Meatatarian Mug

A person who eats meat virtually to the exclusion of vegetables. The people who call themselves this, who think they are saving the environment by "saving vegetables for those who will eat them", or bringing down the production costs of vegetables as meat-eaters, are not only flat-out wrong but immediately brand themselves as never having taken a post-secondary institutional science course (or remembered what they were taught in school about trophic energy levels). As a refresher: In Ecology, you learn that it costs much more energy to create a tertiary consumer than it does to create a primary consumer, and that only 10% of the energy used on each trophic level actually gets passed to the next "higher" level on the food chain: the rest is lost in waste and reduced output of information and energy. In other words, it costs much more energy to create a Fox or a Hawk than it does to create a vegetarian Great Ape. Why? Because of the amount of food that it took (entirely dependent on plants as a keystone species), the energy, time and circumstance that it took each animal in that food chain in order to "be", while the Ape skips that whole process and eats directly from the fruits/vegetables of the earth. Thus, much less vegetables are consumed in the long run because it takes 85% of our food in America to feed livestock for slaughter that could instead be going around the world to feed hungry people 3 times over, while currently half the world is starving. Calling this an act of "saving the environment" is probably the biggest lie yet: the largest and number one source of CO2 and methane gas emissions in America is surprisingly not the cars and coal companies (although they are a large factor and constitute 39%), but a large vague sector called Industry. According to the Best-Meat-Nation (who recruit employees to work for their meat-packing plant), the number one industry in America is Agriculture. What is the number one largest sector of Agriculture? The Meat and Dairy Industry. The slaughterhouses themselves produce the most greenhouse gases, and as it further traps the sun rays that should be disappating back into space from our troposphere, Also, read about cow flatulence and the methane gases they emit. Their normally healthy bacteria flora that they are normally in symbiosis with has been thrown off balance from not only their enslavement (over 40% of dairy cows are lame and can not walk by the time it is time to get on the slaughter truck and must be dragged), their forced pregnancies to keep dairy cows lactating and the hormones pumped into them, but a once primary consumer (cattle and chicken, which are used to eating seeds/grains and vegetables only) are now turned into Tertiary consumers. The humane society, unbeknownst to most people, take the pile of cats and dogs (or rabbits, horses, guinea pigs, etc.) euthanized on a routine basis, chop them up and add them to cattle and chicken feed. So really, whenever you bite into that "juicy" hamburger (with a good probability of toxins, round worms, pin worms, tape worms, etc.), you are most likely eating poor "Fido" or "Tiger" that you put down last week...and it's really terrible to think that in a sense, we are forcing other animals to be cannibals. Another myth to bust, when people think eating meat helps save the environment: the antibiotics/hormones pumped into the cattle and chickens just to keep them alive from the terrible conditions they are kept in, ends up later in our ground water sources. This is the #1 worst water pollution problem we face. This is called Non-Point Source Ground Pollution (because people generally don't like to admit where it comes from as it comes from slaughterhouses everywhere, and to do so would be to make a change, a change for more compassionate/thinking and personal awareness lifestyles.). The overstressed nature of the animals produced chemicals that, upon their fear, pain and death ends up washing and leaching down into the earth which ends up in our rivers, estuaries, lakes, the chemicals from which end up killing ecosystems as bacteria is forced to use up the oxygen in the water to compensate, killing fish, algae and aquatic ecosystems that other animals are dependent upon. Our drinking water contains it and it can not be filtered out. We will feel and live the affects of the choices of millions of people even as vegetarians who must drink the same water, unless people everywhere make choices for the better, and that is why education on these topics (rather than blind jokes about how choices creating a dying world are "okay") is not only important but vital to living in a sustainable world. PS--Plants can live without animals. Animals can NOT live without plants. Through acid precipitation that destroys forests, such as the once-lush Green Mountain forests of Vermont, and degree differences in global warming that will melt icecaps and send many genus and species (such as crabs who can not handle even 1 degree difference changes) into extinction, we must make sure that we be considerate guests to other species on this blue-and-green planet, that we only take the minimum of what we need, and be sure to give back to the best of our ability.