I watched a debate the other night after stumbling upon this 10-minute video clip from the debate about whether or not animals should be off the menu. This speech is the best I have heard and I found it very moving. I added it to my Veg Ed page on my blog and also wanted to share it in this blog post today, inviting you to be both enlightened and inspired.

Here are the words of Philip Wollen that I felt most moving. These words will forever stick with me.

“When we suffer, we suffer as equals and in their capacity to suffer, a dog, is a pig, is a bear, is a boy.”

“Vegetarian cows today are the worlds largest ocean predators. The oceans are dying in our time. By 2048 all our fisheries will be dead. The lungs and arteries of the earth.”

“Only 100 billion people have every lived. 7 billion people live today. And yet we torture and kill 2 billion sentient living beings every week! 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this a biologist would would call them a virus. It is a crime against humanity of unimaginable proportions.”

“Animal rights today is now the greatest social justice issue since the abolition of slavery.”

“Meat kills animals, kills us and is killing our economies.”

“Water, as you know is the new oil. Nations will soon be going to war for it. Underground aquifers that took millions of years to fill are now running dry. It takes 50, 000 liters of precious drinking water to make one kilo of beef.”

“Today 1 billion people are hungry. 20 million people will die from malnutrition. Cutting meat by only 10% will feed 100 million people and eliminating meat will end starvation forever.”

“If everyone ate a western diet, we would need two planet earths to feed us. We’ve only got one and she is dying.”

“As I travel around the world, I see poor countries who sell their grain to the west while their own children starve in their arms and the west feeds it to livestock so we can eat a steak! Am I the only one who sees this as a crime? Believe me, every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a hungry child. When I look into her eyes, do I remain silent? The earth can produce enough food for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

“We are facing the perfect storm. If any nation had developed weapons that could wreak such havoc on the planet, we would launch a preemptive military strike and bomb it back into the bronze age… The good news is we don’t have to bomb it, we can just stop buying it!”

“The axis of evil does not run through Iraq, Iran or North Korea, it runs through our dining tables. Weapons of mass destruction are our knives and forks.“

“Meat is like the one and two cent coins, it costs more to make then it’s worth.”

“Peace is not just the absence of war, it is the presence of justice. Justice must be blind to race, color, religion or species. If she’s not blind, she will be a weapon of terror and tonight there is unimaginable terror in those ghastly Guantanamo’s we call factory farms or slaughterhouses.”

You can watch the full debate here.

Let us open our eyes and take responsibility for actions. The problems that our world is facing are not out of our hands. We are not helpless. We can make a difference, if even just a small difference.

I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes, one that inspired me when I first decided to go vegan…

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do.” – Edward Everett Hale

Stay conscious friends!