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1.25 million people watched a livestream of April the giraffe giving birth to her calf in a New York zoo. Unfortunately, the world’s giraffe population has declined dramatically — losing 40% in the last three decades. They are now labeled as “vulnerable” to extinction. As a matter of fact, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reported that, since 1970, we have lost over 50% of all wildlife on Earth. Let that sink in — OVER ONE-HALF OF ALL WILDLIFE ON EARTH HAS VANISHED IN JUST THE LAST ~40 YEARS. In contrast, over that same period, our human population has doubled — from 3.7 billion to 7.4 billion today. We cannot ignore the increased pressure our growing human population places on the environment and other animals. Of course, the fact that most humans also consume animal foods, which have an enormous resource footprint and are wrecking environmental havoc at scale, makes the situation substantially more dire. Animal agriculture is the largest anthropogenic user of land, which results in it also being the biggest driver of deforestation. This, in turn, results in many species losing their habitats, further driving the rapid loss of biodiversity (with our time already being labeled by scientists as the “Sixth Mass Extinction”). In addition to considering the benefits of smaller families, please recognize that being vegan is easy, healthy and one of the most impactful positive actions you can take as an individual to benefit the environment and other species (including animals in the wild and billions of other animals who are needless killed every year for foods we do not need). |