veganism

Down the Rabbit Hole into the World of Animal Rights

April 25th, 2013

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?

 
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Night Thoughts

April 15th, 2013

Hello everyone,

Just thought I’d post a brief update.

What an intense experience it was writing and putting together my last blog post, my interview with Anita Krajnc, founder of Toronto Pig Save.

Intense because… it is intense to witness these things. Death. Suffering. Cruelty. Injustice.

It is intense to even talk about these things. In fact, in rereading my interview I noticed that I skimmed over talking about the true horrors of what I saw. I did write a brief post about it on my other personal blog though, which can be found here.

I think it is amazing that Toronto Pig Save bears witness 3 times a week.

I think it is important too…because I think…you start to second guess yourself. You think, maybe I couldn’t have seen what I did. Pigs boiled alive… It was only after reading a comment on TPS’s facebook today where someone was talking about how many pigs are boiled alive did I feel like, OK! I wasn’t just seeing things!

It’s hard to believe the things you see. It’s like your mind almost wants to protect you from it, and tries to dull the memory so that you can’t “bear witness” as powerfully. The emotion fades. But at the same time, I’ll never forget what I saw. Yeah, I can’t recall the exact sound of the pigs screaming anymore but I know what I heard, and saw. It never totally leaves you I guess.

Did anyone watch any of Toronto Pig Save’s videos? If so, I’d love to hear your experience watching them, and thanks to everyone who liked and commented, that was so amazing to feel your support. It is wonderful to hear from people from far and wide.

Well, I feel I am kind of left with the question, what do I do? Anita invited us all to think about starting our own Pig or Cow Save groups,  and in the interview she suggested I do use my artistic bent to make some sort of art for animals.

I would love to do something kind of like what Jo-Anne McArthur does. But how? But what? I will be brainstorming on this question…

One thing I read today got me thinking about…

All those people out there who still think we need meat to be healthy…

Also all those people who skim over the elephant in the room when talking about vegetarianism or veganism (sure it’s healthy, and good for the environment, but what about the murders taking place)…

What a challenging issue this is. Definitely something that will be in the history books. This is a movement. I love how Anita is leading it on one front from Toronto, Non-Violent Style–inspired by Gahndi and Tolstoy…

Something I hate:

I hate how people don’t like vegans. I hate how people don’t understand that vegans are self righteous for a reason.

Murdering innocent animals…so crystal clear in my mind. And yet….so …everywhere!

My main question I think after the interview was

WHY

Why don’t people get it?

Here are my ideas why people don’t understand why animal rights matters:

1. They may not have a very large capacity for empathy

2. They are numbed to feeling empathy for animals from all the conditioning from food companies (“you need meat to be healthy”), scientists debating whether or not animals are conscious, hunters numbed to violence at a young age, parents creating a “bystander effect” by eating meat like there is nothing wrong with it, advertizing proclaiming humane, local, sustainable meat from old fashioned farms with happy pigs and cows (ha!) and just generally all the messages we receive in our society that animals are ours for the eating and using.

3. people do feel empathy for animals but are addicted to the taste of meat and dairy and feel they can’t change (I definitely have felt this way and know how hard this can be)

4. They feel threatened by vegans moral stance which deep down makes sense to them, and feel judged and that creates a backlash like “but it tastes so good!”

5. They have never seen a farm animal before in their life, let alone gotten to know one, and so they never think about animals and can easily assume animals are dumb and don’t suffer like we do

Other ideas?

a puppy in the womb

I am experimenting with the 80/10/10 Diet by Dr Doug Graham, which is a book about High Carb Raw Veganism, also known as Low Fat Raw Veganism, or Fruitarianism or eating all fruits and vegetables. I have been eating so much fruit.

Hope you are all doing well, and Happy Tax Day and Happy Monday!

 
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