Drawing Tools/Water and Meat

I've gotten a few inquiries about two of my previous posts, so I thought I'd answer them here.

Drawing Tools: I draw my cartoons the old-fashioned way, with brush and ink on bristol board, then scan them into a Mac to do all the repair work and coloring in Photoshop. I have a very cool state-of-the-art screen from Wacom called a Cintiq, on which you can draw with a stylus directly on the screen, which is pressure sensitive. So I can get a thicker line by pushing harder, thinner line by letting up pressure, etc., just like a paintbrush. I could (and have, on rare occasion) draw an entire cartoon on my computer, and no one would be able to tell the difference. This fancy-pants screen is tons o' good in my line of work.

Water and Meat: Many folks all over the place wonder about this "5,000 gallons to raise a pound of beef" (the subject of CHNW's demonstration in Times Square) and how much water it takes to raise plants for vegan/vegetarain diets. The way it works is that most of the crops we grow in this country are fed to animals, not people. So the water it takes to grow them is figured into the amount it takes to raise a pound of meat. Feeding plants directly to humans is 12-to-16 times more efficient than feeding them to animals (the number varies depending on the animal and the crop). In other words, it takes enough food and water to provide 16 meals for humans to create a single serving of meat. If the whole world turned vegetarian (yeah, like that would ever happen), we could feed 12-to-16 times more humans with the crops we currently grow. Simply put, it would solve world hunger.

The next question people ask is what you would do with all those farm animals in this vegetarian utopia. Simple: Stop breeding them. There are nearly a 100 billion "food" animals alive on the planet at any given time. Stop allowing them to breed, and they'd be gone in no time. As would the millions of tons of feces per second that they create, as well as the greenhouse gases they emit, and the pollution resulting from their poo. Contrary to popular belief, you can't use that much poo for fertilizer. Mostly, it just pollutes the air and ground water. We'd also see a HUGE reduction in medical costs, as most cancers, heart disease, diabetes, you name it, would disappear.

Like I say, vegetarianism will never happen worldwide without some kind of devestating plague that makes it too dangerous to eat animals, but all of these facts are part of why I don't subsidize the animal agriculture industry by buying or consuming animal products of any kind.

For more info on this kind of thing, visit Woodstocksanctuary.org. CHNW and I are founding board members and pour a lot of our time, work and money into this project.