Can you think of ways to pay it forward to make our world better place?

Question

Helping a stranger pay for their groceries at the check out line, going to a nursing home to read/spend time with the patience etc. Tell me what can you do to pay it forward?

Answer 1

volonteer at after school programs, environmentally conscious clubs (help clean the rivers =).

Answer 2

Hmmm. That reminds me I lent the book to a friend and they haven't returned it. I hope they lent it to someone!

Answer 3

Please,at least think about it,give it a moment,every day when you sit down and eat, your choices of what you eat have a large impact on you,the enviroment,animals, and other humans,a larger impact than you may think.YOU have a choice,they don't.

1.Caring for the enviroment-
America's meat eating habits are bad.Half of the water used in the U.S. is used for animal agriculture.Our topsoil is damaged by raising animals for food,we only have about 6 inches of topsoil left,it takes 500 years for 1 inch of topsoil to be created.Every year in the US an area the size of Connecticut is lost to topsoil erosion--85% of this erosion is associated with livestock production.
.Animals create a huge amount of waste,a population of 60,000 pigs creates the same amount of waste as a group of 240,000 people,and our poop is flushed and filtered so the water can be used again,animals' waste is put into a manure lagoon or a small amount can be put back into soil,but most of it builds up.Think about what I said before
60,000 pigs=240,000 people
and now think of the 10 billion animals raised for food each year.Imagine the waste created.The number of farm animals on earth has risen fivefold since 1950: humans are now outnumbered three to one. Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.This is why biotechnology - whose promoters claim that it will feed the world - has been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the production of more lucrative crops for livestock. Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed the world's people. It cannot do both.

The impending crisis will be accelerated by the depletion of both phosphate fertiliser and the water used to grow crops. Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water. Aquifers are beginning the run dry all over the world, largely because of abstraction by farmers.Approximately 1.3 billion cattle populate the earth at any one time. They exist artificially in these vast numbers to satisfy the excessive human demand for the meat and by-products they provide. Their combined weight exceeds that of the entire human population. By sheer numbers, their consequent appetite for the world's resources, have made them a primary cause for the destruction of the environment. In the US, feedlot cattle yield one pound of meat for every 16 pounds of feed. (Within the 12-year period preceding 1992, the number of chickens worldwide increased 132% to 17.2 billion.)It takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. According to Newsweek, "The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer." In contrast, it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat.Feeding the average meat-eating American requires 3-1/4 acres of land per year. Feeding a person who eats no food derived from animals requires only 1/6 acre per year. Recent marginal growth in animal protein consumption in increasingly affluent developing countries has led to huge increases in the need for feed grains. In 1995, quite suddenly, China went from being an exporter to an importer of grain. World shortages are predicted as both populations and meat consumption rise together--an unsustainable combination. Early in 1996, the world was down to a 48-day supply of grain. According to Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, the world "may have crossed a threshold where even the best efforts of governments to build stocks may not be enough."The passage of local laws favoring massive corporate pork operations in North Carolina recently propelled the state into the number two spot in national hog production, practically overnight. In terms of manure, the state might as well have grafted the human population of New York City onto its coastal plain, times two! Studies by North Carolina State University estimate that half of the some 2,500 open hog manure cesspools (euphemistically termed "lagoons"), now needed as part of hog productions there, are leaking contaminants such as nitrate--a chemical linked to blue-baby syndrome--into the ground water. In the summer of 1995, at least five lagoons actually broke open, letting loose tens of millions of gallons of hog waste into rivers and on to neighboring farm lands. No mechanical method of retrieval exists that cleans contaminants from groundwater. Only nature is able to purify things again; and that could take several generations.Worldwide demand for fish, along with advances in fishing methods--sonar, driftnets, floating refrigerated fish packing factories--is bringing ocean species, one after another, to the brink of extinction. In the Nov., '95 edition of Scientific American, Carl Safina writes, "For the past two decades, the fishing industry has had increasingly to face the result of extracting [fish] faster than fish populations [can] reproduce." Research reveals that the intended cure--aquaculture (fish farming)--actually hastens the trend toward fish extinction, while disrupting delicate coastal ecosystems at the same time.A scientist, reporting in the industry publication Confinement, calculated in 1976 that the planet's entire petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 13 years if the whole world were to take on the diet and technological methods of farming used in the US. Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate in the US, as well as around the world, for meat production. If tomorrow people in the US made a radical change away from their meat-centered diets, an area of land the size of all of Texas and most of Oklahoma could be returned to forest.It is estimated that livestock production accounts for twice the amount of pollution in the US as that produced by industrial sources. Livestock in the US produce 20 times the excrement of the entire US population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their lives in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. One poultry researcher, according to United Poultry Concerns literature, explains: "A one-million-hen complex will produce 125 tons of wet manure a day." To responsibly store, disperse, or degrade this amount of animal waste is simply not possible. Much of the waste inevitably is flushed into rivers and streams. Becoming a vegetarian does more to clean up our nation's water than any other single action.Methane is one of the four greenhouse gasses that contributes to the environmental trend known as global warming. The 1.3 billion cattle in the world produce one fifth of all the methane emitted into the atmosphere.Meat contains no essential nutrients that cannot be obtained directly from plant sources. By cycling grain through livestock, we lose 90% of the protein, 96% of the calories, all of its carbohydrates, and all of its nutritional fiber.Agricultural engineers have compared the energy costs of producing poultry, pork and other meats with the energy costs of producing a number of plant foods. It was found that even the least efficient plant food was nearly 10 times as efficient in returning food energy as the most energy efficient animal food.Since so much fossil fuel is needed to produce it, beef could be considered a petroleum product. With factory housing, irrigation, trucking, and refrigeration, as well as petrochemical fertilizer production requiring vast amounts of energy, approximately one gallon of gasoline goes into every pound of grain-fed beef.The direct and hidden costs of soil erosion and runoff in the US, mostly attributable to cattle and feed crop production, is estimated at $44 billion a year. Each pound of feedlot beef can be equated with 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.A nationwide switch to a pure vegetarian diet would allow us to cut our oil imports by 60%.Compared to a vegan diet, three days of a typical American diet requires as much water as you use for showering all year (assuming you shower every day). acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef. In the U.S., 260 million acres of forest have been destroyed for use as agricultural land to support our meat diet (over 1 acre per person). Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds. For every acre cleared for urban development, seven acres are cleared to graze animals or grow feed for them.

2.Caring for animals-
To see how meat ends up on your plate go here(http://meat.org/)
Around eight billion animals are killed for food every year in the U.S. alone -- a number greater than the entire human population of the planet. Each meat-eating American eats the equivalent of about 24 animals per year. What's worse, modern agricultural methods mean that animals are raised in cramped confinement operations instead of the pastures from childhood picture books -- a practice known as factory farming. Chickens are crammed into cages with no free space, and are debeaked to keep them from pecking each other to death. Animals are pumped full of various powerful drugs to kill diseases resulting from filthy living conditions, and to make them grow or produce faster than nature intended. When cows and chickens stop producing as much milk and eggs as the younger animals, they're unceremoniously slaughtered and made into low-grade meat (fast food and pet food). For some, vegetarianism and veganism are ways to refuse to participate in the commodification of animals.In the official words of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), The Animal Welfare Act, as passed by the US Congress, "specifically excludes animals raised for food or fiber." With virtually no protection of farm animals (at either the federal, or on the state level), institutional cruelty and abuse have become the norm. In legal terms--which is where it counts in a for-profit environment--cruelty and abuse of farm animals is, for the most part, simply not against the law in the United States of America.Pigs in today's factory indoor facilities are likely to be stacked two and three decks high, each solitarily imprisoned in a bin--a cage just a bit larger than a pig's body. Those pigs who live through their stress and fright will adopt coping behaviors--from pacing, to repetitive rocking, to incessant biting of, or banging on, the bars. Industry blames the animals; it calls these behaviors "vices"So-called "redskins" are those chickens which--on the conveyer belts to their deaths--missed not only the brine-filled electrified stunning trough, but the knife that was to cut their throats. Their deaths occurred in the scald tank where feathers are loosened before plucking. Industry throws aside piles of them every day.Farm animals in our factory sheds today are supposed to have their drug intakes stopped at proscribed intervals prior to slaughter to avoid residues ending up in the final consumer product. Withdrawal schedules, however, are not always properly followed. With so many different drugs, the regimens can be complex, with written instructions often not very coherent. Due to the mechanized nature of today's conveyer belt feeding systems, troughs of old, drug-laden feed may not get cleaned away when withdrawal should begin. In addition, since farm animals are often fed animal waste as well as animal flesh, drug and pesticide residues continue to be recycled.About 98% of all milk in the US is produced using factory methods. Part of factory life for a cow includes dangerous levels of drugs administered to boost milk output. Due to selective breeding, cows already produce at least two and a half times the amount of milk of yesterday's pastured counterpart. Then, as of February, 1994, farmers were given the go-ahead to use the genetically engineered hormone Bovine Somatotropin (BST) on their herds. Designed to boost milk output by an additional 15 percent, milk per cow statistics are already showing the effects nationwide. A cow naturally has at least a 20-year lifespan; today's stressed out cows, however, become hamburger in less than 4 years, as a cow's ability to give milk quickly diminishes under modern conditions.In today's factory henhouse, certain lighting schedules will be employed to maintain an illusion of eternal spring--a technique that keeps egg production up to speed. When production drops off, the birds may be put through a brutal forced molt, induced by days of starvation and darkness. Some, and often many, of the birds will inevitably die in the process. Cruelty can be a regular occurrence at stockyards. Sick and crippled farm animals, called "downers," may lie suffering for days until dragged by chain to slaughter. The downer phenomenon would drastically be reduced if all stockyards refused to allow ranchers to make any money on them. (Slaughter of a living creature affords a rancher a better price than "dead-on-arrival" meat.) With every one of their natural instincts restricted and unfulfilled, pigs in today's factories will take to "tail-biting." Insane, bored and frustrated, these naturally intelligent and playful creatures may be driven to gnawing neurotically on one another's pig tails and hind ends. If not prevented, a mauled pig may die from an attack. Mauled pigs cannot be sold, so they become a problem to the producer. The answer? Pig tails are routinely amputated, and pigs are kept in total darkness except for feeding time.In egg factories all over the country, male chicks are weeded out and disposed of by "chick-pullers." Over half a million chicks a day are stuffed en masse into plastic bags where they are crushed and suffocated. Or they may be ground up while still alive to be fed to livestock or used as fertilizer.A male calf born to a cow--what does the farmer do with this useless by-product of the dairy industry? After the calf's birth, if he is not immediately slaughtered, more than likely he'll be taken to a veal factory. There, he will be locked up in a stall and chained by his head to prevent him from turning around for his entire life. He'll be fed a special diet without iron or roughage. He will be injected with antibiotics and hormones to keep him alive and to make him grow. He will be kept in darkness except for feeding time. The result? A nearly full-grown animal with flesh as tender and milky white as a newborn's. The beauty of the system from the standpoint of the veal industry is that meat from today's so called "crate" veal will still fetch the premium price it always did when such flesh came only from a baby calf, just a lot more of it.
A method used to crank up pork production is to take piglets away from their mothers soon after birth. The forced weaning allows the sow to end her lactating period so she can become pregnant again. To prevent piglet death due to the emotional loss, a mechanical teat may serve as a substitute. Tending to the mother's emotional loss has no economic value and so is given no consideration.Chicken feathers, guts, and waste water, which normally need to be discarded during processing, are routinely "recycled" back to the layer and broiler houses as feed. Industry experts believe that along with unclean slaughtering and processing techniques, this forced cannibalism is leading to the rampant salmonella epidemic in poultry plants. To produce foie gras, a duck or goose is force-fed huge quantities of grain three times a day with a feeder tube. This torturous process goes on for 28 days before slaughter, causing stomachs sometimes to burst. Livers, diseased and swollen to several times normal size by this process, are considered a delicacy which sell for about $12 an ounce. About 7,000 tons are produced worldwide per year.

3.Human rights-
Exploitation of animals goes hand in hand with exploitation of animals,the meat industry has proved this many times over and over.At the expense of their own hungry populations, producers in poor countries will choose to export luxury foods such as meat for sale to rich countries. Meat is much more profitable than subsistence crops such as rice, beans and vegetables.Meat industry apologists claim that livestock do not compete with humans for edible food because they live on forage humans cannot eat. In fact, 70% of all the grain produced in the US is fed to livestock.With an annual injury and illness incidence rate of 23.2 per 100 full-time workers, poultry processing is ranked as the nation's 11th most dangerous industry, nearly twice that of coal mining and construction. The high illness incidence exists because workers actually contract diseases from the sick animals in their midst. Workers in the meat packing industry suffer injuries in the workplace at 10 times the national average, primarily due to damage to tendons and nerves from repeating the same motion up to 8,000 times an hour. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly one in three slaughterhouse workers suffers from illness or injury every year, compared to one in 10 workers in other manufacturing jobs.The rate of repetitive stress injury for slaughterhouse employees is 35 times higher than it is for those with other manufacturing jobs.Employees who are injured at work—and most will be—are often fired if they take time off or try to file a health insurance or workers’ compensation claim. Human Rights Watch cites one slaughterhouse worker who reports: “They love you if you’re healthy and you work like a dog, but if you get hurt, you are trash. If you get hurt, watch out. They will look for a way to get rid of you before they report it. They will find a reason to fire you or put you on a worse job like the cold room, or change your shift so you quit. So a lot of people don’t report their injuries. They just work with the pain.” Another worker in a factory farm agrees, confessing: “I worry every day that I will break my hand or get hurt, but I never say anything for fear I’ll lose my job. No American would do this job. This is a **** job, for **** money."The farmed-animal industry often lures immigrants far away from their homes with false promises of good jobs—one meat company even bussed workers from the Mexican border to a homeless shelter in Minnesota! In some slaughterhouses, two-thirds of the workers are immigrants who cannot speak English, and according to the former safety director for ConAgra, “[I]n some plants, maybe a third of the people cannot read or write in any language.” Factory farms and slaughterhouses set up shop in the poorest regions of the United States because they know that they can use poor and uneducated people in these areas to do their dirty work for low wages. The farmed-animal industry has also been condemned for exploiting children—kids in their early teens have even died while working in animal-processing plants, and Multinational Monitor magazine called Tyson Foods one of the world’s “Ten Worst Corporations” because it hires people in the U.S. who are too young to work legally.When workers try to unionize, the industry uses illegal intimidation and harassment tactics to ensure that pro-union employees are silenced. According to Human Rights Watch, “Many workers who try to form trade unions and bargain collectively are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized for their exercise of the right to freedom of association.”One factory farm worker sums up his job this way: “We’re disposable to them. We’re like a machine. I don’t think they see us as real people. I need this job. I feed my family with this job, but it’s not right.”One worker says, “The chain goes so fast that it doesn’t give the animals enough time to die. People don’t have enough time to wash their knife if it falls on the floor.”Another worker says, “The line is so fast, there is no time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull and you have to cut harder. That’s when it really starts to hurt, and that’s when you cut yourself.”22 Despite the fact that workers are getting hurt because they’re struggling to keep up, the farmed-animal industry continues to put profits over people by continuing to demand faster line speeds.The overuse of antibiotics on factory farms has also led to strains of bacteria that are antibiotic-resistant, and when workers are infected with these supergerms, they cannot be treated with conventional medicines. People who eat the carcasses of these animals are also at risk for serious illness. Exposure to the chemicals used to process and store animal flesh is also a major hazard for workers. In July 2006, for example, 22 workers at a chicken slaughterhouse in Oklahoma were taken to the hospital after an ammonia tank leaked.Slaughterhouses abound with dangerous equipment that is often operated by immigrants and poor, rural Americans who can’t read the instructions and haven’t been properly trained. Sometimes training consists of little more than watching a video, and the up to 400 percent job turnover rate at some slaughterhouses means that plants are usually staffed with new people who run a much higher risk of being hurt or accidentally hurting someone else. The animal-processing industry usually makes workers pay for their safety gear out of their own pocket, despite the fact that many of the workers are too poor even to feed their families.As a result of the poor training and the industry’s blasé attitude toward employee safety, anyone who works in a slaughterhouse runs the risk of being hurt by the powerful machines that cut and kill animals. Maria Martinez, a worker at a Tyson plant, told CorpWatch about a man who lost an arm at the plant in 2003. “[He] cut off his arm with a hock-cutter [a machine that cuts through cows’ knee joints]. The company had taken off the arm guards from the hock-cutter and the machine wasn’t working right because of production. All they care about is production, not the safety of the workers.”If the farmed-animal industry would invest more time and money into properly training and equipping its employees, many injuries and deaths could be avoided. But factory farms and slaughterhouses have not taken the appropriate steps to create safer working conditions because slowing down the lines or buying safety gear would cut into the companies’ bottom line. Human Rights Watch explains, “These are not occasional lapses by employers paying insufficient attention to modern human resources management policies. These are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.”The people who come in at night to clean the slaughterhouses are especially at risk for serious injury—the air is heavy with fog from hoses that spray steaming water and chlorine onto the equipment, and the workers cannot see more than a few feet in front of them. Many of the killing machines are still running, and the cleaners have to climb onto them in order to clean off all the blood, grease, and feces that have accumulated from the thousands of animals killed that day. Inevitably, some of the cleaners are hurt or killed by the equipment that they’re trying to clean. An OSHA report notes some recent accidents involving cleaners:38

“Cleaner killed when hog-splitting saw is activated.”
“Cleaner dies when he is pulled into a conveyer and crushed.”
“Cleaner loses legs when a worker activates the grinder in which he is standing.”
“Cleaner loses hand when he reaches under a boning table to hose meat from a chain.”
In his best-selling book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser lists some other fatal accidents involving cleaners in slaughterhouses: “At the Monfort plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, Richard Skala was beheaded by a dehiding machine. Carlos Vincente … was pulled into the cogs of a conveyer belt at an Excel plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and torn apart. Salvador Hernandez-Gonzalez … had his head crushed by a pork-loin processing machine at an IBP plant in Madison, Nebraska. The same machine had fatally crushed the head of another worker, Ben Barone, a few years earlier. At a National Beef plant in Liberal, Kansas, Homer Stull climbed into a blood-collection tank to clean it, a filthy tank thirty feet high. Stull was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes. Two coworkers climbed into the tank and tried to rescue him. All three men died. Eight years earlier, Henry Wolf had been overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes while cleaning the very same tank; Gary Sanders had tried to rescue him; both men died …. The [OSHA] fine was $480 for each man’s death.” Schlosser concludes, “The men and women who now clean the nation’s slaughterhouses may arguably have the worst job in the United States.”Under the Bush administration, OSHA has also done the farmed-animal industry a big favor by deciding that it is no longer necessary to keep track of on-the-job repetitive stress injuries. The rate of repetitive stress injury for slaughterhouse employees is 35 times higher than in other manufacturing jobs, but the meat industry doesn’t have to take these injuries seriously now that the government doesn’t even care enough to ask employers to keep a record of them. Instead of setting a tougher ergonomic standard to combat repetitive stress injuries in slaughterhouses, OSHA made the problem go away by refusing to keep track of these injuries at all.Workers’ compensation often fails to provide support for those injured at their jobs in slaughterhouses or factory farms. Because many of the workers cannot speak English, they cannot fill out the forms necessary to make workers’ compensation claims. Managers often lie to injured employees to make sure that they don’t file for workers’ compensation—for instance, they may tell workers that their insurance will only pay their medical bills if they agree to say that they were injured while at home..Roughly one out of three workers is injured in animal-processing plants in a given year, and there are often on-site clinics to deal with the constant stream of hurt employees.50 The nurses and doctors who staff these clinics are often described as being extensions of management and may tell workers that they were injured at home, or they may pressure workers not to fill out accident reports. The clinics often send hurt workers back to the line even when they have suffered serious injuries.

One worker told Human Rights Watch of this failed attempt to get compensation for a work-related injury: “I kept having pain in my back. My supervisor wouldn’t let me go to the clinic. He said there was too much work and I couldn’t leave the line. I woke up the next day and couldn’t move. When I went to the clinic, they told me I got hurt at home. They said that the regular insurance would pay my medical bills if I agreed that I got hurt at home. They asked me to sign a paper but it was in English and I didn’t understand it, so I didn’t sign it. I quit because the pain was so bad. Nobody paid my medical bills, neither the company insurance nor workers’ comp.”

From being kicked in the chest by a dying cow to suffering from chronic bacterial infections because of the exposure to animal feces, working in a slaughterhouse entails risks that only desperate migrant workers and rural Americans are willing to take.Slaughterhouses in the U.S. run radio advertisements in countries in Latin America to recruit workers, and the animal-processing giant IBP has a labor office in Mexico City.Some companies even bus workers from their homes south of the border to the slaughterhouses where they will work—GFI America, Inc., an animal-processing corporation that makes hamburger patties for chain restaurants—even bussed workers from the Mexican border to a homeless shelter in Minnesota. The company had told the immigrants that they would be given apartments, and it tried to make peace with officials at the homeless shelter by offering to donate some hamburgers to the shelter’s cafeteria. Understandably outraged, one county official said, “Our job is not to provide subsidies to corporations that are importing low-cost labor.”Immigrant workers are easy prey for the meat industry. After they are brought to the U.S., they’re often so desperate to make money to send to their families back home that they’ll take any job without complaint. If they’re being treated unfairly, they don’t have any choice but to continue working for the farmed-animal industry, and if they become injured and can no longer work, they are often stuck in the U.S. with no job and no money to buy a bus ticket home.

Immigrant workers are often illiterate and unable to speak English, which makes it more difficult for them to learn about their rights and to organize a union. They are easy to manipulate because they are terrified of being fired or deported. Some plant managers have been accused of knowingly hiring undocumented workers and then threatening to fire them unless they buy fake social security numbers from the managers for hundreds of dollars. One undocumented worker who used to work at a chicken slaughterhouse in Shelbyville, Tennessee, told Fortune magazine, “Supervisors knew who had green cards and who didn’t. And they used it against us. If we didn’t do what they wanted, they would threaten to call immigration.”Immigrant workers are also cheaper to keep on payroll because they are often reluctant to demand benefits like health-care coverage, even though they are working in a dangerous environment where they will likely be injured. By the time immigrant workers realize the importance of having good health care or workers comp plans, it is often too late.“Elena Cardona” is just one of the countless immigrants who have been exploited and then tossed aside by the farmed-animal industry. Tempted by the promise of a steady job with good wages, she left her children with her mother in Honduras to travel to North Carolina and work in a Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse. She says, “I worked at least 10 hours a day, into the early morning hours. They give you only three minutes to go to the bathroom and hardly 10 to eat. They used to take advantage of us because we did not have work permits, and they always cheated us. Sometimes they’d only pay us half of our wage.”

The Smithfield slaughterhouse where she worked kills 36,000 pigs a day, or more than 2,000 an hour. More than half of the slaughterhouse’s workers are Hispanic immigrants. Cardona was forced to leave her job after 20 months because she was hurt while trying to lift a large load, and like many meat-industry immigrant workers, she suddenly found herself injured, far from home, and without a job or workers’ compensation.In its continuous quest to find cheaper labor, the farmed-animal industry has also turned to exploiting children. Multinational Monitor magazine has labeled Tyson one of the world’s “Ten Worst Corporations” because of its use of child labor. Kids have even been killed while working in slaughterhouses in the United States—a 15-year-old died, and a 14-year-old was seriously hurt in separate incidents at Tyson’s animal-processing plants. “One teenager died and another suffered serious injuries because this company ignored the law,” the U.S. Labor Department noted. “It was illegal for either one of them to be employed in the kind of work Tyson’s hired them to do.” The company was fined for using child labor, but the exploitation of children persists in the farmed-animal industry.

4.Protecting your health-
It's no secret that compared to average meat-eaters, vegetarians generally live longer, are less likely to be overweight, suffer far fewer incidences of cancer and heart disease, and have more energy. These facts have been consistently borne out by decades of scientific research. The largest epidemiological study ever conducted (the China-Oxford-Cornell study) concluded that those eating the amount of animal foods in a typical American diet have seventeen times the death rate from heart disease, and, for women, five times the rate of breast cancer, than those who get 5% or less of their protein from animal foods. In 1980, six years after the pesticide dieldrin was banned, the USDA destroyed two million packages of frozen turkey products contaminated with dieldrin. (And such contamination can routinely occur without detection.) In 1974, the FDA found dieldrin in 85% of all dairy products and 99.5% of the American people. The EPA discovered that the breast milk of vegetarian women contained far lower levels of pesticides than that of average Americans. A study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "The highest levels of contamination in the breast milk of the vegetarians was lower than the lowest level of contamination…(in) non-vegetarian women… The mean vegetarian levels were only 1-2% as high as the average levels in the U.S."An animal-based diet is invariably high in cholesterol, animal protein and saturated fat, which combine to raise the level of cholesterol in the blood--the warning signal for heart disease and stroke. Due mainly to the meat-centered diet of most Americans, these two diseases account for nearly 50% of all deaths in the US.The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group of 3,000 physicians, estimated the annual health care costs directly resulting from the nation's meat-centered diet to be between $23.6 billion and $61.4 billion--comparable to similar health cost estimates associated with cigarette smoking.Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), dubbed Mad Cow Disease because of the apparent mental torture cows display before death, is an always-fatal neuro-degenerative cattle disease caused by incredibly virulent and mysterious infectious proteins called prions. An outbreak in Great Britain had by early 1996 stricken around 160,000 cows. Circumstantial evidence pointed to the British practice of mixing the remains of sheep, including brains and bones, into cows' feed as the cause of the outbreak. This apparent species-to-species inoculation is what makes all forms of spongiform encephalopathy (known to affect other mammals as well) so alarming. Are cow-eating humans the next victims? At press-time, evidence pointed to a certain strain of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) as being the human variant of spongiform encephalopathy. Grim predictions tell of up to 500,000 Britons a year falling to this disease due to their past consumption of BSE-infected cows. Prion-based diseases often have incubation periods in terms of decades, so the saga is sure to continue. In the meantime, since using the remains of dead animals in feed has been integral to agricultural operations in the US for years, BSE, or the chance of some future American version of it, is one more reason to think twice before biting into that char-broiled burger.Harvey Diamond, co-author of the Fit for Life books, writes, "the list of ailments that can be linked to dairy products is so extensive there is hardly a problem it doesn't at least contribute to." Consumption of cow's milk is linked to colitis, dysfunctions of the thyroid gland, and headaches--even Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Lou Gehrig's disease and Multiple Sclerosis. Parent advisor Dr. Benjamin Spock has said that cow's milk, "causes internal blood loss, allergies and indigestion, and contributes to some cases of childhood diabetes." Dr. Spock even linked milk to the risk for anemia in babies. The common cold, as well as allergies to dust, cats and pollen, are more likely to go away when cow's milk is taken out of the diet. At least 95% of all toxic chemical residues in the American diet come from meat, fish, dairy products and eggs. This is because such residues are stored in fat. Each step up the food chain serves to amplify the consumption of toxins. Fish, especially, have very long food chains. Avoiding fish to avoid toxic residue may not be a sufficient preventative measure, however, as one third of the world's fish catch is fed to livestock. Due to the excessive use of pesticides, insecticides and petrochemical fertilizers on cropland, the injection of hormones and antibiotics into farm animals, and the abundance of PCBs and mercury in our oceans, there is toxicity in the flesh of all animals people eat. More than ever, it is wise to eat "low on the food chain," with plant food being the lowest and safest.The high incidence of constipation, hemorrhoids, hiatal hernias, diverticulosis, spastic colon, and appendicitis in humans corresponds very closely to today's widespread adoption of high fat, low fiber, meat-centered diets.The Allied naval blockade during World War I of German-occupied territories in 1917 forced Denmark most dramatically into nationwide vegetarianism. The death rate there from disease during the period dropped by 34%.More than a third of the veal calves tested in a 1995 undercover investigation done by the Humane Farming Association came up positive for clenbuterol--an acutely toxic and illegal animal drug. Subsequently it was found that many veal producers in the US had knowingly purchased and used the drug for their herds over a five-year period. This in itself is frightening; but worse is the revelation that the FDA and the USDA worked to protect the veal industry from scandal by maintaining a coverup about the clenbuterol use of which it became aware.Poultry processors are not required by the USDA to check for salmonella bacteria in poultry. A 1978 USDA rule still in effect accepts a "chill tank" bath for bird carcasses as a sufficient counter-measure. Dunking a chicken carcass through this bath, now known as the "fecal soup," has been likened to a rinse in your toilet. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, 25% of all chicken sold in the US carry the salmonella bacteria--a conservative estimate. The USDA says that salmonella poisoning may be responsible for as many as 4 million illnesses and 3 thousand deaths per year.According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, cardiovascular diseases caused 954,000 deaths (42% of all deaths) in 1993. Total direct cost to sufferers added up to $126.4 billion. Seventy-two percent of the deaths were due to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), a disease strongly linked to a meat-based diet.The USDA only inspects about one out of every 250,000 animals,less than 1%.For every 100 slaughterhouse workers there are roughly only 4 inspectors.When they do test it is for less than 10% of toxins and pesticides.

If you read this far,thanks.If you at least consider it,you can message me.You should check out these sights

Issues related to meat consumption
http://goveg.com/theissues.asp

Vegetarian Starter Kit
http://goveg.com/order.asp