vegan bags

Down the Rabbit Hole into the World of Animal Rights

A few things:

1. I updated my vegan shoe pinterest with some cool vegan shoes such as these:

There are some excellent shoes on there, so check it out if you so desire to clothe your feet in man-made materials. Vegan Shoes 4 Lyfe.
2. Following Anita Krajnc, head of Toronto Pig Save, on facebook is very educational. I feel as if I have gone down the rabbit hole, so to speak.
If you want to learn more about animal rights stuff, just subscribe to her posts and then check out the pages of groups she shares and whatnot.
I don’t even know where to begin.
I now feel certain that animal rights will be the next great battle our society wages for freedom and justice and all that.
Everywhere I see more and more people mentioning veganism. This movement is growing!
Along time ago when I started with vegetarianism, I always used to think to myself “what difference am I making. So I’m not ordering meat at a restaurant…big deal. 1 billion other people are.” Still I stuck to it because it felt like the right thing to do, not really knowing why, besides I loved animals and my dogs.
After all this time I feel I finally understand my true motivation for being a vegetarian and now vegan.
For one thing, it DOES make a difference. Little by little, person by person, vegans infiltrated mainstream media and awareness.
And for a second thing, ( a thing I have become so much more aware of lately thanks to my interviews with animal rights heroes) vegans are, as one blogger put it so well, Conscientious Objectors to Cruelty.
Check out this blog post from the great blog Once Upon a Vegan. She shares the story of a man who privately financed the transport of 669 Jewish children to England…because they were going to the death camps. He saved their lives, but no one, even in his family, ever knew about it until 50 years later he wife found a log in his attic listing all the names of the children he saved. She contacted them and there is a video clip on the blog post showing him meeting some of the children he saved years later…
I could watch it a hundred times. It’s amazing.
She links to this article which tells the whole story of Nicholas Winton. One of the most touching things I’ve ever read. At the end of the article it says he wears a ring given to him by one of the children he saved which said

“save one life, save the world”.

(nicholas winton with one of the children he saved)
a book about him was written by one of the children he saved.
This guy never asked to be recognized, he just quietly did a beautiful thing. I imagine he felt he could die happy after that meeting, knowing that he made a difference in the lives of so many grown men and women. You have to see the vid in the blog post–so good!
3. Speaking of the Holocaust, I saw this video Anita Krajnc posted on Facebook the other day–these two guys discussing why people become violently offended and write vegans off when they compare the exploitation of animals to the holocaust. They do a fantastic job of discussing it, and it’s really fun to watch.

The similarities to the things I saw in the slaughterhouse videos and in the trucks thanks to the youtube videos of Toronto Pig Save have really been haunting me with how similar they seem to the holocaust. Gas Chambers. Cattle Cars. Horrible experiments on animals. The dark barren barns chickens and pigs, for example, live in before being slaughtered.

The moment I decided not to look away and “bore witness” was the moment everything changed. Now I feel like I want to see more, to know what is really happening. Now all these extreme animal rights people’s tirades are really making sense!

When I learned about the holocaust in middle school I read a lot of books about it…in my typical, disturbed and depressed yet can’t look away fashion. I always remember thinking, how could this have happened only 50 years ago? It didn’t make sense. I looked around me and didn’t see evil people who were capable of doing anything like that. It seemed like a blip on the radar. And yet I imagined myself, being half Jewish, in that situation and tried to make it feel real.

Now I see that those behaviors are still in place but they are hidden from our view…in the slaughterhouses of the world. In the video I mentioned above, they talk about how evil is often just no one taking responsibility…like in a bureaucracy where normal people take orders but don’t want to take responsibility for what they are doing–that’s how evil happens. Exactly!

Clicking around, I found this Holocaust Comparison Project, a photo essay by David Sztybel, that the video is responding to. It makes fascinating and disturbing points. The same patterns of violence that existed in the Holocaust are very much alive and well.

At the end of the photo essay there is this post script:

Edgar Kupfer was a survivor of the Dachau death camp. After his liberation, he furtively scrawled the following message on the wall of a hospital barrack:

Wow.

I understand the Holocaust is an extremely sensitive subject. But like they say in the video, by discussing the past, we can learn from the past.

Your thoughts? Do you feel that you know your motivations for being vegan or vegetarian on a deep level or do you sometimes question? What do you think about the Holocaust Comparison Project?

 

My Non Leather Life T-Shirts and Visions of a Vegan Lifestyle Brand

mynonloeatherlife

A dream I have is to have my own vegan lifestyle brand. A la Martha Stewart.

Of course, everything would be animal cruelty free. There would be no leather, wool, suede, rich calfskin linings, fur trimmings etc. Everything would be fake.

One thing I love is the aesthetics of different companies. Some companies want to be all high fashion, and others are inspired by things like old movies.

Some companies are loud and proudly vegan, preferring to shout the truth about what is happening to animals from the rooftops (OlsenHaus comes to mind). Others prefer to simply present a non leather option with a more subtle animal rights message (Good Guys Don’t Wear Leather comes to mind).

What would my imagined company do? I think I would try to make a brand centered around the fabulous lifestyle of the most well equipped vegan ever–by that I mean, a vegan who never needs to hunt on the internet for cool shoes and what not. Oh no, she has it all already. She has every non leather item you could ever want.

What kind of girl is she? She is a very old fashioned, romantic soul. She lives alone, or perhaps she is married, or perhaps she has several BEAUX, who bring her fresh flowers.

She has a vintage car, and she lives on a farm, a vegan farm though. Maybe this farm grows sprouts or micro greens. She has a big greenhouse full of tropical plants which she collects on fabulous plant hunting and preservation vacations. She has a lavish bed full of DOWN-FREE comforters and pillows. A pair of tan non leather driving gloves lies by her bed side table.

She has a closet of non leather shoes. She has a cool fake leather jacket that looks like she found it in a thrift store. She has faux leather pants for when she needs to impress say, Prince.

She has hats, many hats–but with no wool in them. She has floral couches, with no leather trim. Even her car–the seats are upholstered with faux blue leather.

She likes to fashion herself after a gibson girl, lucy honeychurch from a Room With a View,

a pre-raphelite painting. She wears a golden circlet and flowers clipped to all her shoes.

She LIVES…MY NON LEATHER LIFE.

A little fantasy for today.

Oh, and I made t-shirts!! Comment below if you would like to acquire one.