Be vegetarian, but why?

According to a recent article in Time magazine there are about 10 million vegetarians in America with an additional 20 million who admit to having had vegetarian tendencies at some point in their lives. Many choose such a diet for health reasons.\nDr. Collin Campbell at Cornell University has been studying the relationship between diet and health for years and says, "The vast majority, perhaps 80 to 90 percent, of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented, at least until very old age, simply by adopting a plant-based diet." The American Dietetic Association has said, "Appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, are nutritionally adequate and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases."\nBut being vegetarian for others comes from a discomfort over the slaughter of animals for food, i.e., animals have as much right to life as humans. The problem is, excluding animal foods from your diet does little to reconcile this issue. Professor Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, estimates that the number of animals killed every year might actually increase with a purely plant-based farming model. The preparation of land for growing and the harvesting of crops results in the death of mice, moles, rabbits and other animals. "If they say they don't want to kill an animal so they can eat," Davis says, "I think their conclusion is misguided because they are killing animals so that they can eat that vegetarian diet."\nDavis' numbers are based on our current agricultural system, which is not the most efficient or ecologically friendly. Farmers often plant only a handful of crop varieties resulting in monocultures that have a strong dependency on chemical inputs (e.g., fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides). Brian Halweil, a research associate at the non-profit public policy research organization Worldwatch Institute, in a recent report suggests that a shift towards "agroecological" farming would not only reduce chemical usage (and therefore the impact of such pollutants on field animals and the environment in general), but also increase crop yields by 93 percent.\nBut the problem of animal deaths during harvesting would still remain. Davis predicts a ruminant-pasture model of food production excluding poultry, pig and lamb in favor of a beef and dairy industry would lower the number of animal deaths by 300 million a year. This, and Halweil's push for incentives for farmers to meet ecological goals (e.g., reducing chemical usage), would go a long way to enhancing the efficiency of food production, while also minimizing field animal deaths. If the issue of animal rights is your primary motive for becoming vegetarian, then you should be aware that such a dietary shift does not necessarily solve the problem. This is not an argument against being vegetarian. Instead, the decision should be more realistically based on a question of which is the lesser of two evils -- on one hand you have animals specifically bred for slaughter, and on the other, inadvertent deaths of field animals during crop production. But it's a fine line that becomes blurred when arguments are made for a global shift towards crop-based food production. Animals would still be killed and, as a consequence, cannot be justified.\nVegetarianism is a healthy choice and should be encouraged but not on the grounds of being more humane. If you are serious about animal rights, campaign for more ethical, ecologically friendly and efficient farming practices, because boycotting animal foods will not solve the problem.