We Are All Leaving Blood Footprints

What Can You Do About Yours?

It’s a powerful image — each and every one of us leaving behind a trail of bloody footprints as we move through life. But what the hell does it mean?

And more to the point, what can we do about it?

Most of us are familiar with the term ‘carbon footprint’ as a way to measure our impact on global warming. Our carbon footprint refers to the amount of greenhouse gasses produced by an individual, event, organization or product and expressed as its equivalent in carbon dioxide.

The idea stemmed from a concept developed by William E. Rees and Mathis Wackernagel in the 1990s and is closely related to the concept of ecological, land and water footprints, which all generally measure our impact upon this glorious planet on which we live.

But very few people have yet to come across the similar concept of a ‘blood footprint’. It’s a relatively new term, coined by vegan zoologist and writer Jordi Casamitjana, who defines it as:

The total amount of suffering caused to other sentient beings by an individual, event, organization or product.

Simply put, reducing our blood footprint is a way of seeking to exclude, as far as practicable and possible, all forms of exploitation and cruelty to animals, including humans.

Of course, it’s not possible to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions to zero — just the very act of breathing produces carbon dioxide and many of the essential activities we do every day contribute to our carbon footprint.

But we can recognise the need to reduce our emissions where we can, by making small (or large) changes in our own lives and by supporting companies or organisations making efforts to reduce global warming, rather than supporting the companies responsible for the most emissions.

In much the same way, it is not possible to live our lives without harming any animals at all. Just walking crushes insects underfoot. The tyres on our vehicles or on the public transport we use contain animal products, as do some bank notes.

Even growing vegetables involves the deaths of countless small creatures in the process.

People often attempt to use this fact as a way to attack vegans, claiming that vegans are hypocritical because their lifestyle involves inevitable crop deaths or the mass farming of bees for pollination.

Yet this misses the point. Such accusations may serve to make people feel better about supporting animal agriculture or deflect attention away from the harm their own lifestyles are causing, but it fails to address the real issues.

By and large, it is safe to say that most vegans are generally aware of these issues. We know you cannot live in the world or move through it without causing some harm, so we seek to minimise the harm we do.

One way we can have a direct impact is to stop paying people to abuse and slaughter cows, pigs, chickens and fish, for example. It’s simple, it’s easy and it’s an effective way to reduce the size of our blood footprint as we walk through this life.

As for the issue of crop deaths, veganism addresses that, too. Animal agriculture, apart from being inherently cruel and exploitative, is a grossly inefficient way to produce food. It commonly takes ten pounds of grain, for example, to produce a single pound of beef.

That’s ten times more land and ten times as many crop deaths.

By consuming grains, vegetables and fruit directly, rather than relying on the massively wasteful process of passing them through animals first, vegans are generally using a lot less land than meat and dairy consumers. By extension, we are responsible for fewer crop deaths, as well as not paying for the direct slaughter of the farmed animals themselves.

So no, we cannot eliminate our blood footprint altogether, but rather than use this as an excuse to do nothing, we can make every effort to reduce the harm we do to others. This is what being vegan is all about. Vegans recognise that we are not perfect, that just by living in this world we are going to be contribution to suffering and death on some level, but we do our best to minimise the harm we do.

We avoid consuming flesh, milk or eggs, knowing that to do so is to contribute directly to the suffering and deaths of billions of sentient individuals. But it doesn’t have to stop there. We can avoid buying products from companies who exploit animals for vivisection, or investing our money in businesses who support factory farming.

Instead, we can show our support, both moral and financial, to businesses and organisations seeking to reduce their own blood footprints, to find alternatives to existing products which cause mass suffering and death and to promote healthy, vegan lifestyles.

What’s more, because animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of global warming, through the methane emissions of farmed animals (particularly cattle), increased land use, increased carbon dioxide production, habitat destruction and pollution, it turns out that reducing our blood footprint also tends to reduce our carbon footprint at the same time.

It’s a happy coincidence and a win-win situation.

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