1. Raising animals for food is grossly inefficient, because while animals eat large quantities of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn, they only produce comparatively small amounts of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return. This is why more than 70 percent of the grain and cereals that we grow in this country are fed to farmed animals.

2. It takes up to 13 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of meat, and even fish on fish farms must be fed up to 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish flesh.

3. Raising animals for food (including land for grazing and land for feed crops) uses up a staggering 30% of earth’s land mass.

4. Commercial fishing methods such as bottom trawling and long-lining have virtually emptied millions of square miles of ocean and pushed many marine species to the brink of extinction.

5. Commercial fishing boats indiscriminately pull as many fish as they can out of the sea, leaving ecological devastation and the bodies of non-target animals in their wake.

6. More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals, and according to scientists at the Smithsonian Institution, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed worldwide every minute to create more room for farmed animals.

7. It takes more than 11 times as much fossil fuel to make one calorie from animal protein as it does to make one calorie from plant protein. Raising animals for food gobbles up precious energy. Simply add up the energy-intensive stages of raising animals for food:

– keep the meat refrigerated or frozen in the stores until it’s sold.

– transport the meat to grocery stores;

– operate the meat-processing plants;

– transport the meat to processing plants;

– operate the slaughterhouse;

– truck the animals many miles to slaughter;

– operate the factory farms;

– transport the feed to the factory farms (again, in gas-guzzling vehicles);

– operate the feed mills (requiring massive energy expenditures);

– transport the grain and soybeans to feed manufacturers on gas-guzzling 18-wheelers;

– grow massive amounts of corn, grain, and soybeans (with all the required tilling, irrigation, crop-dusters, etc.);

8. Between watering the crops that farmed animals eat, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning away the filth in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply. Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.

9. It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons. You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for six months!

10. According to Greenpeace, all the wild animals and trees in more than 2.9 million acres of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil were destroyed in the 2004-2005 crop season in order to grow crops that are used to feed chickens and other animals in factory farms.

11. If we simply ate soy and other plant foods ourselves instead of feeding them to farmed animals, we would not need to raise nearly as many crops, and we could eliminate the need to decimate the rain forest.

This information was compiled from PETA.org.