Rohitha Naraharisetty | 8 September 2023 | The Swaddle

Laxmidhar Behera, IIT Mandi’s Director, reportedly asked students to stop eating meat because it’s causing landslides in Himachal Pradesh. “It is having landslides, cloudbursts and many other things again and again, these are all effects of cruelty on animals… people eat meat,” he said, adding that butchering animals has an effect on environmental degradation.

At face value, the meat industry does contribute significantly to greenhouse gases. However, so does agriculture, which leads to land degradation, desertification, and environmental pressures by way of large freshwater requirements. The questions of how our food production systems — both crop and meat — impact the environment are important ones if they were raised in good faith. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the IIT Mandi Director’s statements, who injected a moral argument against meat-eating in his hypothesis.

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