Skip to main content

Why I went vegan in 2000

Source: BBC
It was the burning cows.

It was the pictures on TV that stopped me in my tracks. Burning cows and the explanations, together with the images, of how a virus had made its way through Europe on live cattle transports throughout the continent - transports on which the cows suffered unspeakable misery, for the simple reason that by being slaughtered in a different country their meat could be labelled as produce of that country.

Another picture is forever etched in my mind, thought I can't find it online - footage of those live cattle transports, a cow was being transferred from train to lorry I think, via crane. The crane just attaches where it can, it had the cow dangling in the air by a front leg, which was being broken and dislocated. Didn't matter. The cow, leg broken but alive, was dropped into the new container for further transport. As long as it was breathing on arrival, that's all that mattered.

I cried for them. I'm crying right now as I think of that image. And I decided eating animals was no longer an option if I wanted to live with integrity - I have always loved animals, how did I until then manage to close my eyes to the hypocrisy of loving some animals and eating others? And, worse than merely eating them - by buying their meat, supporting an industry that caused such suffering?

I could no longer bury my head in the sand after those pictures.

It wasn't so much the fact that animals had to die for meat - I had known that, of course - it was the suffering. The suffering is why I never stopped at vegetarianism. It was the early days of the Internet and I looked and found out what miserable existences dairy cows, egg laying hens, and other animals we "use" like industrial materials had... and once seen, I could not un-see those things.

I began to look at meat and see the creature who died so I could choose to eat this (a purely optional part of my diet) - a sentient animal with capacity to feel pain - who had known nothing but suffering its entire life.

Milk from another species...
we don't need it
I began to look at milk and see the cow who would have doted on its calf, had it not been taken away and killed so I could drink the milk intended for it.

I began to look at eggs and see the hens in cramped conditions, with beaks cut off so they couldn't hurt each other, laying egg after egg at an unnaturally high rate until they were no longer productive enough, and discarded.

I didn't decide not to eat these things again, so much as I simply couldn't, having come across the information. I could not block out what I knew.

So that, friends, is why I became a vegan - it's not all of why I am a vegan now: my reasons have expanded, and the suffering was merely a doorway into a room full of reasons to be vegan. I'll write a few more posts about the reasons that keep me doing this.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...
1 comment
Read more

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...
2 comments
Read more

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...
Post a Comment
Read more