Vegan is the lifestyle that most environmentalists suggest us to adopt. Not only because it is healthier than current lifestyle most people have, but also because it is environmentally better for us. One of the reasons is because it doesn’t require us to build animal farmlands and ranches.
But that’s not the only way going vegan would help us to reach a better life. There is another thing that we all should notice about avoiding eating animal products, that we all already knew but tend to forget and ignore.
Experts found that going vegan would help us to avoid such pandemic outbreak like coronavirus in the future. How come? One thing that we should underline is that most modern-day outbreaks came from human and animal interaction.
Here in this article we will show you how the world would change so much (and better) when the whole world go vegan.
Animal Consumption
Animal-based foods are indeed multi-trillion dollars business. Look at the biggest food chains in the world, most of them are promoting their products that contain processed animal meats as the best-tasted food in the world.
The demand for more animal meat is then offset by the growth of the number of animals being raised in farms. The number of animal farms has been increasing rapidly too with the growth of food chains all around the world.
The problem is, many farmers only think about their profits without thinking about the environmental impacts of their business. Environmental impacts including the condition of their livestock, their sewage treatment, and what follows after are mostly being ignored.
“Many devastating disease outbreaks come about because humans house animals in filthy, severely crowded farms and markets – breeding grounds for pathogens – in order to satisfy their meat habit,” as stated by Elisa Allen, Director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
While apparently ignorance of environmental impacts result in most disasters happening on this planet, including global warming and pandemics, but the demand for more meat means profit. This is why we still have animal farms everywhere.
From Flus To Coronavirus
Starting from swine flu, bird flu, SARS, and the current outbreak of COVID-19 began when animals are transferring the virus to human. And what most people don’t realize is that most of those transmissions were related to food.
Swine flu and bird flu were transmitted to human in farms. Human carrying the virus then transmitted the virus to another human and the chain started. Thousands of people killed by the disease and millions other have suffered.
Both of those diseases were originally animals’ diseases. However, when it mutated inside the host, it changed into human-infecting disease. “When you bring animals together in unnatural situations, you have the risk of human diseases emerging,” said Kevin Olival, a disease ecologist and conservationist at EcoHealth Alliance.
Recently, we are also struck by a disease transmitted from animal, believed as bat, called novel coronavirus or COVID-19. It is said that a man ate infected bat and caught the disease. And here we are nowadays as the virus has caused a global pandemic.
Had the man who ate the infected bat was vegan, maybe we should have had different story and different life to what we have today. But it is not the time to blame anyone, because eating animal is a habit practiced all around the world.
Stopping Pandemic
This is where we are going to explain how going vegan can help us to prevent future pandemics. As what we mentioned earlier, most of bad things that we experience nowadays starting from global warming to coronavirus pandemic are directly influenced by animal consumption.
The fact that most of those deadly diseases were transmitted from animal intended for consumption to human, prove that we could have avoided it all by going vegan. Veganism is more than stopping animal cruelty, but also a way to avoid disasters.
When more people are going vegan, there will be less demand for animal meat all around the world, and it will directly affect even the biggest food chains. It will then demand the farmers to change their strategy in breeding and housing livestock.
And if we further demand for the end of animal cruelty, we as the market will have more voice. In addition, we will eventually be able to stop future pandemic. “Obviously we all need to do our bit and #StayAtHome, but if we want to save even more lives, human and animal, and prevent future pandemics, we also need to #GoVegan,” Allen stated in a comment.
With the demand, we will create market, and in this current world’s situation, market create the norms nowadays. There would be no man who eat bats anymore too, because it is far from the norms, which means there would be no more coronavirus-like diseases being transmitted from bats to human.
Vegan Means More
Vegan is more than just stopping animal cruelty. It means much more and gives us much more benefit than that. Reducing greenhouse gasses emission, avoiding future pandemic, and making the whole world healthier are some of the benefits.
In addition to that, we can also increase the chance of eating delicious and nutritious food when going vegan. In example, eating vegan foods mean eating fresh food, because most vegetables and other non-animal products are only sold fresh.
We can also get fresh vegetables easier in local markets around us, which will support the farmers directly in this hard time. It shows how going vegan can help the economics of smaller business rather than making more money for the richest people.
Additionally, we can easily track our food sources when buying from local markets, and choose which farmer has the best products of all. We can see directly how the farmers treat what they grow and the methods they use to maintain the quality of their products. Simply no need to worry about chemicals and pesticides in your vegetables this way.
When the world is going vegan, we can avoid many disasters including future animal-transmitted diseases becoming pandemic. But that’s not the only reason to go vegan, because it means much more than explained in this article. So, have we given you more reasons to go vegan now?
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