Does the thought of chowing down on one of your friends give you the creeps? How about eating something that may as well have been dunked in the toilet? Well, read on! This site is for kids who care about animals and do not want to eat or abuse them.

What Is Wrong With Eating Animals?

First of all, it is not cool to eat animals. Factory farms – the places where most animals come from before they wind up on our plates, are nightmares for animals. It is not good for you and your family to eat meat, either: Eating meat causes cancer, heart disease and strokes. Plus, factory farming is one of the worst polluters around.

Factory Farms

You know that song ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’, where the ducks made ‘a “quack, quack” here, and a “quack, quack” there’? Unfortunately, those kinds of farms, where animals are free to wander in the barnyard, barely exist anymore.

On today’s farms, little chicks’ beaks are sliced off with a hot blade (sometimes the blade takes parts of their faces or tongues, too). Pigs are killed by having a long, iron rod pushed through their heads. The animals are given drugs to make them grow quickly, but often they grow so quickly that their hearts and legs cannot keep up—they have heart attacks or their legs become painfully deformed.

The next time you go to the market, look at the chicken stall and see how the chickens are kept in rusted, wire cages filled with their own filth and usually without water or food. Have you seen what happens when a customer buys a bird? The stall owner roughly drags the animal out of the cage and slaughters and plucks him or her right there! If you have seen that happen, you know it is very upsetting.

Terror During Transportation

Animals are subjected to horrendous cruelty every day when they are transported to the places where they are killed for food. Cattle are made to march long distances without food and water. Some of the animals get so tired or sick they collapse, and the workers smear hot chilli powder into their eyes to make them so upset they cannot rest any longer. If that does not work, the workers might twist their tails and break them. Most of the animals arrive injured at the slaughterhouse. Others do not make it through the trip alive.

Unhappy Ending

At the slaughterhouse, animals are hung upside-down and killed—often while wide awake. Each year in India, the food industry kills millions of cows, pigs, lambs, sheep and birds, along with billions of fish; millions more die of anxiety, injuries or disease.

Abattoirs are usually very dirty, disgusting, stinking places. Workers do not care if animals suffer when they are killed. Instead of getting it over with quickly with a sharp knife, workers in smaller abattoirs slaughter animals with saws or small, dull knives. Before the animals die, their legs are often cut off; sometimes, they are even skinned alive.
If you love animals and want to help them, the best thing to do is to go vegetarian. For the animals’ sake, please do not eat meat.

Get Healthy – Go Meat-Free

Not only do you not need meat or milk, you are much better off without them! Animal products like meat, eggs, cheese and cow’s milk are full of fat and cholesterol and have no healthy fibre or complex carbohydrates, which we need to help us digest food properly and fight off deadly diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

The Healthy Heart Diet

Cholesterol is only found in meat, eggs and dairy products and can cause heart disease and strokes, two scary diseases that are becoming more common in India. And it is not just happening to old people, either. More and more young people are becoming afflicted with heart disease. In fact, Indians get heart disease 10 years earlier than Americans do.
Vegetarian foods, like fruits, vegetables, beans, bread and soya milk have zero cholesterol. Eating these foods instead of meat and dairy products can save your life! Studies have shown that on average, a lifelong vegetarian visits the hospital 22 per cent less often than a meat-eater. Why not make the switch to a purely vegetarian – in other words, vegan – diet?

Meat Is Tainted With Yucky Bacteria

A vegan diet also protects you from E. coli and salmonella, tiny organisms that get into animal products and make you sick. Cramps and diarrhoea are just the beginning – both of these bacteria can send you to the hospital.

Where do these organisms come from? Animals who are about to be slaughtered are so terrified at the awful things they see happening to the cow, pig, sheep, lamb or chicken ahead of them in the slaughter line that they lose control of their bowels, which empty onto the slaughterhouse floor. The animals are usually cut up on the same floor, so the meat becomes filthy. Not only that, their carcasses are transported around the country in unrefrigerated vehicles, which allows bacteria to grow.

Diabetes

Studies have linked dairy foods and processed meat to adult-onset (or type 2) diabetes. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, complications include higher risks of heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, blindness, kidney disease, nerve damage and amputations. India has more diabetics than any other country. Kids and teens are even getting diabetes now because too many of them eat too much meat and dairy products.

Cancer

Every year, a whopping 6 million people around the world die of cancer. Sadly, as countries develop, their eating habits get worse. More and more areas are adopting the high-fat, high-cholesterol diet, which means that countries in which diseases like cancer and heart disease were once rare are experiencing a sharp increase in these diseases. The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2015, two-thirds of all cancer cases will occur in the developing world.

Obesity

Eating animals and animal products also makes you fat. Obesity is a big problem in India, even for kids. Within the next 25 years, India’s obesity rate could skyrocket to three times what it is right now. Drink soya milk instead of cow’s milk, try chickpea and rice dishes cooked without the fatty meat or lard, eat fresh fruits and other tasty vegetables and you will find yourself leading a happier, healthier, longer life.

Saving the Planet Begins With What You Eat

Most people think of themselves as ‘environmentalists’. Maybe you recycle, pick up litter or conserve energy in your home. But did you know that if you want to help the Earth, the best thing you can do is to stop eating meat? Raising animals for food spoils our fresh water and our forests. Eating meat wastes both water and food that could save human lives.

Pollution

Thousands of animals produce thousands of pounds of waste. This waste seeps into streams, rivers and well water, making it unsafe for people to drink. When the animals are killed, their blood and waste flow onto the floors, outside onto the ground and into the water. At one slaughterhouse near the River Sutlej, so much waste has polluted the water that it poisons the birds who drink it. People also drink from the river.

Slaughterhouses and large farms also pollute the air. When many animals are crowded together, they cannot escape from their own waste. It piles up and smells terrible, both to the people who live nearby and to the animals who are forced to stand in it all day and all night. At slaughterhouses, the bodies of animals who are killed are piled up until they are collected by tanneries, where their skin is taken off and turned into leather. The bodies of these poor animals decay and make the air nearby foul.

Forests

Eating meat is killing our forests. For many years, farmers in India have allowed their cattle to graze in the forests, even though it is usually illegal. The hungry animals eat trees that are just sprouting, so new trees cannot grow and replace older, dying trees. More than 15 percent of all the cattle and sheep in the world live in India, but our country has less than 2 percent of the world’s forests.

In South America and parts of Asia, forests are being chopped down and the land cleared so that cattle can graze. If this continues, some people are worried that all the forests and the plants that grow near the trees will be destroyed – and all the animals who live in the forests will also die. Even people who do not live in or near forests need the oxygen they produce to live.

Water and Food

Raising animals to kill and eat takes a lot of water and grain – which could be used by people. Just 1 kilo of meat takes 11 kilos of grain to produce. If we did not raise cattle, sheep and chickens, we would have more food for hungry people.

Raising and killing animals also uses much of the world’s fresh water. In the United States, more than half of all the water used goes to raising animals for food! In some places in India, people cannot easily find fresh water because it is used by slaughterhouses. An abattoir called Al Kabeer, near Hyderabad, uses so much fresh water that there isn’t enough left for the villagers.

By choosing to eat a healthy vegetarian diet, without meat, milk or eggs, you can help save our forests, conserve water and feed hungry people. You will also be helping the animals and your own body. What are you waiting for?

Save animals, the Earth, and your family’s lives by ordering a free vegetarian starter kit for your family.

Pour out the Milk and Help Poor Cows

Milk is not a ‘natural’. No other species naturally drinks milk beyond infancy, and no species would naturally drink the milk of a different species. Cow’s milk and buffalo milk are good for the nutritional needs of their calves but not for us.

Every glass of milk comes from a sad, suffering mother whose baby was killed before her eyes or taken from her so that humans could drink the milk nature meant for her baby. The mother cow herself may also be killed when her milk dries up.

Myths About Milk

The myth that milk is good for children has been around since the time of Lord Krishna, but experts now know that some infants are extremely sensitive to cow’s milk, which can cause bleeding in the intestines. Although the risks are greatest for children during their first year of life, there are also health concerns for older children.

Many people who drink milk become sick with heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes, and even osteoporosis, the very disease that the dairy industry claims it prevents! The high animal-protein content of milk actually causes calcium to be leached from the body. No wonder industrialised Western nations, the biggest consumers of milk, also have the highest rates of osteoporosis, while regions of the world where dairy products are practically unheard of, such as China and Japan, do not have much osteoporosis at all! One study suggests that the occurrence of low bone mass (bone density and strength) in the Indian population is higher than in the Western population.

Loaded with fat and cholesterol, milk also contains pesticides and antibiotics that are fed to cows. The cholesterol-free, low-fat plant world provides all the calcium you need. Broccoli, beans, peas, almonds, raspberries, watermelon, lettuce, oranges, parsley, carrots, guavas, apples, pears, leafy and green vegetables, turnips, and grains are all great sources of calcium.

Milk’s Secret Ingredients

Dairy farmers are reportedly still using oxytocin, a banned hormone. oxytocin is harmful to you and the cow. Experts believe that hormones can pass to humans who drink milk and cause serious ailments like hormonal imbalance, retarded growth in young children, risk of abortion in pregnant women and, in some cases, cancer. Large amounts of the poisonous pesticides DDT and HCH show up in milk and have been found to contain arsenic, cadmium and lead, which can cause kidney damage, heart disease, brain damage and cancer.

Other nasty stuff that can show up in milk includes sewage water, vegetable oil, liquid soap – even earthworms because they excrete slime, which increases the density of the milk. Dump dairy – for good!
To find out more about health hazards caused by milk, click here.

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