By IANS,
Bhopal : Calling upon people to save planet Earth by giving up non- vegetarian food, members of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) held a demonstration here Wednesday.
Dressed up in bio-hazard suits and holding placards reading, ‘Meat is toxic for you and for the environment’ and ‘Paryavaran ko bachana hoga, sabko shakahar apnana hoga’, the members walked through the thoroughfares of the main New Market area of the Madhya Pradesh state capital.
Speaking on the occasion, PETA’s campaign coordinator Nikunj Sharma said: “Meat-eating is destroying our environment.
“Vegetarians were truly the Earth’s best friends and adopting a vegetarian diet was the easiest and most effective way to help save our planet”, he added.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, he said, the international meat industry generates more greenhouses gases than all transportation methods of the world combined.
Sharma said that animal agriculture produces more than 100 million tonnes of methane a year and about 85 per cent of this methane is produced in the digestive processes of livestock, and the collective effect on the environment of the hundreds of millions of livestock worldwide releasing methane is enormous.
Shifts in diet, he further said, lower greenhouse gas emissions much more quickly than shifts away from the fossil-fuel-burning technologies that emit carbon dioxide.
“Arguably, the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products. By going vegetarian, we can help eliminate one of the major sources of emissions of methane – the greenhouse gas that is responsible for almost half of the global warming impacting the planet today”, said the PETA campaigner.