Given these five compelling reasons to reconsider dietary choice—anymal suffering and premature death, environmental degradation, world hunger, labor injustices, and our own health—it is not surprising that the world’s most commonly celebrated religions require and/or encourage a diet of greens, grains, fruits, and legumes, while simultaneously forbidding and/or discouraging the slaughter of anymals and the consumption of anymal products.

Humans who are in positions of power make the rules, and therefore their interests almost always come first—no matter what the cost to anymals and less powerful human beings.

Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution we imagine ourselves to be.

Our efforts to protect primates will be much more effective if we dismantle the artificial line that we have created between ourselves and other animals.

The number of individuals enslaved and slaughtered on factory farms every year exponentially surpasses—by trillions—any form of exploitation of human beings anywhere, at any time. . . . American meat eaters were responsible for about 198 deaths per person in 2009, which accumulates to about 15,000 animals in the course of one individual’s lifetime.

If one cares about the earth—if one respects nature—it is better to consume vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains. If you care about the planet and wish to adopt an earth-friendly lifestyle, it is advisable to focus only secondarily on the car that you drive, or recycling, or turning off lights and turning down heat, and primarily on what you buy at the grocery store. What we eat has a much greater impact on the environment.

Those guided by core religious commitments in one of the world’s largest religions are rightly anymal liberationists.