The old tradition of being the proud owner of a “man’s best friend” yet still inflicting pain and abuse on farm animals is all we know and all we will ever know as Americans. Without eating any animal products, humans would starve, right? There is absolutely no reason to resist the various delicious meats that are available in abundance to you. As long as it comes on a nice plate with an irresistible, savory scent and resembles nothing of the innocent pig that was murdered, nobody can call you a hypocrite. It is completely justifiable to eat cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, and be an animal lover all at the same time. However, it is absolutely unacceptable to even consider eating a dog or cat. Just the thought is repulsive. The fact of the matter is that these double-standards that uneducated Americans hold must come to an end.

Picture international animal rights activists rushing to America every year on the dreaded fourth Thursday of November to stop the massacre of innocent turkeys. Enraged foreign teens posting horrific and graphic photographs on their social media accounts with the hashtag ‘StopAmerica2k16.’ The people in China are forced to endure the double-standards for meat eating every year during the Yulin Dog Meat Festival, an annual celebration held in Yulin, China where over 10,000 dogs and cats are consumed. However, the slaughter of millions of animals in the U.S. does not bring any protests. Although the consumption of beef seems trivial to nearly all Americans, cows are considered sacred in other parts of the world, like India, yet there are never reports of people flying into the U.S., breaking into farms, rescuing the angelic souls, and travelling back to their country, victorious in their mission. The only thing differentiating a dog from a cow is one’s perspective of which animals are for eating and which are for pets. One argument against the Yulin Dog Festival is the inhumane treatment of the dogs, yet factory farms here in America are not all rainbows and meadows either; treatment is just as bad.

Many people love eating meat but are ignorant to the process as to how the meat comes from the cow to their stomach. When any young child is asked to draw a farm where animals are raised, they would most likely make something that appears to have bright red walls and happy animals roaming free in the front lawn. However, the factory farming that goes on all across America today resembles nothing of the sort. The farm that chickens come from should be drawn as dark, windowless sheds that can hold about 40,000 birds each. On a visit to such a farm, the New Yorker Staff Writer Michael Specter felt that “they were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way.”

At a Tyson slaughterhouse, workers tore the heads off of live chickens. This sort of behavior is common in the food industry nowadays. According to PETA, workers have previously been caught hanging a line of chickens upside down and using them as punching bags for their entertainment, stomping on and spray painting the chickens’ faces, and sexually assaulting them. As consumers, it is important to know all of the information in order to decide whether one is willing to invest their money in something so cruel. If one is disgusted by the thought of slaughtering an animal themselves, they are not ethically justified to eat its meat.

Many believe that without consuming animals or animal products, more humans would be exposed to starvation. However, the reality is quite the contrary. Only about 10% of the energy is transferred from one organism in a food chain to the next. This means that the organism that consumes plant-based foods, for example grass, takes in only one tenth of the of grass’ energy. If a cow were to absorb 10% of the energy from grass, then only 10% of the 10% (1% of the grass’ total energy) is transferred to the humans that eat the cow. The amount of food that the cow eats greatly outweighs the amount of cows humans can eat. According to the Anti-Hunger Organization, approximately 950 million people are suffering from the effects of hunger. If all plant products were fed directly to humans instead of animals, about 70% more food would be brought into the world’s food supply, which would be enough to feed an additional 4 billion people.

Uneducated consumers bear way to uneducated hypocrisy. Animal-loving Americans are blind to the perspectives of other cultures, and are stuck on the belief that one type of animal is deserving of love and care while the other is nothing but a life to be eaten. Every animal’s life contains the same value, so in order to point fingers at others, one must first be willing to look into their own actions.