Q: Why should I become vegan?

A: People usually become vegetarian either in an attempt to avoid causing the suffering and death of animals or to protect their health from the hazards of animal-borne infections, saturated fat and cholesterol. As understanding deepens, becoming vegan is the obvious next step.

To keep producing high yields of milk, dairy cows have to give birth every year. The male calves are often slaughtered almost immediately or kept alive for a few months in barbaric conditions to produce veal. The mother cow is one of the most overworked and exploited animals in modern farming. Her calf is torn away from her after just a few days and she is stimulated by unnatural feeding and breeding to produce far more milk than she naturally would. After a few years she is too worn out to keep up peak milk production and is slaughtered to maximise profit.

Dairy products include a large amount of saturated fat with well established harmful effects on the heart and arteries. Over 60% of dairy fat is saturated. Individual consumers may avoid this unwelcome fat by using skimmed milk, but the fat stays in the human food supply and someone ends up eating or drinking it.

Dairy products, like meat, are a source of infection. Pasteurisation times were belatedly increased a few years ago in many countries when it was discovered that dairy products carried live bacteria linked with the development of Crohn's disease in humans.

The battery chicken exemplifies human exploitation of animals in pursuit of profit. Hens are kept in extremely cramped conditions in which they have no semblance of a natural life. Debeaking is used to prevent these tortured beings turning on each other in their frustration and distress. Concerned shoppers often seek out free range eggs as a less cruel alternative, but even these often come from hens who never see the light of day. In all forms of egg production, male chicks are treated as a waste product to be killed en masse and disposed of. Laying hens, like dairy cattle, are slaughtered for meat at a fraction of their natural life span.

Eggs are justifiably described as cholesterol bombs. They do provide some nutrients, but all of these can be obtained from plant sources without the accompanying cholesterol.

The life of a bee centres on the collection of honey as part of a complex society. Humans remove the honey and replace it with sugar and clip the queen bee's wings to prevent the natural swarming of the bees. With so many alternatives available, vegans choose to avoid this exploitation of the humble bee as well as that of larger animals with whom we can more readily identify.

Honey has been frequently linked with outbreaks of botulism and despite recent attempts to praise it as a source of antioxidants (only about a tenth as much per calorie as fruit) it is a poor source of nutrients, barely above white sugar.

In summary, vegans recognise that animal suffering and slaughter are closely entwined with the production of milk and eggs. The very principles that lead so many people to become vegetarian lead them, as confidence and understanding grows, to take the next step and become vegan. The experience of more than a million living vegans has shown that this involves no detrimental effect on either health or enjoyment of food. We invite you to join them and experience the special joy of knowing that no chicken, cow, goat, or even bee is being held in unnatural conditions and suffering or dying on your behalf.