Veganism (Click to select text)

Veganism can dramatically alter ones life forever, often producing deep emotional changes. Although choosing veganism is a source of great joy, it can also create friction among family and friends. Cultural pressures, the demand for conformity, and the personal desire for acceptance can challenge a vegans confidence and self-esteem. Because vegans so acutely see and feel the suffering of the world, and are at odds with many widely accepted social customs, some will invariably experience occasional bouts of the blues. Vegans who experience anger, pain, or frustration for extended amounts of time may become depressed and exhausted from maintain such strong emotions. Feelings of loneliness, isolation, or rejection can compound matters, leading to despondency in an otherwise emotionally healthy person. Holidays and celebrations such as birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and reunions are opportunities to reconnect with family and friend and feel like a part of the broader culture. However, most gatherings center around customs and practices that are very upsetting to vegans. Meat is typically the center of the holiday table and the focal point of picnics and barbecues. Although most happy occasions are intended to convey a spirit of fellowship and conviviality, they can be extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant experiences for vegans. Consequently, it is not surprising that many vegans feel torn over their allegiances and may distance themselves from family and community celebrations. They may opt instead to participate in alternative festivities or start their own traditions with others who share their perspectives and ideals. The most difficult challenge for me in being a vegan is the separation and distance. I often feel far from others who are not vegan. It is no longer comfortable for me to sit down at a table where animal products are being served. I feel that I know too much, and it is so painful to be aware of the profound suffering and misery that is represented on the table. This is especially true at celebrations such as Passover, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc... where the the holiday is about freedom and gratitude. Oppressing and harming others while we speak words of thanksgiving feels hypocritical and wrong to me. People who profess to be animal advocates yet eat meat, eggs, or dairy products or wear leather shoes and belts apply contrary rules of ethics. They are known as people with selective compassion. Their actions imply that one group of animals– the one they represent– has a greater right to life than another and suggest that sacrificing habit, fashion, and beauty, comfort, or taste is a worse evil than taking an animal’s life or making an animal suffer Some activities vegans are against are rodeos, marine mammal parks, circuses, zoos, fishing, racing( dog and horse) and hunting which is probably the worst activity. Hunting, hunters proclaim, instills in its devotees such noble qualities as self-reliance, ruggedness, discipline, and courage. But in fact, hunters skulk about the forest in camouflage, wait in ambush for their victims, and kill at a long range with overpowering, technological weapons, often going to extraordinary lengths to lure their unsuspecting prey into a violent death. Equally important is the fact that hunters are rarely in any danger from the animals that they hunt. They inflict pain and death on creatures who cannot hurt them. Even animals who could pose a threat, such as bears or cougars, would normally run rather than fight a human unless they are cornered or protecting their young. Hunters entrap and frequently shoot terrified animals in the back as they flee for their lives. Often, hunters tempt animals with a false promise of a mate, and then kill the trusting creatures who are duped by their bait. Also 17 million animals are trapped in the United States each year for fur, many traps are so painful that the animals chew through their own limbs to escape. Some materials Vegans do not wear consist of leather, wool, fur, etc. Most people believe that shearing is not only harmless, but necessary to rid sheep of excess wool foisted on them by nature. Like much information about animal-agriculture practices, this, too, is a myth. Merinos are the most commonly raised wool producing sheep. Their unnatural skin folds and excessive coats cause severe heat exhaustion and fly infestations. To reduce fly problems, the sheep are subject to mulesing, a surgical procedure performed on about 20 % of Australia’s 150 million sheep. The great majority of wool used for clothing in the United States comes from Australia, which produces nearly one-third of the world’s supply. Mulesing involves cutting large strips of flesh off of the hind legs of 4 week old lambs. Another procedure is called tail docking, designed to maintain the salable condition of the wool surrounding a sheep’s anus, whereby the tail and some skin are cut off with a knife. Because of economic and logistic considerations, these procedures are performed on fully conscious lambs without analgesic, producing varying degrees of acute pain that may last for hours or even days. Sheep, like most farmed animals, have been genetically manipulated. Previously sheep shed their wool naturally. Today modern sheep, however, produce abnormally excessive amounts of wool. As a result, they are no longer capable of shedding their wool and must be shorn. Sheep shearers are paid by piece rate; the more sheep sheared, the more money they earn. Therefore, speed alone dictates the shearing process. Because there is no incentive to deal with the animals carefully, the sheep are often violently handled. As a result, sheep are frequently cut and injured during a shearing. After being sheared, the animals must endure extreme weather conditions without protection. A closely shaven sheep is more sensitive to cold than a naked human, since a sheep’s natural body temperature is much higher than ours, roughly about 102 degrees. During cold weather, hundreds of thousands of sheep die of exposure or freeze to death, and in hot weather, freshly shorn sheep suffer painful sunburns. Leather must be treated to prevent it from rotting or becoming extremely rigid in the cold or flaccid in the heat; thereby rendering it unusable. Treatments to leather are environmentally unsound; in addition, they preserve the animals skin and make it incapable of biodegrading. Leather tanneries not only emit a foul odor, but also produce a host of pollutants, including lead, zinc, formaldehyde, dyes, and cyanide based chemicals. Tannery runoff contains those toxic substances as well as large amounts of hair, proteins, salt, sludge, sulfides, and acids, which are discharged into rivers and groundwater. Furthermore, workers in the tannery are exposed to carcinogenic substances such as coal, tar derivatives, toxic chemicals, and noxious waste. Purchasing leather goods supports the ongoing contamination of our air, land, and water from tannery toxins. The United States cattle industry produces 158 million tons of waste per year, and live stock production is the number one cause of water pollution in the United States. From 1960- 1985, over 40% of the Central American rainforests were destroyed to create grazing land for cattle. Understandably, dairy farmers want the public to desire their products and feel good about using them. Even though human beings are the only creatures on Earth that consume another animal’s milk after growing old enough to not need it anymore. As a result, the dairy industry has painted a utopian but highly fallacious image of modern dairy production. Impressions aside, dairy is a big business and with all business, interests boil down to the bottom line. 70% of dairy cows and 25% of heifers are bred artificially. Genetic manipulation is customary and rampant. Dairy cows suffer the entirety of their brief lives enduring illness and pain caused by barbaric confinement practices, rigorous automatic milking systems, endless cycles if pregnancies, artificial inseminations, drugs, hormones, and genetic manipulations, prior to facing the ultimate horror of death, making dairy production certainly as brutal and murderous a trade as meat production. But because the dairy industry is shrouded with in civic approval leveraged by powerful lobbying force, it receives extensive governmental subsidies, has a stranglehold on our federally funded school lunch programs, and has carried favor with the medical and healthcare communities. The blood and tears that go into every glass of milk are masked by manipulative marketing crusades, couched in political pretense, and made virtually invisible to an oblivious and trusting public, making dairy products perhaps even more distasteful to vegans than meat. Chickens wingspan is 30 to 32 inches and four to six chickens are typically crowded into a 16 inch wide cage making it impossible to stretch their wings or walk Since they are in such a confined space they go insane just like anyone would, they turn to cannibalism and pecking at each other usually eating their eyes. So to stop these acts, handlers have come up with a method called debeaking where they cut off the chickens beaks. When they do this, they are cutting through bone, cartilage, and delicate soft tissue. Male chicks are of no use to the egg industry because they can not produce eggs and do not grow large enough to be sold profitably for meat. Consequently, they are disposed of by the quickest and cheapest methods, most often suffocation(thrown into a garbage bag), gassing, drowning, or being ground up alive for animal feed. All egg hatcheries commit these atrocities. Whether they provide hens for factory farms or free range farms, approximately 200 million male chicks die these ways each year. This is just a brief rundown of why Vegans are the way they are. They see life for what it really is and stop their everyday routine to be conscious about the suffering around them. They are the people who act out in defense and voice their opinions on society to say that what people are doing is wrong, hurtful, and evil. Society must open its eyes and realize it is being force fed death, disease, and suffering from all of the dead bodies of other animals just to make a profit. Some Vegans and Vegetarians: Einstein, Ghandi, Jesus Christ, Voltaire, Thoreau, Leonardo DaVinci, Mark Twain, Plato, Socrates Vegan Quotes “You are what you eat”- American proverb “ People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.”- Isaac Singer “Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn. You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into a great oak. Bury a sheep, nothing happens but decay”-George Bernard Shaw “You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit, and plays with the rabbit, I’ll buy you a new car”- Harvey Diamond