Animal agriculture endangers more than just the health of wildlife

Liquid manure as fertilizer poses incalculable risks to health and the environment: nitrates and antibiotics enter groundwater through animal waste, and the costly treatment and filtration processes make drinking water more expensive.

Manure tanks full of hazardous waste

In winter, the manure storage tanks are full of hazardous waste including antibiotics, hormones, genetically modified feed, pesticides, sprays, herbicides, and more. For environmental protection reasons, farmers are actually not permitted to spread liquid manure at will: it may not be applied when the ground is frozen, snow-covered, or waterlogged. Yet many farmers fail to comply with the regulations on liquid manure spreading, and the authorities simply look the other way.

The cumulative effect of the entire toxic cocktail that Swiss farmers dispose of on their fields also takes a severe toll on wildlife — to the point of causing serious illness. Game meat is by no means as natural and organic as the hobby hunting community would have the public believe. Game meat in particular is contaminated with residues of pesticides, sprays, liquid manure, antibiotics, and more from the feed and water on the fields — in addition to the potential heavy metal contamination, such as lead from ammunition particles left by hobby hunters.

Slurry also contains a lot of heavy metals, as animals in factory farming are fed feed containing zinc and copper. These heavy metals end up in the excrement, which enters the soil via the slurry. They inhibit plant growth and damage valuable microorganisms and important soil organisms such as earthworms.

Buffer strips are being disregarded

Time and again, Swiss farmers spread their hazardous waste even in the protected 3-metre-wide buffer strips along streams, forests and hedgerows. It is also prohibited to store silage bales on these strips. Farmers are paid through direct payments to ensure they do not cover these ecologically particularly valuable buffer strips with liquid manure, dung and pesticides, so that wild plants and animals have a natural habitat. In reality, however, many do not comply with the regulations — and are rewarded regardless.

For the sake of the environment, health and animals, IG Wild beim Wild advocates for a high tax rate on meat and other animal products. In addition, Carl Sonnthal, head of IG Wild beim Wild, calls on consumers to rethink their habits and appeals to farmers to transition to bio-vegan agriculture.

This means that this form of agriculture operates entirely without toxic animal faecal matter. In conventional organic farming, faecal matter is a central element. Many Swiss farmers still believe today that sustainable soil management without animal faeces is impossible, as this is precisely what is taught in agricultural schools.

The consumption of meat, milk, cheese and eggs causes the greatest environmental problems of our time. For reasons of profit, however, farmers are keeping ever more animals, which increases slurry output and the contamination of groundwater, according to René Schärling, nutrition policy expert at PETA. Consumers can avoid the associated risks to the environment and health by adopting a vegan diet.

Climate-damaging nitrous oxide and nitrate in groundwater

Livestock farming is well known for its immense water consumption. But liquid manure used as fertilizer also has devastating consequences. It releases nitrous oxide, which is 310 times more harmful to the climate than carbon dioxide. It also produces ammonia, which in turn contributes to fine particulate matter and triggers respiratory illnesses. The application of liquid manure also allows pollutants to seep into the ground. This causes nitrate levels in groundwater to rise, water quality deteriorates, and in the worst case the water becomes unusable. Nitrate is one of the greatest threats to groundwater. Elevated levels are found especially at monitoring stations in regions with large numbers of livestock operations — and antibiotics are also present there in high concentrations. Hundreds of tonnes of antibiotics are used annually in German livestock facilities. Animals excrete a large proportion of these, meaning drug residues and resistant bacteria can make their way into groundwater," says Dr. Edmund Haferbeck, Head of the Legal and Science Department at PETA. Since the active substances are also used in human medicine, consequences such as antibiotic resistance are impossible to fully assess; according to experts, wastewater treatment plants do not filter them out sufficiently.

Ten litres of liquid manure are produced for every 400 grams of pork. The consequences are severe: the nitrates in liquid manure give rise to carcinogenic nitrite. And yet operations that exploit animals, destroy the environment, and endanger human health receive subsidies and are thus financed by the general public.

Bio-vegan agriculture demonstrates how nutrients can be returned to the soil without any animal excrement whatsoever. At the same time, higher taxes on products of animal origin could reduce livestock farming and thereby significantly improve the common good for both humans and animals. More on Environment and Nature Conservation and Hunting and Biodiversity.