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Many of us never really stop to think about the environmental problems caused by the meat production industry. This might be due to the fact that we have not been educated on this increasing dilemma. In today’s society, food companies are advertising how they are going green. The only downside to this is that they are not diminishing the dependency on meat. The problems that this high production of meat brings to the environment are an increase in air pollution, overgrazing, deforestation and the diminishing of water resources. Each one of these factors is incrementally adding up into a less environmentally friendly tomorrow.
At the rate that we are going, not much progress is being made. An interesting fact is that livestock have added up to 9% of all human related carbon dioxide emissions (“Cutting Meat Consumption”, pg.1). This is due to the fact that cow’s flatulate gasses that is harmful to the ozone layer. A cow’s passing of gas is primarily composed of methane and carbon dioxide which is produced from the swallowing of air (Motavilli, pg. 1). This air then goes through the large intestine and the stomach, and the chemical reactions from the intestinal fluid and the stomach acids from its four stomachs (Chiu, par.2). All this air is released daily and adds to our already increasing air pollution. As the human population increases, so will the demand for meat. Another problem with the consumption of meat is that it increases land use thus degrading our lands by encouraging deforestation. Perhaps the grazing of the livestock is not a great problem but what is fed to them and the way they obtain this land for them to live on is. Much of the land that is being used to cultivate the feed for these animals adds up to a large amou...
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