Health Impacts of the Animal Industry

Posted on by

For my Capstone Project I want to explore the animal industry’s impact on both the health of an individual and the Earth. I will briefly summarize the wide scope of the animal industry on my site but in order to keep a coherent focus I will concentrate on meat and dairy and the impact these products have on both the health of the globe and the individual. While I will primarily be focusing on the negative aspects of the industry, there are a few benefits to it as well that I would be biased to ignore—though as I will make clear, the great majority of the industry’s impact on global well-being is undesirable and greatly outweighs the few benefits the industry provides. I will create an infographic using vectored images as well as a remixed video using clips from other CC videos.

Animals used in agriculture take up a lot of space and occupy land that used to be rainforest or that could have been used to grow crops for human consumption. This results in decreased biodiversity as well as hunger across the globe. Carbon and methane from these ruminants become trapped in the atmosphere and the air we breathe. Their waste contaminates water through improper disposal.

However this is not all. While there is a relationship between high rates of meat consumption and obesity, heart disease, stroke, and a variety of other medical conditions, not to mention its propensity to transmit diseases, milk consumption has been linked to obesity, osteoporosis, and cancer due to both natural and artificial hormones within it.

The animal industry has suffered large profit gains in recent years at the expense of small farmers, and it is slated to grow even larger as the world population increases. We must remember that our resources are not infinite, and there is a limit to how large anything can grow before it will collapse upon itself.

Leave a Reply