Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[bennyboy]

I'm a vegetarian, nearly vegan.

Congratulations. You know you save roughly 500 lives a year as a veggie. 1,000 as a vegan.

Really? Links? I'm not seeing how the math works.

Let's say I eat a few strips of bacon every breakfast. A single pig probably provides hundreds of strips. So that's maybe a pig a month, so 12 pigs. Now, let's say I eat a sandwich with generous amounts of meat-- that's another several kilograms/months. If it's beef, that's probably a single cow per year, total. But let's say it's chicken, and I have 1/4 chicken worth of meat per day-- that's rougly 91 chickens/ year, but let's call it 100. Same for dinner-- how about a pound (1/2 kilo) of hamburger meat per day-- that's still maybe 1 or 2 cows' worth of meat. So the consumption of meat is directly causing maybe 200 or 300 animals AT MOST.

Now, let's take dairy. How many cows kill per person of milk? Not even 1, I'd wager. There are fewer than 10 million milk cows in the US, and surely almost 100% of people drink milk. But even if we say only 50% drink milk, that's still 150 million milk-drinkers. Given a lifespan of just ONE year, that's still 1/15 of a single cow directly destroyed per person drinking milk.

Now, if you include insects, voles, etc. killed in the industrial VEGETABLE farming processes, you have a legitimate point. But in that case, your fight is much more with industrial farming than with meat-eating.


You should know that I'm a strict vegetarian, and now vegan. But bullshit numbers are bullshit numbers. I want to see some math.