Close your eyes for a moment and imagine what a totally meat-less planet would look like. Green plates, safe surroundings and healthy and happy people.

The picture perfect planet you imagined a moment ago was thoroughly researched upon by an Oxford Academic, Dr. Mark Springmann. He discovered that if all the 7 billion inhabitants of our planet were to go vegetarian by 2050 we would be able to save 1.1 trillion dollars in health care costs and cut down greenhouse gas emissions by 60%

I will be focusing on 2 major arguments:

1. Animals are independent creatures that don't exist to serve humans 

2. We don’t need animal meat to survive and hence we should give our selfishness and greed a rest

• On to my first argument, ‘Animal rights’ does that ring a bell? Animals have rights and it is wrong to kill them needlessly. Animals may not be as clever as humans, but even a new born baby is less intelligent than an ape but that doesn’t mean we go around eating new born babies or subjecting them to fewer rights. When I googled the word ‘chicken’, I got ‘best grilled chicken recipes’ ‘roasted and smoked chicken’ ‘garlic herb butter chicken’; not one of those pictures showed a living breathing and feeling chicken. Just image googling your name and finding recipes on how to grill yourself with honey and garlic. Worthy opposition , you've got to explain why you think it's permissible to do to an animal what you think it would be impermissible to do to a human being? As humans, we’ve negated animal rights for a while now. Killing animal’s just for the satisfaction of our appetites isn’t working out anymore. We desperately need to draw ourselves out of the grey area and deem meat eating barbaric.

• Secondly, we don’t need to eat animals to survive. It’s been scientifically proven that plant-based foods can meet all your nutritional needs. We’re not living in the dark ages anymore, our understanding has evolved and in the process we have come to learn that eating animals is no longer the necessity we once believed it to be.