My Top 10 Reasons to go vegan

By Ingrid E Newkirk.

1. To get meat, you must pay someone to draw a knife across an innocent creature’s throat; to get cheese, yoghurt and milk, you must steal the milk meant for a baby. Animals are not property. They are sentient individuals with unique personalities and loving families. Animals want to live, just like us. We have no right to take their lives from them, to use them or exploit them in any way.

2. Who doesn’t want to live a longer and healthier life? Studies show that living vegan increases life expectancy by an average of seven years and the threat of diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, certain cancers – particularly of the sexual organs like breast – are drastically cut on a vegan diet. Netflix’s trending film What The Health demonstrates the

many health benefits of a vegan diet.

3. We must object to sex discrimination, and the fact is that female animals are exploited for their bodies (eggs, milk, their young taken away). Females are repeatedly impregnated and then they are sent to slaughter at a young age. Male babies in the dairy and egg industries have no use and so are killed soon after birth.

4. It helps us safeguard our children, partners, parents and other loved ones. To keep everyone we care about on a healthy track, being vegan allows us to set a fine example and help them learn to cook vegan, eat vegan and be vegan, and stick around longer. Watch Forks Over Knives on Netflix for real-life examples of this.

5. It is a great way to explore and expand your taste sensations to discover new products, new recipes and new cuisines. You don’t crave a nap after lunch because vegan foods do not weigh you down, as all the top athletes in tennis, motor sports, long-distance running and even weight lifting nowadays can attest.

6. Animal agriculture is a leading cause of Amazon deforestation, ocean dead zones, mass species extinctions and global climate change. Intensive dairy and meat production means the water sources wildlife depends upon are polluted with offal and chemicals, causing fish and birds to die. Vegans do not contribute through their purchases and eating habits to deforestation which forces native peoples off the land. Watch Cowspiracy on Netflix for more information.

7. Going vegan helps alleviate hunger and poverty. An estimated 800 million people of the world’s population suffer from chronic hunger. However, we currently produce enough crops to feed 10 billion people. This is because a majority of grain production is fed to animals. Meat, dairy, eggs and leather are a huge drain on our planet’s resources.

8. It makes real your view of yourself as a decent and kind person. You stop being a

hypocrite, saying something but being another. It allows you to learn and share a

new language; your newfound knowledge about all aspect of being a vegan, from the

moral to the practical to the health to the environmental will allow you to converse fluently

with anyone who is inquisitive.

9. On your deathbed, you’ll be able to look back on your life and know that you lived in accordance with a sense of justice toward others. Veganism allows you to align your actions with the compassionate beliefs you already have. It means you understand that might does not make right, and you do not take from others, including their lives, simply because you are powerful enough to do so.

10. You know it’s the right thing to do.

• Ingrid E Newkirk is the president and founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the author of One Can Make a Difference, Let’s Have a Dog Party!  50 Awesome Ways Kids Can Help Animals, Making Kind Choices, The PETA Celebrity Cookbook, 250 Things You Can Do to Make Your Cat Adore You, Free the Animals, and The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights. Visit peta.org for more information.