If you eat meat, you have something in common with most of the cows you have eaten. They've eaten meat too. The meat industry has developed ways to boost its productivity and lower it's costs. This process is a form of recycling.

When a cow is slaughtered, about half of it by weight is not eaten by humans. These parts including the head, hooves, horns, bones, and blood are dumped into giant grinders at rendering plants, along with the entire bodies of cows and other farm animals known to be diseased. Rendering is a 2.4 billion-a-year industry, which processes forty billion pounds of dead animals a year.

There is no such thing as a dead animal too diseased, too cancerous, or too putrid to be welcomed by the rendering plant. Another staple of the renderer's diet, in addition to farm animals, is euthanized pets- the six or seven million dogs and cats that are killed in animal shelters every year. The city of Los Angeles alone sends some two hundred

The destruction of the rainforest can also be attributed to American meat consumption. Rainforest land is virtually worthless to most governments. The rainforest soil is usually too poor for farming, so it is used for cattle ranching. The cattle ranchers buy the land for very low prices and burn the forest to the ground. They graze the cattle on whatever grass grows there. When the soil erodes and the grass won't grow anymore, the rancher buys nearby land and moves on. The cattle destroy the land beyond repair. The small amount of topsoil washes into the ocean very quickly. Trees never grow back on land owned by cattle ranchers. Almost the entire rainforest destruction problem is caused by cattle ranching.

For some reason, Meat eaters have five times the risk of cancer compared to Vegetarians. American meat eaters have the highest risk of cancer infection in the world. Countries that eat a less meat-centered diet have a much lower cancer risk than the U.S.

Of course, I am a vegetarian. People frequently ask me "How can you stand not eating meat?" I tell them about rendering plants, and they suddenly understand my way of thinking. I don't have any problem with finding things to eat. Actually, if you change to a good vegetarian diet, you expose yourself to a much wider selection of food that what you would have normally come across. I am not morally objected to stopping people from eating meat. I just believe that the human race would benefit as a whole if we all stopped or at least cut down the consumption of meat.

An average of 660,000 animals are killed for meat every hour in the U.S., that's nearly six billion a year.

World hunger is rapidly becoming a huge problem in many countries around the world. If the U.S. population decreased their consumption of meat by only 10%, 60 million people could be adequately fed by the freed-up agricultural land. This would end the hunger problem in Africa, if the U.S. were willing to export it for low costs. A huge part of American crops are fed to livestock for little meat in return. It takes an entire acre to produce jus

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1413
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)