First, an introduction for folks who might not know me yet. I have been vegan since 1998, when my husband and I made the decision to switch from ovo-lacto vegetarianism, in an effort to hopefully prevent our son (who was just over a year old at the time) from developing some of the same food allergies my husband had just been diagnosed with. I was vegan throughout my pregnancy with my daughter and she has never had a single animal product in her life – beyond my own breastmilk.
When we went first went vegan it was purely for health reasons. We had a peripheral understanding the suffering and cruelty that went into meat, which was why we were already vegetarian, but we did not begin to comprehend how absolutely disgusting and horrifying the egg and dairy industries were until we had already decided to remove them from our diet.
Right from the beginning, my veganism was about learning. About having my consciousness raised. About compassion…about ethics….about justice for animals, who truly are oppressed, in just about every sense of the word, the entire world over. We take away their natural habitats. We imprison them and enslave them for our entertainment/”education”. We breed them against their will, we take their babies away to be killed, we drain them of their milk and steal their eggs, just to do it all over again until they themselves are spent and must be killed for purely financial reasons. This attitude of animals existing solely for our use – especially when many of us have no real, pressing need for ANY of these things for our own survival – is incalculably abhorrent to me. It is one of the worst aspects of our current world, in my opinion. And vegans, I know that most (all?) of you already agree with me on that.
But if you are truly invested in ahimsa/fighting oppression/ending cruelty for EVERYONE, it’s time to get real.
Read More
Imagine how amazing the vegan movement would be if vegans everywhere were kind and compassionate towards ALL of their fellow earthlings?