This Is Vegan Propaganda (& Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You)

by Ed Winters

Our most joyous days of celebration and ritual are often marked by the mass death of others. We celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving by confining tens of millions of turkeys in windowless barns, where many of them die of organ failure, the ones who survive then being taken to slaughterhouses. We celebrate Easter by killing newborn lambs so we can eat their legs and have a wonderful day of celebration, talking about how the remains of a baby animal are so tender and juicy. We do the same for sporting events as well, with the Super Bowl in the USA being celebrated with the consumption of 1.35 billion chicken wings during the course of the weekend, which means that around 700 million chickens are killed just for a sporting event,1 with a staggering 99.9 per cent of them being raised on a factory farm,2 suffering immensely before being forced into crates and taken to slaughterhouses. It is estimated that this number of wings is enough to circle the Earth three times.3 But most of the people who are consuming these wings are not bad people and would be horrified at the prospect of having to take an active part in this process. When it came to the anniversary party, I thought about my grandparents – the most gentle, kind and loving people – celebrating such a wonderful event by eating the remains of animals who had lived lives of abject suffering. To me, that juxtaposition of celebration, union and love with misery, torture and death was one that I couldn’t rationalise. I decide...