Those sort of statistics are created by calculating that a chicken eats a said amount of corn, or grain, which is farmed using petro-chemical fertilizers, and gas guzzling tractors, not to mention carbon emitted through the practice of fallow fields. Such feeds are transported by truck to the factory farms where the chickens, cows and pigs (just as beautiful of creatures as your beloved pets) are raised in often abhorrent conditions.

Of course, if you still think these stats are bunk, add up the transportation of the animals to slaughter, then packaging (in cans or plastic which of course use fossil fuels) and again, more fossil fuels consumed through additional transportation to retail outlets, where they sit on shelves in a heated or air conditioned box store, and are finally driven in your 4x4 to your suburban home.

Furthermore if your dog eats beef, instead of chicken, theres the added fun of methane (which cows can produce abundantly due to their unnatural diet of corn, which their stomachs aren't evolved to properly digest without the added methane creation, but makes them fatter faster). Methane is a much more powerful GHG (measured by it's ability to trap infrared radiation as well as its longer decay rate in the atmosphere).

Personally, I think you should get rid of your car before your pet, but that's because I understand the psychological importance of pets in today's age of "social networking." Also, bikes are fucking fun to ride, and you feel great after a month or so of bicycle commuting.

Oh, and if I haven't pissed off pet lovers enough by backing these QI statistics, think about how many people will starve to death while your obese dog bongo fills up your back yard with shit today.

This is how I've lived for some time. I realized during my 20s that empathy is extended to those we see aspects of ourselves in. It makes me both mad at and feel pity for people who use the term "bleeding heart liberal", since they have identified themselves as empathy-impaired and utterly unfit for any role in governing. It's why I don't hate terrorists, but pity them, realizing the immense pain they must have endured to snuff out all sense of empathy in their hearts. We are all related, as was mentioned in the video (although the Adam and Eve bit was a huge over-simplification).

And I am slowly developing a sense of empathy toward all animals (rather than just those we consider pets). I can tell because I am starting to feel more and more guilt when eating meat and other animal products. After all, we are animals too. And I would not want to live and die like on some factory farm.

video is not working for me. But my mentality is that meat is meat. You dont discriminate because its got a familiar face, humans have this un written rule of if its not your own kind then its fair game. hah I made a pun far as I know cannibalism is frowned upon.

*edit to say it worked and I watched it, feeling are still the same, the only thing I seen in this video to compare is factory farming of chicken. Meats meat.. tired of people not taking responsibility for what eating other animals means to the animal being eaten. Although I dont at all condone the living conditions. Nore do I condone having a billion people in a country and stacking them on top of each other in cubicle domiciles.

In reply to this comment by Gibletses:
This is the cost of maintaining almost 7 billion humans. It's the cost. Pay it or perish.

When the US incorporated (1776), there were only one tenth the number of people there are now. Eliminate the factory farms and destructive ag then watch five billion people eat YOU.

For the veganoids; destructive ag (deep-till, fertilize, gm seed, irrigate, harvest, repeat) -- the process used to produce your tasty soy curd -- kills more animals than all of the factory meat production combined. Mostly through destruction of habitat. Most species extinction results from loss of habitat to farming so that you have food that makes you smug and makes other people assume you're feeble minded. (Guess what...)

In order for you to be smug behind a steamy pile of curd, thousands of animals are killed outright or die from habitat loss. The great plains now produce wheat, soy, and corn (for now...until the topsoil is gone). Do you realize how many elk, bison, wolves, foxes, voles, skunks, etc. were killed to do this? Do you know what the run-off from those crops does to streams, rivers, and the ocean? Death on a massive scale, that's what. Vegans are the worst hypocrites of them all.

I'm sorry, but your argument makes no sense. The bulk of current soy and corn crops right now are used for animal feed, in a process that only produces 1 calorie of meat for every 7 calories of vegetables used. Reducing, or removing, meat production could effectively halve the amount of farmland which needs to be sowed and maintained.

Livestock is the most ineffective way to produce food and nutrition. By reducing it you could effectively support larger populations of humans with fewer crops grown.

Just to hammer the point in, a lifestyle focused on less meat and more vegetables would require LESS farmland and agriculture, not MORE.

This is the cost of maintaining almost 7 billion humans. It's the cost. Pay it or perish.

When the US incorporated (1776), there were only one tenth the number of people there are now. Eliminate the factory farms and destructive ag then watch five billion people eat YOU.

For the veganoids; destructive ag (deep-till, fertilize, gm seed, irrigate, harvest, repeat) -- the process used to produce your tasty soy curd -- kills more animals than all of the factory meat production combined. Mostly through destruction of habitat. Most species extinction results from loss of habitat to farming so that you have food that makes you smug and makes other people assume you're feeble minded. (Guess what...)

In order for you to be smug behind a steamy pile of curd, thousands of animals are killed outright or die from habitat loss. The great plains now produce wheat, soy, and corn (for now...until the topsoil is gone). Do you realize how many elk, bison, wolves, foxes, voles, skunks, etc. were killed to do this? Do you know what the run-off from those crops does to streams, rivers, and the ocean? Death on a massive scale, that's what. Vegans are the worst hypocrites of them all.

I'll trust a person who likes their chick pulp wrapped in bacon, deep fried, smothered in cheese, and served in a bowl of gravy before I'll waste spit on a hypocritical vegan retard.

I, as another poster here, grow my own food in a sustainable manner (no-till method) and raise my own livestock in a sustainable manner. Where does YOUR food come from?

When sharks, crocodiles and tigers start taking an interest in the humane killing of humans for food, I will take an interest in the treatment of chickens. Granted, humans aren't often on the menu...but still.

I'm pretty sure if we took away all factory farming and I had to go out into the wild to hunt my own meat, the impaling arrows I use to kill chickens will somehow not cause less pain then the grinder or de-beaker and the spear or knife I use to kill larger game will increase the animal's stress level significantly more than a quick spike in the brain.

Some people live in a fantasy world where nature is not cruel and we are somehow not a product of nature. I guess it's easy to get confused when your meat comes prepackaged in neat foam containers and you have the luxury of sitting comfortably while demonizing the people who created it for you.

My body needs meat and if I had to jump on the animals back and rip it's throat out with my teeth...well, I'd just buy more dental floss.

>> ^HollywoodBob:
Factory farming is a necessary evil, there's too many people for us all to raise our own livestock.

Everything's a necessary evil until you decide to change your priorities. Slavery was a necessary evil, unless you were willing to let cotton prices rise. Owning a car is a necessary evil, unless you decide to move to a city with good public transit. Factory farming is a necessary evil, unless you decide that you don't want to eat these products, or at least are willing to pay more for ones that were treated differently.

It's very possible to decide what impact you'll have on the world. But the path of least resistance in America is a pretty destructive one: strewn with slave labor, oil-fueled war casualties, tortured animals, and toxic emissions. You're free to decide that you don't care about some of those things, but you can't call them necessities. You're free to be angrier about unjust wars or farm subsidies than mangled chicks, but it's not a zero sum game. You can go to war protests and call your congressman about the new farm bill and still have plenty of time left over to not buy chicken and eggs on your way home from work.

The problem isn't that it's too hard to change your diet. The problem is that it's too easy not to think about it at all.

As unfortunate and uncomfortable as this is, it's far less moving to me than say, a single iraqi child with their arm blown off. Until we've stopped indiscriminately killing people, I'm not going to worry about baby chickens getting turned into cat chow.

Factory farming is a necessary evil, there's too many people for us all to raise our own livestock. Food animals are a commodity, they're not pets, once you stop thinking of them as such, it's easy to compare what you see in videos like this with harvesting produce.

Frankly I'm more disgusted with what the corn industry has done to corn farming, relying on tax money to keep prices low enough to grow billions of tons of inedible produce that can only be used for the high fructose corn syrup that is killing so many obese people. It's a sad state of affairs that a corn farmer can't even feed their family the "food" the produce.

What a video. I am glad I am already a vegetarian. I have seen slaughterhouses, reports on animal factory farming and processing before, but this still hurts - Thank you producers. If animal-derived food is required, there are certified humane options available; or animals from small farmers. Sure these options are more expensive, for a good reason and in my opinion fully worthwhile. What my countryman, Dr Kohr, said decades ago is still true: Small is beautiful. At least at small operations, the farmers still can care if they want to, and they often do. Technology and mass farming or mass food production takes the humane aspect out of it all and most always makes life, production, and products worse than necessary. The problem may be that we sometimes believe we have to have quantity instead of quality, which compromises ethics all around. Greed and hunger for money and products didn't make humans and the world we live on healthier or happier.

Sorry for "Spazzing" out, perhaps an over reaction to how people just think everything has to be mechanized. There is just something lost when we give ourselves over to machines. (other than taking the humanity out of it.) My brain does however react strongly to this.

I'm not sure how this is much different to the machines that milk the cows, or the system used to process eggs from chickens in mass factory/farms but a machine that manipulates a living creature like that somehow just seems wrong....

And No, I can't sheer a sheep, nor have I tried, nor have I ever needed to. I have seen it done a thousand times. There is an art to it, and in the end, I suppose it can be hard work if you have 1000s of sheep to do but... - "them poor sheep."

Anyone out there that "sheers sheep for a living"..., Give us "your" comments...

i was a full-on vegan, for a year.
because the girl i was dating was. it's not that i wanted to impress her or anything. but i wasn't going to go cooking meat in the home we shared, which to her would stink.

besides, i found it easy to walk away from anyway. truth is that the tofu-burgers and such, have now had decades to improve since their inception, and are now nearly indistinguishable.

i know one sticky point for a lot of people (though most don't actually realize it) is that it's not the eating of meat, or cheese, etc, that's immoral. because in order for an organism to live, some other organism generally has to die, even if only at the cellular level.

no, the real problem is what modern 'farms' have had to resort to, to feed so many of us, in the way we've grown accustomed to. the factory farms. it's ugly shit to look at, and thus easy to detach oneself from. having baby chicks grabbed by machines, like something out of The Matrix, so that their beaks can be half-burned-off.

but there is hope, mink. things change. even if agonizingly slowly.
and often, only when something personal finally happens.