In this episode, Howard Lyman (vegan) talks about the harmful effects of animal-people livestock raising both on the environment and human health. He also discusses how we should live in harmony with nature by feeding healthy people instead of growing grain to feed animal- people, and then killing them.
Howard: They took out a tumor the size of my thumb. I walked out of the hospital with a one-in-a-million operation. (Wow.) But I guarantee you I walked out a much different individual. (Wow.) I knew that it was not about more land or more cattle or more equipment. There was more to it than just being bigger and richer. I went to my banker and I said to him, I said, “I need your help. We need to start farming with nature.”
My banker, he reared back in his chair and he said, “What in the world does that mean?” I said, “I think we need to become organic farmers.” And he looked at me and he said, “You want me to lend you money? You’re not going to share it with my other customers – the chemical dealer, the pharmaceutical dealer, the fertilizer dealer?” He said, “There will never be a day like that!” And so, 1983, I sold my farm. I paid my debts. And I started working with other farmers to start producing food correctly.
I learned that there’s a lot of money out there that did not want people to know the truth. I started talking to people about not eating animals, talked to them about mad cow disease. They thought I was the one that had holes in my brain, because they had never heard of it. But I ended up on “The Oprah [Winfrey] Show.” I told a few million people that we were grinding up cows and feeding them back to cows, that we were scraping up roadkill – deer, elk, opossum, raccoons – and we were feeding those back to cows. And then we were taking euthanized pets, dogs and cats, full of chemicals that were used to kill them.
The city of Los Angeles alone, 200 tons of dogs and cats a month are being ground up and put back into the feed for our pets or our food animals. Oprah, her eyes were as big as saucers. She turned around and looked at the guy from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and said, “Dr. Weber, are we feeding cows to cows?” I will never forget what he had to say, “Uh…yeah… There’s a limited amount of that going on.” Well, the next thing out of Oprah’s mouth got us sued! She said, “That stops me cold! I will never again eat a burger!”
Now, I knew that 13 States had a thing called the Food Disparagement Law. But the Food Disparagement Law said it was against the law to say anything you knew to be false. I told the truth. But guess what? The cattlemen sued. They didn’t want the people to know the truth. They ended up suing us for six years. Hundreds of thousands of dollars defending our right to tell the American people the truth! (My God!)
I want you to realize, sitting here today, that if we don’t deal with the truth, if we don’t realize the fact that the majority of Americans today are dying from pain inflicted by their fork, we’re digging more graves with our fork than any other tool that’s out there. (Woh!) We need to look at what’s going on in the world.
We need to understand that Easter Island, for example, where you have these large stone monuments set up on the beach, at one time was a vibrant society. Rich soil, trees, boats, fish. But in there, your stature was how big a stone monument you put up. Well, there were some stowaways came to the island – rats! They didn’t care because the rats were not eating the human food. They were eating the seeds from the palm trees. As they cut down the trees to sled the large monuments down to the beach, there were fewer and fewer trees because no new trees were growing. Can you imagine what it was like when the last monument, cut the last tree, and there were never going to be any more trees on Easter Island? The monuments are there today. The people are gone, because they could not learn to live within their environment. It’s the same thing we’re faced with today. We need to understand that the tipping point, between everything being fine and total disaster is a very fine line.
If we look at St. Matthew’s Island, for example, in 1943, they put 29 reindeer on an island so they would have a backup food supply for the military detachment that was there. They never needed them. Twenty-nine reindeer on a 128-square-mile island with no natural predators! Twenty years, those 29 animals went to 6,000 fat, sleek, healthy animals in 20 years! Twenty years later, there was not one live animal left on the island, because they did not learn to live within the environment that they had. We have the same problem right now. When the boat people came to the United States, a little under 300 years ago, we had the deepest, richest topsoil on the face of the Earth.
In 300 years, we have lost 75% of all of the topsoil that was here. It takes 500 years to produce an inch of topsoil. We haven’t been here long enough to produce an inch of topsoil, and we’ve lost three quarters of what was here. In 1850, in Iowa, they built a church. From 1850 in Iowa until today, that church has been in continuous use. In 1850, they took a picture of it. All of the land around the church was farmed. All of it was at the same elevation. Over 150 years later, they took another picture of the same church. All of the land around it was still farmed. The only difference is the church sits 10 feet (~ 3.05 meters) higher today than all of the farm ground around it.
If we are going to survive as a Homo sapiens species, we need to understand the fact that 80% of all of the grain that is produced in the United States of America today is stuffed down the throat of an animal. It takes 16 pounds (~ 7.26 kilograms) of grain to produce one pound (~ 0.45 kilograms) of meat. Sixteen pounds of grain – you can feed 32 hungry people. Which is the best use of our resources?
We need to understand that the future is to feed healthy people, not animals to kill them. I spent 45 years of my life in animal production. I will tell you that what we’re doing today is absolutely, totally non-sustainable. I changed from a meat-eating animal production person to a person today that is vegan, eating nothing with a face, liver, or a mother.
I changed my diet for my health. I do what I do today as a hardcore vegan, for the love of the animals. I know that no animal has to die for me to live. If we are going to survive as a species, we have to understand that our job is not to do everything; Our job is to do everything that we can do. And I charge you today with a very simple, straightforward charge: All you have to do is what you can do. Go Veg! Go Green! Save the Planet! Thank you very much.
(Thank you so much, Howard, for your insight, for this remarkable story. It’s certainly been most informative and educational, and as you can imagine, some of the members in our audience right now have a few questions. Could we have question 1, please?)
(Mr. Lyman, you have taken my breath away. Thank you for your love, for coming here today to be with us. My name is Betska K. Burr. I am co-president of Coaching & Leadership International. We are the global leaders in mind-body-spirit coach training. I have a very important question for you, and that is: Should we put a carbon tax on [animal-people] meat? And if yes, how do we do that?)
The first question is: “Should we put a carbon tax on meat?” The answer to that is: Yes.
The question is: “How are we going to do it?” It’s simple. If you could take a fourth-generation farmer, rancher, feedlot operator, and I can change to become a hardcore vegan, does that mean that the people that care about the environment can’t? Seventy-nine percent of Americans claim – claim – to be vegetarian. If you’re actually going to claim to be a vegetarian, how about walking your talk? (79%?)
If we are going to change this, it is not going to happen in Washington D.C. It’s going to happen right here. Look at what has happened in West Hollywood, what they have been able to do in this community. We need to go in our own communities. We have to organize, we have to look at what’s not available; and if it’s not available, we need to start it. If there are changes that need to happen, we need to be the people that start the change.
Our job is to become the leaders, so that when we look in the eyes of a child, we can basically say to them, “I can’t do everything, but I can do everything that I can do.” And if we don’t, there will not be a future for our children and grandchildren. Can we do it? Absolutely. When should we start? Right now!
(Do we have the second question, please?) (Thank you, Mr. Lyman. My name is Daryl Cumberbatch and I’m a green accountant from Toronto, Canada. My question to you is: Should there be warning labels on meat for the chemicals, drugs, and hormones that cause cancer and other diseases such as diabetes?)
If we look at what should be the absolute textbook of answering your question, it’s Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s book “The China Study” – it is not only the chemicals we’re using in producing meat, but look at the fact that it is animal protein that is the #1 cause of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity – the largest dietary study that has ever been done in the history of the world. Is it worse when they end up with the chemicals in it and the hormones in it, and the antibiotics in it? Absolutely!
But if you want to live a long, healthy life, realize that our Maker did not build junk. He ended up giving us a phenomenal body; if we would just end up consuming what we were designed for. And it is not hamburgers, T-bone steaks, or pork chops.
I never saw in 45 years of my life, an animal going to the slaughterhouse clicking their heels and saying “Hoh, yippee skippee, I’m going to be a burger tomorrow!” They do not want to die. Our job is to make sure that they are able to live the life they were intended to live, so that we can live the life we were intended to live.
Photo Caption: “The Road to OLD HOME Is Faster and Nearer Than You Ever Expected!”
