(1) Animal Suffering
Non-human animals used for food, clothing, entertainment, and commercial research are sentient beings who are fully capable of feeling pain and experiencing psychological trauma; the conditions under which they are raised subject them to merciless suffering and untimely and often painful deaths. Since medical research has discredited the popular claim that animal products are indispensable for good nutrition (quite the contrary!), this suffering and death is entirely unnecessary in the overwhelming majority of cases, unless one is prepared to interpret mere aesthetic enjoyment on the part of human beings as a necessity. Read all about it in Tom Regan's Empty Cages.

(2) Poor Environmental Stewardship
Animal husbandry, especially in its modern industrial form, has devastating consequences for the environment: it requires wasteful allocation of land to grow grain to feed animals (when it could be feeding people); it requires astronomical amounts of water, and fossil fuels for herbicides, pesticides, and transportation; it generates massive amounts of waste (manure) and greenhouse gasses (cow flatulence produces almost 20% of the methane), and animal and chemical waste runoff causes air and water pollution. Read all about it in Michael Jacobson's Six Reasons for a Greener Diet.

(3) Exploitation of the Disenfranchised
Factory farms and slaughterhouses are among the most dangerous and degrading places to work (not to mention to live): the stench is unbearable, the work environment is filthy and full of peril (physically and psychologically), the acts of cruelty that workers must perform are horrific, and these operations prey on illegal aliens and other disenfranchised persons who have limited employment options.Read all about it in Gail Eisnitz's Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment inside the U.S. Meat Industry.

(4) Global Injustice
International companies exploit arable land in the developing world (which could be used to grow food for the undernourished people who live there) in order to grow grain to feed animals that only the richest countries in the world can afford to eat. More importantly, in order to keep grain prices low, the government pays billions of dollars per year in subsidies which harm the global poor (i.e., the 20% of people in the world who live off of less than what a $1/day would buy in the USA, and the 50% that live off of less than $2). The Economist, The Lancet and other publications have estimated that discontinuing the subsidies and reallocating these resources more responsibly could save millions of people a year from unnecessary suffering and death. Read all about it in John Robbins's The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and the World.

(5) Local Injustice
Industrial agriculture has destroyed rural communities, putting family farmers either out of business or into servitude to large, unscrupulous corporations who take virtually all of the profits and none of the risks; the result is that land which, when wisely stewarded, can support the growth of hundreds of species of plants (a practice that has a regenerative effect on the soil) is now used to grow genetically modified corn and soybeans to feed factory farmed animals. Read all about it in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

(6) Poor Stewardship of Personal Health
The most current scientific and nutritional findings provide substantive evidence that eating animal products is a direct cause of “diseases of affluence” such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, breast and intestinal cancers, Alzheimers, and many others; meanwhile, the same studies show that the consumption of a whole foods, plant based diet not only reduces one’s risk of getting these illnesses, but can mitigate and even reverse them when they’ve already taken hold. Read all about it in Dr. Kerrie Saunders's The Vegan Diet As Chronic Disease Prevention.

(7) Poor Stewardship of Public Resources
Personal health crises lead to public health crises, and this is proving true in the United States, where we spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually on medication and invasive surgical procedures to treat “diseases of affluence” that can be prevented by the more responsible consumption of a whole foods, plant based diet. Read all about it in Dr. T. Colin Campbell's The China Study.