "You need supplements. That proves it's unnatural."
The B12 Question: A Lost Vitamin Is Not Proof of a Carnivorous Past
No animal on Earth makes B12 — not even a lion. Why gorillas, horses
and rabbits share our exact "limitation," and why the one gene humans
really did lose proves the opposite of what meat-eaters claim.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🌾 THE DEFLECTIONS — "But what about plants and crops?"
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 4 — "Plants feel pain too."
Do Plants Feel Pain? Science Says No
No brain. No nervous system. No nociceptors. Reaction is not sensation.
👉 [LINK]
PART 5 — "Vegetarians are killers too — crops kill insects."
Are Vegetarians Also "Killers"? A Deeper Look at a Common Excuse
80% of farmland on Earth grows animal feed. Meat-eating is two layers
of killing, not one. The argument collapses on its own arithmetic.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
☠️ THE HEALTH COST
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 6 — "Meat isn't harmful."
Heterocyclic Amines in Cooked Meat and Their Carcinogenic Potential
What forms in flesh at high temperature, why the WHO classifies it,
and what it does to DNA.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🔥 "IT'S NATURAL, IT'S OUR CULTURE"
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 7 — "It's our culture. Everyone eats meat."
Speciesism and the Geography of Habit: Who Actually Chose Your Plate?
A cow is sacred in India and dinner in Argentina. A dog is family in
Europe and food elsewhere. If your ethics change with your postal code,
they were never ethics. They were an inheritance.
👉 [LINK]
PART 8 — "Humans have always eaten meat. And you cook rice and bread too!"
The Fire Test: If Humans Are Carnivores, Why Must We Cook?
No carnivore on Earth cooks. We must. Raw flesh gives us tapeworms that
reach the brain; cooked flesh gives us carcinogens. And heating a plant
is not the same act — skip the fire and rice is merely unpleasant, while
chicken puts you in a hospital.
👉 [LINK1]
👉 [LINK2]
PART 9 — "It's natural. Animals eat each other."
"It's Natural — Animals Eat Each Other"
A lion cannot survive on plants. You are standing in a supermarket. The
lion has no choice and therefore no responsibility; you have both. And
if "natural" were truly your standard, you would have to give up
medicine, clothing and electricity first.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🐄 THE ANIMALS THEMSELVES
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 10 — "But my meat is humane, free-range and grass-fed."
"But My Meat Is Humane, Free-Range and Grass-Fed"
Chicken: killed at 6 weeks, lifespan 8 years. Pig: 6 months, lifespan
20 years. Every label changes the beginning and none of them changes
the ending. "Humane" has never once included growing old.
👉 [LINK]
PART 11 — "Nobody dies for milk and eggs."
Dairy and Eggs: "But Nobody Dies for Milk"
A cow gives milk for the same reason a woman does — she gave birth. Her
calf is taken within hours, her sons become veal, and she is slaughtered
at a quarter of her lifespan. Around seven billion male chicks are killed
every year on the day they hatch, because they cannot lay eggs.
👉 [LINK]
PART 12 — "Fish don't feel pain."
"Fish Don't Feel Pain"
Fish have nociceptors. Painkillers stop their pain behaviour — a reflex
cannot be switched off by morphine. They will abandon a preferred
environment to reach relief. Between one and three trillion are killed
each year, with almost no legal protection anywhere on Earth.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
👶 IS IT SAFE?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 13 — "A vegan diet is dangerous, especially for children."
"A Vegan Diet Is Dangerous — Especially for Children"
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states plainly that plant-based
diets are appropriate for ALL stages of life — pregnancy, infancy,
childhood, adolescence and elite athletics. Plus the soy hormone myth,
and the double standard that calls nuggets and soda "normal."
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🌍 THE PLANET
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 14 — "What does any of this have to do with the environment?"
The Land, the Water and the Air: What Animal Farming Actually Costs
Livestock occupies 80% of the world's farmland and provides 18% of its
calories. One kilogram of beef costs as much water as fifty kilograms of
vegetables. And 77% of global soy is fed to animals — so the Amazon is
not being cleared for tofu.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🍀 THE LAST EXCUSES
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 15 — "It's my personal choice."
"It's My Personal Choice" — and Every Remaining Excuse
A choice stops being personal when someone else dies in it. Plus: what
would happen to all the animals, farmers' jobs, "my grandfather lived to
95," "vegan food is expensive," and "nobody's perfect" — each one
answered, and the whole series summarised in a single paragraph.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Fifteen objections. Not one of them survives examination.
Every claim in these fifteen posts is sourced from peer-reviewed research
and from the official positions of the WHO, the FAO, and the world's
dietetic associations.
Read them in order, or jump straight to the one you need.
No one is asking you to be perfect.
Only to stop using excuses you have never examined.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#guide #faq #animalrights
@GreenPathForAll🍀
Fifteen posts. The fifteen objections people actually raise — every one
answered with science, sources, and logic, not opinion.
Save this post. The next time someone repeats one of these, send them
the link.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🦷 THE HUMAN BODY — Are we built for meat?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 1 — "We have canine teeth. Humans are omnivores."
22 Reasons Why Humans Are Herbivores
Jaw movement, intestine length, hands, sweat, instinct — twenty-two
anatomical facts, every one of them pointing the same way.
👉 [LINK]
PART 2 — "Where do you get your protein? Plants aren't complete."
Plant Protein: Complete, Abundant, and Nothing Like "Just Grass"
The "incomplete protein" myth, the combining myth its own author
retracted, the real numbers, and the question that answers itself:
where does the cow get its protein?
👉 [LINK]
PART 3 — "You need supplements. That proves it's unnatural."
The B12 Question: A Lost Vitamin Is Not Proof of a Carnivorous Past
No animal on Earth makes B12 — not even a lion. Why gorillas, horses
and rabbits share our exact "limitation," and why the one gene humans
really did lose proves the opposite of what meat-eaters claim.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🌾 THE DEFLECTIONS — "But what about plants and crops?"
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 4 — "Plants feel pain too."
Do Plants Feel Pain? Science Says No
No brain. No nervous system. No nociceptors. Reaction is not sensation.
👉 [LINK]
PART 5 — "Vegetarians are killers too — crops kill insects."
Are Vegetarians Also "Killers"? A Deeper Look at a Common Excuse
80% of farmland on Earth grows animal feed. Meat-eating is two layers
of killing, not one. The argument collapses on its own arithmetic.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
☠️ THE HEALTH COST
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 6 — "Meat isn't harmful."
Heterocyclic Amines in Cooked Meat and Their Carcinogenic Potential
What forms in flesh at high temperature, why the WHO classifies it,
and what it does to DNA.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🔥 "IT'S NATURAL, IT'S OUR CULTURE"
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 7 — "It's our culture. Everyone eats meat."
Speciesism and the Geography of Habit: Who Actually Chose Your Plate?
A cow is sacred in India and dinner in Argentina. A dog is family in
Europe and food elsewhere. If your ethics change with your postal code,
they were never ethics. They were an inheritance.
👉 [LINK]
PART 8 — "Humans have always eaten meat. And you cook rice and bread too!"
The Fire Test: If Humans Are Carnivores, Why Must We Cook?
No carnivore on Earth cooks. We must. Raw flesh gives us tapeworms that
reach the brain; cooked flesh gives us carcinogens. And heating a plant
is not the same act — skip the fire and rice is merely unpleasant, while
chicken puts you in a hospital.
👉 [LINK1]
👉 [LINK2]
PART 9 — "It's natural. Animals eat each other."
"It's Natural — Animals Eat Each Other"
A lion cannot survive on plants. You are standing in a supermarket. The
lion has no choice and therefore no responsibility; you have both. And
if "natural" were truly your standard, you would have to give up
medicine, clothing and electricity first.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🐄 THE ANIMALS THEMSELVES
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 10 — "But my meat is humane, free-range and grass-fed."
"But My Meat Is Humane, Free-Range and Grass-Fed"
Chicken: killed at 6 weeks, lifespan 8 years. Pig: 6 months, lifespan
20 years. Every label changes the beginning and none of them changes
the ending. "Humane" has never once included growing old.
👉 [LINK]
PART 11 — "Nobody dies for milk and eggs."
Dairy and Eggs: "But Nobody Dies for Milk"
A cow gives milk for the same reason a woman does — she gave birth. Her
calf is taken within hours, her sons become veal, and she is slaughtered
at a quarter of her lifespan. Around seven billion male chicks are killed
every year on the day they hatch, because they cannot lay eggs.
👉 [LINK]
PART 12 — "Fish don't feel pain."
"Fish Don't Feel Pain"
Fish have nociceptors. Painkillers stop their pain behaviour — a reflex
cannot be switched off by morphine. They will abandon a preferred
environment to reach relief. Between one and three trillion are killed
each year, with almost no legal protection anywhere on Earth.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
👶 IS IT SAFE?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 13 — "A vegan diet is dangerous, especially for children."
"A Vegan Diet Is Dangerous — Especially for Children"
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states plainly that plant-based
diets are appropriate for ALL stages of life — pregnancy, infancy,
childhood, adolescence and elite athletics. Plus the soy hormone myth,
and the double standard that calls nuggets and soda "normal."
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🌍 THE PLANET
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 14 — "What does any of this have to do with the environment?"
The Land, the Water and the Air: What Animal Farming Actually Costs
Livestock occupies 80% of the world's farmland and provides 18% of its
calories. One kilogram of beef costs as much water as fifty kilograms of
vegetables. And 77% of global soy is fed to animals — so the Amazon is
not being cleared for tofu.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🍀 THE LAST EXCUSES
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
PART 15 — "It's my personal choice."
"It's My Personal Choice" — and Every Remaining Excuse
A choice stops being personal when someone else dies in it. Plus: what
would happen to all the animals, farmers' jobs, "my grandfather lived to
95," "vegan food is expensive," and "nobody's perfect" — each one
answered, and the whole series summarised in a single paragraph.
👉 [LINK]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Fifteen objections. Not one of them survives examination.
Every claim in these fifteen posts is sourced from peer-reviewed research
and from the official positions of the WHO, the FAO, and the world's
dietetic associations.
Read them in order, or jump straight to the one you need.
No one is asking you to be perfect.
Only to stop using excuses you have never examined.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #scientific #science
#guide #faq #animalrights
@GreenPathForAll
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Green path Vegan
22 Reasons Why Humans Are Herbivores 🍀
1. Drinking vs. Lapping: Humans sip water like other herbivores, while carnivores lap it up.
2. Jaw Movement: Like other herbivores, humans can move their jaws up and down as well as side to side without moving their…
1. Drinking vs. Lapping: Humans sip water like other herbivores, while carnivores lap it up.
2. Jaw Movement: Like other herbivores, humans can move their jaws up and down as well as side to side without moving their…
❤1
"But we have canine teeth!" 🦷
Meet the hippopotamus. Fifty centimetre canines — the largest of any land
mammal on Earth.
It eats grass.
Now look at the lion, an actual carnivore: seven centimetres. Smaller than
a musk deer. Smaller than a camel. Both of which have never eaten meat in
their lives.
Here is what canine teeth are actually for: fighting rivals. That is why,
in every species that has large ones, the males have huge canines and the
females do not. They are weapons for combat and display, not tools for
eating.
And human canines? Male and female human canines are the same size. Ours
are not weapons, and they do not even protrude past the teeth beside them.
Yours is one centimetre, flat-tipped, and the only thing it has ever
"torn" is meat that had to be cooked for an hour first to become soft
enough to chew.
A hippo could bite a boat in half with teeth it uses on grass.
You need a stove.
📚 Full breakdown in Part 1 and Part 8 of The Complete Guide.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #canineteeth
#scientific #science
@GreenPathForAll🍀
Meet the hippopotamus. Fifty centimetre canines — the largest of any land
mammal on Earth.
It eats grass.
Now look at the lion, an actual carnivore: seven centimetres. Smaller than
a musk deer. Smaller than a camel. Both of which have never eaten meat in
their lives.
Here is what canine teeth are actually for: fighting rivals. That is why,
in every species that has large ones, the males have huge canines and the
females do not. They are weapons for combat and display, not tools for
eating.
And human canines? Male and female human canines are the same size. Ours
are not weapons, and they do not even protrude past the teeth beside them.
Yours is one centimetre, flat-tipped, and the only thing it has ever
"torn" is meat that had to be cooked for an hour first to become soft
enough to chew.
A hippo could bite a boat in half with teeth it uses on grass.
You need a stove.
📚 Full breakdown in Part 1 and Part 8 of The Complete Guide.
#vegan #vegans #vegetarian #vegetarians #greenpath #canineteeth
#scientific #science
@GreenPathForAll
Please open Telegram to view this post
VIEW IN TELEGRAM
❤1
🥩 “Humans are omnivores. We are meant to eat meat.”
Then eat it raw.
Not: “Humans cannot eat raw meat.”
But: “Humans are the only animal that needs technology in order to eat meat.”
No carnivore and no omnivore in nature — from the lion to the bear — needs fire, a freezer or a veterinary inspector to eat meat. The brown bear is an omnivore whose diet is mostly plants, and it still catches salmon and eats it raw. The chimpanzee shares 98.8% of our DNA and eats its kills raw.
Only one animal on Earth cannot.
An animal that cannot eat a food without technology is not built for that food.
📖 Full argument → Part 8
@GreenPathForAll🍀
Then eat it raw.
Not: “Humans cannot eat raw meat.”
But: “Humans are the only animal that needs technology in order to eat meat.”
No carnivore and no omnivore in nature — from the lion to the bear — needs fire, a freezer or a veterinary inspector to eat meat. The brown bear is an omnivore whose diet is mostly plants, and it still catches salmon and eats it raw. The chimpanzee shares 98.8% of our DNA and eats its kills raw.
Only one animal on Earth cannot.
An animal that cannot eat a food without technology is not built for that food.
📖 Full argument → Part 8
@GreenPathForAll
Please open Telegram to view this post
VIEW IN TELEGRAM
❤1