I recently discussed my vegan beginnings on the blog, and what lead me to this path. If you read that, then you know that I went vegan for clout.

This is one of the reasons that I don’t judge people for what they eat. I’m not one to force how I live onto others. I’m just doing my own thing and providing the information for anyone who is curious. It’s not like my motivations to become vegan were 100% pure, and even after 6 years, I’m not perfect.

I quickly learned that the most effective way to break my addiction to dairy was to educate myself to its method of production. When someone told me that chocolate milk was often sold as such because the milk was too discolored by pus and blood, um.. yeah. That was all I needed to hear, but there was so much more to learn.

It is important that we educate ourselves, and I wanted to know my shit. I wanted to defend myself in case I ever got heat from family and friends for my lifestyle, like I read about online (spoiler: it never happened). I sought information to help motivate me and encourage me to stick with this lifestyle change.

I wanted to know all of the reasons, so I started searching. While I can’t say that I haven’t looked back, I am so happy to live my life this way. Each of my reasons affirm this decision, but my biggest and most obvious reason is my own personal ethics. My personal feelings about protecting people, the planet, and the voiceless animals came into play as soon as I started to research.

Animal Cruelty

This one is obvious, and is something that many of us are at least acutely aware of. Many of us have seen the footage. Being an animal lover, I find these videos difficult to watch. “Dairy is Scary” was one of the ones that I specifically remember watching, which made me rethink my “need for cheese.”

Bacon and sausage were staples in my childhood, but just reading excerpts from Gail Eisnitz’ book Slaughterhouse, was enough for me to rethink my ability to live without it. In her book, the chief investigator for the Humane Farming Association details the inner workings of slaughterhouses, and interviewed dozens of slaughterhouse workers to get their first hand experiences.

The bits that I read of Slaughterhouse were horrific enough to know that eating meat was no longer for me. This paired with my growing understanding for how absolutely intelligent and emotional pigs are made it even easier for me to say “no, thank you.” If you’re curious, some say they are as smart as a human toddler, and it is well agreed upon that pigs are generally more intelligent than dogs. A lot of people wouldn’t eat a dog, though.

Animal cruelty is to me, a big reason to be vegan. I understand that animals die, even in soy farming and other non-animal agriculture rodents and insects are killed. Still, I can’t help but feel that the anguish of the animals who must endure a life of factory farming and industrial slaughter is also consumed when we eat them. The physical and emotional pain is imbued within their bodies for us to consume, just like our trauma is often expressed in our physical body in various ways.

Rather than eating animals, along with their pain or fear, my personal preference is to eat plants instead. While fear and adrenaline does affect an animal’s “quality, flavor, and texture,” as meat, for me this choice to abstain is more ethical and spiritual than it is gastronomic.

Environmentalism

The thing about animal cruelty, and growing up for half of my childhood in a semi-rural Mexican-american home, is that there is a certain level of animal killing that I have been desensitized to. My grandpa grew his own vegetable garden and raised chickens, goats, and pigs. This is a version sustainable living that many immigrants brought with them to help make their American dream a reality, and isn’t something that I’m necessarily uncomfortable with, even now.

We named the pigs and we still ate them, and we sold our goats to other families to eat as well. This is why for many of us, eating meat feels like part of our family culture. The death of an animal isn’t something to cry about because it’s very natural. Unfortunately, this is not what modern factory farming looks like. The truth is that factory farming is so far from sustainable, it’s laughable.

While we urge individuals to make lifestyle changes to help improve the environment, large factory farms are committing not only cruel and unusual treatment of their animals, they are also helping to further devastate our environment, contributing to pollution and deforestation. They are the ones that we should be urging.

Cattle ranching is now the largest driver of deforestation in every amazon country. To offer some perspective, the amazon rainforest has often been referred to as “the lungs of our planet,” but may more accurately be referred to as the Planet’s AC. With climate change rising up the ranks toward being the top threat to human life on earth, we need that AC in pristine condition to help keep our planet cool and balanced to remain inhabitable.

While we may not necessarily need our rainforests intact to breathe, we definitely cannot minimize how important these systems are for biodiversity on planet earth. Beyond that, it is an industry that is constantly encroaching on the rights and territories of the indigenous people who are native to that land. This issue of deforestation is of course, said to be a complicated issue, but to avoid contributing the situation as much as I can by boycotting the cattle industry, it becomes much simpler.

The most straightforward way that I can state my own environmental reasoning for being vegan is that simply put, we have enough grain and plant based food on our planet to feed everyone, but instead, we feed that to animals to fatten them up, to sell to humans to eat on a massive scale. Why not cut out the animals and save some water? We use a ton of water in animal agriculture, even with a flexible scale of how much water meat production uses, it’s still more water than we use to produce plant foods, and yet we are using the water to grow the plant foods to feed the livestock, which we then eat, instead of just growing the plants and eating the plants. I can’t make that make sense.

Even eating fish is environmentally harmful, even though it is often seen as a better alternative to eating meat (editors note: fish is meat). Commercial fishing has a huge impact on our oceans, which is a fundamental component to earths balance, and sustaining life on the planet. Overfishing, bycatch (fishing for a certain species doesn’t stop TONS of other widlife from getting caught up in the net, and they don’t all get rescued and thrown to sea, they are discarded), and pollution are all abuses which have been attributed to commercial fishing.

As a hippie, I view earth as our mother and as our responsibility. Most days I feel that we owe a lot to her. This is why I never litter and when I find out that a large mainstream industry is harming her, I do my best to never give that industry a dollar of my money if I can help it. Sometimes I feel like how I spend money is the only power that I have in this world.

Human Welfare

Sometimes thinking about the welfare of animals, or of people living in another part of the world can feel so abstract. Especially when we have local problems which always need addressing. I also know that to some people, animals or the environment just aren’t a priority, because life is hard. Life is especially hard right now. There are many reasons that this is not a priority for many people, and I think that’s OK.

As a matter of fact, some people believe that animals were put here for us to kill and eat. I also know that some people feel that it’s unfair to make it our individual responsibility to fix the environmental issues related to industry, and to an extent I agree with that. There are many reasons why even thinking about this subject is a privilege, but still, I find myself here at this conclusion to opt out of eating animals, and I can’t be the only one.

I do think that the businesses profiting from this destruction should be held liable and accountable, but the problem seems so massive, it’s daunting. I boycott because my intention is to be the change that I’d like to see in the world. For me, being vegan is a part of doing that to the best of my ability.

Another reason I have found it easy to boycott is learning about the effect that factory farming has on actual people living right here in the US. It took me some time to realize that this industry is not just harmful to the animals, or our planet. It is harming our people as well.

There are areas of our country where farm land is sprawling, and for the families who grew up for generations on this land, they are being poisoned in their own homes by neighboring factory farms, or they are pushed out by strenuous circumstances. There are lakes of pig-shit water which affect not just the smell everywhere you go, but the safety and breathe-ability of the air as well.

Imagine living there with your family. Maybe you are unable to afford to move away from your family home, or maybe you just don’t want to leave that family history behind. Meanwhile your new hog farming neighbors are spraying waste water into the air via irrigation systems, and their gigantic pink lakes of caca are poisoning your local groundwater. This is graphic, but it’s a fact of life for many people who were living there before the commercial farms took over.

It’s also no secret that meat processing plants are hotbeds for illnesses, but these plants are also well known for workers rights abuses and human rights violations. When I started to learn about the cost cutting measures that are taken on top of everything else, which may be one reason why these workers have some of the highest rates of occupational injury and illness in the United States, I started to really feel grimy.

Knowing this makes it a lot easier to not want to support these things during grocery runs. Sometimes I don’t care about the animals, and worrying about the environment is just a lot, and in those moments, it helps to remember the human beings that are being affected. It’s not that I want empires to come crashing down, and regular folks to lose their jobs, it’s just that I believe in a better future, and I don’t want to support this industry with my hard earned cash.

It’s Cool to be Kind

My first encounter with animal advocates wasn’t in college, or even high school. I grew up with dear family friends who were vocal animal advocates. They discussed animal cruelty and were strict vegetarians. I never really gave my diet a second thought, but growing up with someone my own age, and seeing her and her parents live their lives this way, it probably planted a seed. Still, they never pressured me, or even told me to go vegetarian. They spoke the truth but didn’t tell people how to live, and they knew members of a local folk band that I saw perform once. They were (and still are) so cool.

I think as much as I joke around about going vegan to make me cool, there is some truth to it. For whatever reason, I associate the alternative lifestyle and not eating meat with being kind of cool. I mean, there is something different about it, since the more common lifestyle uses animals for food, clothing, and other goods. I also think it’s cool to do what you think is right, even if it’s unusual to others.

I guess for me, it’s just what I want to do, and really, I do it because I can. I don’t need to use animals to survive, so I don’t. I have reasons, but the main reason is that I can’t really find a good reason to keep consuming animals. I’m not about to hunt, and am not in a position to farm. Being vegan is something that I can do.

I’m not that concerned with other people adopting my exact lifestyle. I think that trying counts, and that reduction counts, and these things end up being stepping stones for many people. For me, just by living this way, being happy, sharing bomb food, and showing that my life is not lacking with a plant based diet is enough. Just living this way and enjoying my life is enough to plant a seed for someone in my life.

I believe that sharing good food is the most effective form of advocacy for veganism, and that living as happily as you can is the best way to invite others to seek happiness in their own lives. I accept that it will look different for everyone, though. For me it includes being vegan, and now you know all of the reasons for why that is. If you’re reading this because you’re looking for reasons to try it, I have a challenge for you, try to think of meaningful reasons NOT to. That might help you to take the leap!

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Photo by William Navarro on Unsplash