Pardon the turkey and opt for a vegan dinner instead.

That the (short) life of a turkey on a factory farm is unpleasant is well known to all. This year, 45 million feeling, thinking, fully conscious, and aware turkeys will be killed for Thanksgiving. During their short, pain-filled lives, these birds experience zero federal legal protection. They are kept in overcrowded (high-density) and dark warehouses, where the choking ammonia from their own waste overwhelms their eyes, throats, and lungs. The sanitary conditions are so poor, that like other animals on factory farms, they must be kept alive on regimens of antibiotics.

Infighting under these conditions is inevitable and often fatal. Mortalities are common and considerable time can pass before dead birds are noticed and removed. Each turkey’s first and only brief experience of sunlight and fresh air occur as they are trucked off to the slaughterhouse, where the terrified birds are callously hung upside down and transported on assembly lines to have their throats slit in front of each other.

All of this is well known. Yet people still make excuses, look the other way, and continue to support this cruelty. If directly causing months of suffering followed by a horrible death isn’t convincing enough, please consider a few separate but related issues as well, all of which center around the benefits of eating lower on the food chain (plants, instead of animals).

The earth is a finite repository for fossil fuels, minerals for fertilizers, the chemicals used in water purification, etc. The process of turning turkeys, and other animals, into processed flesh for consumption is vastly more demanding of resources than that of plants.

A separate but related issue is that of energy efficiency. We all know that our current consumption of energy is unsustainable. Consider the fact that it requires, at a very conservative estimate, three pounds of vegetable matter eaten in order to result in a turkey converting that into one pound of flesh. The same is true of water usage. All turkey farm operations (whether factory farms, organic, or free range) demand significantly more water than the cultivation of plants. Water is a shared and finite resource, so this water depletes the stores available for humans and crop production.

Lastly, the emissions of farms where turkeys are imprisoned are also vastly greater and more polluting than those of plants. And again, the earth is a finite “sink” for waste products. These have effects locally, in the disposal of turkey waste products and the leaking of antibiotics into local water supplies. And they have global effects as well, in the carbon emissions of the fossil fuels required to raise them, and construct and maintain the conditions in which they will live and die.

When you consider that 300 million turkeys are killed for food each year in the United States alone, the resource usage, energy, and ecological impact of all of this is enormous.

So join us in giving the turkeys a break this year. There are countless ways to veganize the traditional American thanksgiving dinner, and if you have a hankering for turkey as the main course, Tofurky is an outstanding option and available at most grocery stores.