Animal Millionaires

Hello to all my loyal blog readers. First of all, I would like to apologize for the long hiatus between posts. I started working at a new job in mid-December, and while this has been able to meet many of my needs, it has kept me away from updating this blog for the past couple months. This blog is certainly a project I wish to continue however, and I hope to get back into fairly regular updates as I settle into my new position.

Recently, as I was getting to bed at my new early bedtime, I decided I should put together a list of goals for myself. I wrote down all of one item on this list before I got distracted and eventually fell asleep. The one item I put down on my list was, “Become an animal millionaire”.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term it is one that Erik Marcus brings up fairly regularly on his vegan.com blog. An animal millionaire is someone who, through their actions, has led to a million animals' lives being saved.

What would it take to become an animal millionaire?

Some people choose to foster animals to help save them from certain deaths in shelters. I imagine I could probably foster roughly 15 cats or dogs at a time, over their roughly 15 year life spans. Given that I likely have roughly 60 years left to live myself, I could probably save 60-ish lives by fostering animals. This would also come at a cost of tens, possibly even the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Another technique many have chosen to take for the animals is illegal direct action. Supposing I chose to put my direct action directly towards saving animals (as opposed to causing property damage), my most optimistic projection would be that I could rescue a few thousand animals before earning an extended sentence in my own cage.

This is at least far better than the marginally legal direct action group Sea Shepherd, which manages to get Japan to miss their whaling quota by a few hundred in a good year (out of a quota of roughly 1000 whales). This comes at a cost of millions of dollars to the animal rights movement, and a crew of what appears to be dozens of people. Sea Shepherd's activism comes at a cost of roughly $10,000 per whale saved and saves a mere 10 animals per person-year of work by the crew.

Legislative challenges vary greatly depending on the piece of legislation. California's proposition 2 will likely impact the lives of billions of animals once it goes into effect; although, it is unclear how many, if any, lives will ultimately be spared by this piece of legislation. This came at a cost of roughly $10 million from the YES side, and required perhaps a couple thousand person-years of work. Missouri's proposition B on the other hand will influence the lives of no more than a couple hundred thousand animals per year. It came at a cost of $1.7 million in support to the YES side and likely several hundred person-years of work.

What if we spent our time trying to get as many people as possible to go vegan? If we really put our energy into it, we could talk to several hundred, perhaps even a couple thousand people per week. Obviously the vast majority of people would not make a large lifestyle change from their brief conversation with us, but out of speaking with a few thousand people, it is not unreasonable to think we could get at least one to make a change (along with hopefully pushing many others in the right direction). In a wealthy nation like the United States, getting just one young person to go vegan will typically save the lives of roughly 2000 animals over the remainder of that person's life. Vegan Outreach makes conversing with this many people on a regular basis entirely possible. They print out booklets that, in addition to presenting information to people in a clear and effective manner, also serve as excellent conversation starters with interested people.

Using Vegan Outreach materials, one of their leafleters, Vic Sjodin, managed to pass out booklets to over 100,000 people in a single semester. You may not be the veritable leafleting god that Vic is, but any person donating a full year of their labor to the cause, could most likely get out 100,000 booklets over the course of that year. Depending on how effective of communicators we are on behalf of the animals, it is entirely reasonable that we could get 50-100 people to go vegan over this time period, at a cost of no more than $12,000 to print those booklets (plus perhaps a few thousand more in gas costs). Getting a mere 50 young Americans to go vegan would amount to a million lives saved.



All of the figures in the above table are admittedly very rough estimates. Reasonable error bars on these would be as much as a factor of ten in either direction. Yet even admitting that much uncertainty, there is a clear winner if we are interested in doing what is best for the animals, and that difference is so much so, that using this method, any one of us could easily become an animal millionaire multiple times over within our lives.

Imagine yourself taking just one day every other week to leaflet at a college campus or a concert that young people will be attending. Similarly, imagine yourself setting aside just a couple hours worth of work from every paycheck to donate to Vegan Outreach. Taking these two small steps will set you up to easily reach the goal of becoming an animal millionaire within a decade. I challenge all of you to see which of us can accomplish this simple task the most times over.

Laying Hens

I'm going to do my best to describe why laying hens endure the most suffering of any animals as best I can without sounding like a total downer. It certainly is possible to gather some chicken eggs without having to harm chickens in the process, but for any sort of eggs you would buy at the store the process that makes economic sense is far different from the cruelty-free strategy. Egg laying hens and broiler (meat) chickens are not of the same species. There is no demand for male chicks of laying breeds and these are disposed of in whatever is the cheapest way the hatcheries can get away with. Mercy For Animals did an undercover investigation at the United States' largest hatchery just last year, showing one typical process of male chicks being ground up alive.



The laying hens are packed about 5-7 into slanted battery cages. The cages are slanted so that eggs will roll out and make them easier to gather. The current recommendation by the United Egg Producers is to give each bird between 67 and 86 square inches of space, less than a sheet of printer paper. Chickens in the wild naturally form a hierarchy called a pecking order. Chickens will peck at each other to establish dominance and the lowlier chickens will get out of the way when they don't wish to assert dominance. The battery cage conditions prohibit chickens from getting out of the way, so ordinarily chickens in such conditions would peck at each other incessantly causing one another serious bodily harm. To combat this, the beaks of the laying hens are cut off at birth, making it so that the pain the chickens feel when attempting to peck at each other will be a sufficient deterrent to combat their natural social habit.

Producers have also discovered that keeping the lights on for unnaturally long periods of the day increases the amount the chickens lay. Thus the chickens are kept awake in their cramped quarters for the majority of the day, eating and laying for their existence. After a year in such conditions the hens production begins to drop. An ordinary lifespan for a hen might be for around a decade, but once production drops, it makes more economic sense to raise a new hen than to continue to feed and house one that is producing at a lower rate. Yet the producers don't ship them off to slaughter just yet, by starving the chickens for a period of one to two weeks and keeping them in near perpetual darkness (sometimes depriving them of water as well) they can induce the chickens to molt. According the the American Veterinary Medical Association, “Egg production resumes and increases rapidly to a profitable rate following an induced molt.” This gives the producers one last spurt of production before they send the spent laying hens off to slaughter.

Slaughterhouses and factory farms don't typically exist in the same facility, and the slaughter process is designed, like the rest of the process, to maximize efficiency rather than benevolence. Caged chickens are often literally thrown onto trucks and carried at the producer's leisure to a slaughter facility where the spent bird's meat is typically only useful in processed foods or as pet feed. Typical slaughter for these animals will involve hanging them upside-down by their legs and running them down a production line to have their necks automatically slit, allowing them to bleed out along the way.

Many of you have probably heard that in 2008 California passed Proposition 2, banning the use of battery cages by 2015. While this is probably a step in the right direction, it does nothing to address the worst of the suffering the animals must endure. They will be taken from their cages and merely dumped onto the floors. Beak trimming, forced molting, chick grinding, and bleak lives of densely packed confinement will still be all these fellow animals are allowed to enjoy.

This is all assuming that the predictions of the Proposition 2 opponents don't come to pass.

We estimate that 95% of that output and employment would be lost by 2015 as the egg sector gradually contracted to no more than 5% of its current size due to the proposed ballot measure.

Idaho, Nevada, and Georgia have all made efforts to court California's farmers with promises of fewer regulations that drive up their costs.

Buying free-range eggs, while it may sound like the obvious solution, is not what many of us hope it to be. Free-range producers still produce with competition and economic incentives to keep prices low, and this often comes at a cost of welfare in the process. Peaceful Prairie Animal Sanctuary took footage of free-range hens they had rescued shortly before slaughter showing no noticeable differences from their conventional counterparts.



These free-range birds had all outlived their unwanted male counterparts, had all been debeaked, and were obviously debilitated from their short lives of laying.

I know someone is going to try to accuse me of merely picking out isolated cases that are not an accurate representation of the process. They are going to say that clearly it doesn't make economic sense for farmers to abuse their animals, because stressed and hurt animals produce poorer products (these talking points are almost as predictable as Republicans saying “no” these days). These accusations are baseless. None of the clips I show present isolated cases of abuse, but production lines designed in ways that clearly involve great suffering when run as intended. These aren't outdated or isolated production techniques either, but part of the what the industry says is, “approximately 98 percent of all layer flocks in the U.S. [...] housed indoors and in cages.”

So, do you think the pleasure you enjoy from eating eggs is greater than the suffering the birds endure to produce that product for you?

Sarah Palin's Alaska

Sarah Palin's Alaska is a show that I imagine few if any of my blog readers watch. Yet this week's episode caught the attention of many in the animal rights community for its focus on Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol bludgeoning halibut. Here is a preview from TLC I was able to track down for the episode.



This only shows a small bit of what was displayed in the episode. Having now watched it myself, I would estimate that about half of the hour long episode was dedicated to Sarah and Bristol's time upon a halibut fishing vessel, where they are both shown attempting to beat the life (or the struggle) out of several halibut with a club (with admittedly limited success), momentarily slicing the gills to allow the halibut to bleed out onto the ship, and even holding the still beating heart of one of the fish after it has been sliced apart. At one point during this gruesome ordeal we hear a voice over from Palin expressing that while she understands this appears brutal, it is also the safest and most humane way to kill the halibut.

While the Palins may have managed to stir up controversy on the subject, what happened in the episode was by no means unusual. I was able to find numerous similar clips on YouTube of halibut being beaten into submission, this next clip being perhaps the most brutal of them.



One reader on the Washington Post Blog comments:

As a commercial halibut fisherman in southeast Alaska, I have personally clubbed thousands of halibut. I can tell you that is the only way to do it. A good size halibut can break your boat, your legs and your neck if you don't stun them. It is far more humane than letting them gasp to death on deck. After stunning, a slice to the gills bleeds them out in a hurry. Bleeding them is why they taste so good. Unless you are a vegetarian, you can't really say much about the killing of your food. It's a fact that things die so you can eat.

Luckily I am a vegetarian, so I do have something to say about the killing of these beings. None of the clips I viewed showed the slightest concern for the suffering of the animals. In the episode with the Palins several fish seem to just be left sitting, bludgeoned into submission, but without their gills slit to even begin the bleeding process; clearly alive the entire time. These halibut are left, often for hours at a time hooked underwater, then they are dragged to the surface where they often have additional hooks jabbed into them to pull them aboard, where they are then brutally beaten with nothing more than the crudest mallets until they lose the will to struggle, and are then slowly bled out aboard these vessels until the last breath of life drains from their bodies.

The only sense in this immense cruelty is the economic sense it makes for those participating in the process. There is not the slightest sign of concern for the suffering of the animals given along the way. Not an effort to pull in lines sooner, not an effort to pull them aboard without jabbing into their flesh once again, not even the kind grace (sarcasm) of a captive bolt to put them out of their misery without struggling against repeated blows to enjoy another breath.

These animals, like so many others, are treated as if their interests deserve no consideration. Even when it wouldn't cause us the slightest inconvenience, we still forgo what would lessen their suffering if it does not benefit ourselves as well. We vegans are often accused of placing ourselves upon a pedestal of moral superiority, but those who act as if we have some god-given right over others have placed themselves upon a much sicker pedestal of superiority. For those of us who don't think there is any ethical sense in this purposeless abuse, we make a difference by decreasing the economic sense these beatings make for those without any concern for the suffering of these cousins.

A Vegan No More

This past Friday, the vegan world got rocked by an announcement from a formerly vegan blogger who went back to eating meat. Tasha, the former Voracious Vegan, made this announcement on her Voracious Eats blog in a post titled A Vegan No More. Tasha's post nearly perfectly echos numerous aspects of Lierre Keith's Vegetarian Myth, describing how her time as a vegan left her suffering bouts of depression, low energy, B-12 deficiency, and numerous other physical and psychological troubles, and that somehow out of these troubles that very literally boggled her mind, she managed to come to a well-reasoned truth, that the only way to restore her health was through the consumption of animal products once again. She even goes so far as to echo Lierre's signature line that “life requires death”. Ginny Messina over at The Vegan RD does an excellent job of pointing out this similarity with Lierre's book, along with discussing how poorly several of her health issues were addressed by a doctor who seemed set on merely echoing the Weston A Price Foundation's selling points.

One thing this event emphasized for me, however, was the importance of skepticism in the animal rights movement, both in the message we sell to non-vegans and in correcting the misinformation we hear from other vegans.

In the post Tasha describes how she had been told, and had unskeptically accepted, that a vegan diet would be a miraculous panacea for her health.

Everything I had ever been told by vegans had said that this was the optimum way for humans to eat.

Just as I described in my Why Skeptic post Tasha describes how her beliefs were impacted simply by her desire for them to be true.

I wanted veganism to work. I wanted desperately for it to be right, for my ethics to outweigh my physiology.

When these unrealistic hopes and nutritional misinformation she had been fed didn't pan out, she was all too ready to gobble up an entirely new set of pseudo-scientific claims when a few bits of her previous worldview were shown to be false.

I listened patiently, refuting her [the doctor's] claims with the knowledge I’ve gleaned over the years. After all, I wasn’t just a regular vegan, I was a hardcore, self-righteous and oh so judgmental vegangelical. I never passed up an opportunity for some preaching. She was prepared. Just as patiently she explained how many of the ‘facts’ I was quoting were just plain wrong, or had been presented in a way that distorted the truth. It was horrifying and I almost passed out in her office because I was so worked up.

What if instead of blindly believing that a vegan diet would be a panacea of health Tasha had taken advice from Ginny of the Vegan RD, Jack Norris, or any registered dietitian following the advice of the American Dietetic Association. Had we taken the time to address misinformation within our own ranks we could have prevented this meteoric impact into the animal rights movement. Now, we are instead left with a smoldering ruin of Weston A. Price inspired naturo-babble.

I think Ginny (the Vegan RD) makes an excellent point about what causes some vegans to fail.

I believe that a lot of vegans get sick and return to eating meat when all they needed was more sound information about vegan diets and less misinformation from the pseudo-scientific anti-vegan world (as well as the pseudo-scientific pro-vegan world.)

The enemy of success in the animal rights movement is not anti-vegan information, but misinformation on both sides.

I have talked with Jamie of Skeptical Vegan and we have agreed to go through several of the new pseudo-scientific claims being made by the Voracious Eats blog in greater detail.

One of the best bits of skepticism I saw in response to the Voracious Eats post, however, was a comment left on Reddit in response.

I am a meat-eating omnivore and I'd love to be validated but this piece just has a funny smell to it. We very quickly go from health problems to painting vegans as self-rightous woman-haters. It feels like in an earlier draft they were perhaps anti-semetic puppy-kickers but it got switched before publishing.

Seriously, how many closet meat-eating vegan bloggers would out themselves after a simple email?

While I can agree that maintaining a healthy vegan diet can be difficult and perhaps impossible for some people I just can't believe this article which is so obviously playing on misplaced emotions to persuade the reader.

I assure you that there are no closet meat-eaters behind the scenes at this blog.

Environmental Impact of Leafleting

I got a lot of positive feedback in response to my previous post on whether being vegan is worse for the environment. One of the few objections raised in response, however, was the question of what the environmental impact of leafleting is (and reposting my link Vegan Outreach's leafleting totals). This is an excellent question.

As with almost all things, printing booklets has an environmental impact in a large number of areas, but the objection I hear most often when leafleting is that people don't want to waste the paper because of the trees that need to be cut down to create that paper. This creates an interesting dichotomy, since those of you who have read Livestock's Long Shadow or even the related press release will recall that the majority of land deforested in recent years is now being grazed by livestock. If only we had some way to compare any potential decrease in deforestation due to a decrease in livestock consumption from leafleting, with whatever deforestation may have been caused to print the booklets.

The fact regarding deforestation given in Livestock's Long Shadow is that, “By 2010 cattle are projected to be grazing on some 24 million hectares of Neotropical land that was forest in 2000.” This did not actually originate with the Livestock's Long Shadow report, but is actually attributed to an article published in the journal Global Environmental Change titled Projecting land use changes in the Neotropics: The geography of pasture expansion into forest. Since this article is only focused on neotropical areas, and the fact we are given relates to only grazing cattle, not all deforestation related to animal consumption is being included in the figure we have been given, but we will use it as a baseline for the minimum amount of recently forested land now being used to support our demand for animal products. 24 million hectares in the last decade, or 2.4 million hectares per year.

According to the USDA, worldwide production of beef and veal in 2010 is expected to be around 7.2 million tonnes. This is a slight decrease from a peak of around 7.6 million tonnes in 2007, but serves as a fairly accurate yearly estimate for the past decade. This means that for every tonne of meat, 1/3 of a hectare of neotropical forest is deforested ([2.4 Mha/yr] / [7.2 Mt/yr]), or 3.3 square meters per kilogram of beef.

I leaflet exclusively in the United States, where the total beef consumption in 2009 was 26.9 billion pounds, or about 40 kilograms per person. This means each person in the US contributes to about 130 square meters (40*3.3) of neotropical deforestation per year through their consumption of grazing beef and veal alone.

How many sheets of paper would be in that same 130 square meters of forest? Assuming Pokomoke State Forest in Maryland can serve as a fairly typical example of forest, I calculate that there is roughly 7300 board feet of wood per acre there. That would be roughly 1.8 board feet per square meter. (Pokomoke is mostly brushy forest as opposed to tall trees, which probably explains the low number). Doing some online research I see numbers ranging anywhere from 2000 to 76000 board feet per acre, with just under 10,000 seeming like a fair middle ground, so I will use the more pessimistic Pokomoke number in order to continue to favor beef in all of our estimates. One board foot of wood would weigh roughly 2 kilograms, which we will pessimistically estimate yields only 1 kilogram of paper. A typical density for printer paper is 20lbs (9.1kg) per ream (500 sheets). This would be equal to 55 sheets per kilogram. We have turned each square meter of forest into 1.8 kilograms of paper, so this would be 100 sheets of paper per square meter.

Out of that same 130 square meters deforested for beef production we could typically harvest roughly 13000 sheets of paper. Each booklet I hand out contains the equivalent of 16 sheets of paper, so even if out of every 100 booklets passed out, only one person reduces their consumption of beef by a mere 1 part in 8, our forests will still have come out on top.

I have reached this conclusion making every estimate along the way as beneficial to the pro-beef conclusion as could be reasonably argued. I have even left out important considerations in favor of printing booklets. Booklets are printed on lighter paper than printer paper, paper is predominantly made out of otherwise unusable wood scraps and recycled paper bits with only a fraction coming from newly harvested wood, and land used for logging is replanted once logging is completed. We have ignored land demands for non-grazing cattle and deforestation from cattle that wasn't caused in neotropical regions. No matter how I look at the problem, I am forced to come to the conclusion that leafleting for Vegan Outreach is ultimately beneficial in preventing deforestation as well.

Methodological Shortcomings

One aspect the methodology I have used cannot take into account is the motive for the deforestation. It is entirely possible that cattle farmers are merely taking advantage of land opened up by the logging industry, or that timber harvesters are merely collecting wood off of land that is going to be opened up for grazing in any case. Additionally I have treated world beef as if it is a single commodity, all bearing equally in any deforestation it may have caused, when in reality there is a huge variety in impact attributable to any given producer. The numbers used have been averaged and speak well to the average consumer, ignorant of the details in their food choices, who is being leafleted.

Once again, I would like to emphasize that I am not trying to promote veganism for environmental reasons, but I feel this example speaks well as to why the free distribution of information on paper nearly always outweighs any potential environmental cost.

Being Vegan is worse for the environment?

This past Thursday I leafleted a couple college campuses with Vegan Outreach materials to ensure that I didn't lose my place on the all time leafleting totals (nothing wrong with some healthy competition to help the animals). The first school I stopped at that day, West Valley College, was one of the most receptive schools I've ever been to. At West Valley College, however, I also talked to a young gentleman who tried to tell me that vegetarianism was actually worse for the environment and that the world couldn't sustain an all vegetarian human population. I wasn't out there trying to promote vegetarianism for environmental reasons, but I definitely didn't want environmental concerns to keep someone from giving fair consideration to non-human interests, so I mentioned that the error bars on any such study would have to be very large considering the difficulty of predicting what technologies might become practical under different economic circumstances, and that many estimates predict the earth can't sustain its current human population at all in the long run. I was being very modest since I certainly still believed there are environmental benefits to reducing our consumption of meat (in most cases), but this gentleman had not given me many details to work with. He dismissed my skeptical remarks adding that he had really looked into this in the past and was quite knowledgeable on the subject. He left me with the statement, “You should really look into it, man.” Needless to say I was still quite doubtful of his conclusion, but I am not one to pass up the chance to research a sketchy claim.

I began by doing a few Google searches to get an idea of where the claim may have originally come from: “Vegetarianism is worse for environment”, “Vegetarian bad for evironment”. All the top hits I got for these searches seemed to trace back to a single source. If I dug down a few pages into the results I found a couple older results, which generally traced back to the Weston A. Price foundation, but all the top results (that were relevant to my query) were published on or after Feb. 12, 2010. The earliest of these was an article published in The Telegraph titled, Becoming vegetarian 'can harm the environment'. Like all the other top results I was getting, this article in The Telegraph mentioned a Cranfield University study commissioned by the WWF. My task became clear. I had to track down this vaguely referenced study.

Luckily, the Telegraph article included a single quote from the study. “A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK.” This was the key I needed, and I was able to track this quote down to a pdf available on the WWF website. This study was affiliated with Cranfield University and was published a little less than a month prior to the Telegraph article. This was clearly the study being referenced. How Low Can We Go?: An assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from the UK food system and the scope for reduction by 2050.

My first thought was to check the methodology of this study, to make sure everything seemed appropriate and that it hadn't left out anything like forgetting to count feed crops toward livestock's impact, instead of putting it down as vegetarian food (I can hardly believe the things some people think we eat). The methodology was not just sound, but incredibly thorough, not just counting the feed toward livestock, but refrigeration, transportation, packaging, cooking, every single detail and bit of greenhouse gas seemed to be getting counted. I was beginning to think I may need to reconsider my views on the environmental consequences of vegetarianism, but first I needed to see the results to understand this conclusion for myself.

Very little of the study actually had to do with vegetarianism. The study was about the environmental (specifically in terms of greenhouse gasses) impact of our food choices, and vegetarianism only came up because one out of dozens of scenarios they looked into to mitigate future impact was adopting a no-meat diet. It seemed strange that all of the articles I had read had focused so much on this small aspect of the study, but it was what had attracted me to the articles in the first place, so I wasn't going to blame them for reporting on the bit that seemed interesting.

I still had not seen the original quote from The Telegraph that led me to this study in the first place, and as I read through the results they seemed to be in line what I would have expected. Beef seemed to be worst for the environment in nearly every area studied. Poultry was a far better (environmentally speaking) alternative to beef, and performed at roughly the same level most plant foods did. I was just waiting to come across some bombshell that would be an unexpected hit against vegetarianism. Production? No. Transportation? No. Packaging? No. Refrigeration? No. Disposal? No. Then I came to Table 24, which had results from their various scenarios for reducing future emissions (Click to enlarge).



Not only did no-meat reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it performed better than any other single measure looked at in the study even beating out such far-fetched alternatives as “zero fossil fuels”. I finished reading through the conclusion of the study and still did not find the quote from The Telegraph that had led me to this study in the first place. The conclusion did feel the need to mention the no-meat scenario however:

Diet provides single measures with big effects. In addition, these measures are technically feasible now. The most effective single measure (meat-free diet) gives a 20% reduction. The benefit of a vegetarian diet increases to about 38% when our estimates of LUC [Land Use Change] emissions are included, but this excludes the loss of soil carbon if UK grassland was converted to arable cropping. Our analysis of the effects of the production of substitutes leads to the conclusion that a broad reduction in livestock product consumption balanced by broad-based increases in crop product intake is a more feasible measure which avoids the land use burden associated with soy based livestock product analogues. A 66% reduction in livestock products delivers a 15% reduction in supply chain emissions. Moreover, reduction in ruminant production in particular will reduce methane emissions.

The main dietary changes examined would involve substantial social change. This is quite likely to be the largest barrier. Meat, milk and eggs have been part of our diet for centuries. While a substantial minority actively embrace a meat free or vegan diet, most consumers will continue to consume livestock products. The better nutritional properties of the animal products compared with the non-animal alternatives mean that vitamin supplementation is required. However manufacturing vitamin supplementation appears to be trivial in energy and GHG terms owing to the very small quantities needed.
(p.73 of pdf)

The conclusions were clearly quite in favor of adopting a vegetarian diet for environmental reasons, if anything slightly more favorable than I would have anticipated coming into this paper. The question remained, where had that quote from The Telegraph come from? I did a search of the pdf and found it, not in the conclusion, but rather in the introduction.

A switch from red to white meat will reduce supply chain emissions by 9% but this would increase our reliance on imported soy meal substantially. Our analysis indicates that the effect of a reduction in livestock product consumption on arable land use (which is a critical component of the link with deforestation) will depend on how consumers compensate for lower intakes of meat, eggs and dairy products. A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu and Quorn could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK. In contrast, a broad-based switch to plant based products through simply increasing the intake of cereals and vegetables is more sustainable. We estimate that a 50% reduction in livestock production consumption would release about 1.6 Mha of arable land (based on the yield of crops supplying the UK) used for livestock feed production. This would be off-set by an increase of about 1.0 M ha in arable land needed for direct crop consumption (based on UK yields). In addition to the release of arable land, between 5 and 10 Mha of permanent grassland would be available for extensification, other uses, or re-wilding. Such changes would open up ‘game-changing’ opportunities but there needs to be careful assessment made in the development policy if unintended consequences are to be avoided.
(p.8-9 of pdf)

It appears that in the middle of a paragraph describing how a reduction in livestock consumption and a switch to plant based products would be beneficial, a quote on how not all processed foods obey this trend has been quote mined. The mass release of the idea that vegetarianism is worse for the environment did not trace back to a study but rather to media reporting, and now I wanted to track down where the reporting originally went wrong.

I tracked down every English news article that I could find via Google in which this study was being referenced. The list is relatively short, but these sources were then picked up by blogs and echoed all over the internet. I took down several relevant bits of information about how each source reported on the study. Here are my results:

Date	Source	Title	Vegetarian	“How Low Can We Go”	Cranfield	Donal Murphy-Bokern
01/15/10	Farmers Guardian	Major report focuses on food chain emissions	No	Yes	No	No
01/18/10	WWF	Emissions from UK food industry far higher than believed	No	Yes	No	No
01/18/10	Farmers Weekly Interactive	Farm emissions 'far higher than thought'	Yes (in quote by dairy farmer)	Yes	No	No
01/22/10	Taylor Vinters	UK food system ''must reduce carbon emissions''	No	Yes	No	No
01/27/10	The Land	UK food system emissions higher than thought	No	Yes	No	No
02/18/10	Green Fudge	WWF study shows environmental impact of food	No	Yes	No	No
02/12/10	The Telegraph	Becoming vegetarian 'can harm the environment'	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
02/12/10	The Times Online	Tofu can harm environment more than meat, finds WWF study	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
02/13/10	The Med Guru	Tofu hurts environment more than meat—study	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
02/13/10	The Australian	Tuck in and save the planet: Eating red meat is the new way to be green	Yes	No	Yes	No
02/13/10	Daily Mail	How being vegetarian does more harm to the environment than eating meat	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
02/28/10	Meat Trade News Daily	Ireland - Vegetarians damaging the planet	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

Full Data Set

I have grouped the news stories into two separate categories and then sorted them by date. The first group seems to have done a good job of reporting on the story. They all mention the title of the study they are discussing, none of the mention Cranfield University, which is hardly mentioned in the study, and the only time vegetarianism is mentioned by any of them is in a quote given by a dairy farmer to one of the articles. The second group on the other hand did not report on the study appropriately. All of them mention the word vegetarian multiple times, they all mention Cranfield University, most of them include the name of a single author, Donal Murphy-Bokern, and not a single one remembers to include the title of the study they are discussing. It is clear that several of the later ones let their imaginations loose with even the quote mined version of the quote turning a study which has condemned beef and red meat along every step of the way into, “eating red meat is the new way to be green.”

Both The Daily Telegraph and The Times Online include the clearly quote mined quote in their articles. One hint that The Times may be the guilty party is that the Daily Telegraph references a quote from Liz O'Neil, the spokesperson for the Vegetarian Society, as being given to The Times, and the article in The Times also includes the same quote. In any case, these early stories were picked up and clearly manipulated by other news outlets who appear to not even have been aware of the name of the study they were addressing. If you can't be buggered to read a study that you are writing an article about, then perhaps it is time for you to get out of journalism. Everyone who reported on this as being a mark against vegetarianism clearly did not do their due diligence at best. There is no reason why any journalist should not have been able to track down and read the original study just as I did.

Now if only I had some way of tracking down that young man I talked to at West Valley College.

Dear Abby

I was reading the newspaper this morning and the headline for the Dear Abby column caught my attention.

You don't need to alter Thanksgiving meal to appease 2 vegans

Dear Abby: Last year for Thanksgiving, I made a special effort to get the entire family together for the traditional meal. All 13 of us met at my mother's home, and everyone was to bring a dish or two to share.
One of my brothers has two college-age daughters. Both are vegan, and he insisted that all the dishes we brought be vegan. I did it, but I resented it because I felt that two out of 13 people should not decide the menu. If they wanted vegan dishes, they should bring something for themselves, while the rest of us brought what we wanted.
My brother and nieces are now asking what we're doing this year for Thanksgiving. Frankly, I don't want to go through that again. Am I wrong in thinking everyone should not bend over backward for the vegan meal? I don't mind some of the menu accommodating them, but I don't think the whole dinner should be altered.
Turkey Eater in Texas

Dear Turkey Eater: Neither do I. And the response you should give your brother (and his daughters) is that you'll be serving a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year, so they can either bring something they will enjoy or make other plans.

I understand that being encouraged to bring our own vegan dishes is already much better than many of us vegans enjoy during Thanksgiving with family. Nonetheless, I absolutely disagree with Dear Abby and Turkey Eater in their conclusions.

The vegan daughters have a serious ethical reason for making their demands. It isn't about simply having the foods they prefer to them, but about being able to comfortably enjoy a meal with family without having to be plagued by the cruelty and suffering in every bite around them. They may be trying to throw their weight around a bit in order to save a couple extra turkey lives, and I absolutely support them in this.

Turkey Eater on the other hand is merely whining that he didn't get to enjoy the foods he preferred. He is correct that everyone should get their fair votes toward what foods they want, but food preferences are not something worth breaking up a family get together over. Serious ethical dilemmas are justified reason for the daughters to raise a concern, and I think Turkey Eater has gone much too far by choosing to cut off a part of his family because he is not willing to enjoy a perfectly fine meal with them if it cannot include his choice of flesh.

I encourage you to write Dear Abby and let her know how you felt about today's column. I am not going to write something for you to tell her, but you are welcome to take any ideas or quotes from the above in what you choose to send in.