From Omnivore to Veganism: A Personal Journey Towards Compassion
Although I was raised in an omnivorous home, since toddler-hood I have loved my pets and would cry when seeing an animal suffer. As I grew, I learned of species being endangered and going extinct due to excessive hunting and fishing. Not until the notions promoted in Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet reached my step-mother did I begin to ask the question why I don’t eat my pet cat. But as I learned to cook well enough to host a family dinner, beans and rice served up nicely with a boiled green vegetable like broccoli. Other evenings, I would throw a chicken in the oven, but never the house-cat.
I was occasionally mean to the family Siamese. First as a young child cutting my poor distressed feline’s hair and yanking her tail. But after getting numerous painful scratches and bites from her, I learned to treat animals with more respect and compassion. I did so by adopting cats while going through graduate school. Meanwhile, doing violence to animals was in the name of science. It took me a decade to figure out that doing brain surgery on rats wouldn’t be of much benefit to either science or humanity. Coincident with that learning I went vegetarian and lost 18 pounds in 2 weeks of eating nothing but salads. After collapsing in the shower one day, I realized I couldn’t survive on this diet and returned to meat eating. As a busy, single graduate student, I didn’t have the time, energy, or cooking acumen to change my lifestyle to a totally plant-based diet and, a decade before the internet, it was hard to find the information I needed to become vegetarian on my own, so I returned to my omnivorous habits.
The woman who would become my wife had also been vegetarian for a while and had even cooked at a famous with vegan options. But even though we continued to eat meat fairly regularly, we questioned this aspect of our upbringing and talked often about switching to vegetarian. We delighted in visiting The Naam as often as possible and concerned ourselves with adequate nutrition. But we didn’t begin to actively shift away from regular meat-eating until my wife read ’s book Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. Because it describes graphic truths based on the biblical beginnings of cruelty towards farm animals, I couldn’t read through the blur of tears the book evoked in its first few pages. But I got the point loud and clear. I recognized more poignantly than ever that I was complacent to an abhorrent system and decided to make a more radical shift.
While my wife and I didn’t have the advantage of the internet during our upbringing, information about where our food comes from is now widely available at a global scale and is motivating many to alter their eating habits. For example, there is educational power on internet depictions of factory farming methods including over-crowding of millions of animals with little room to move at freezing temperatures. YouTube accounts of animal abuse perpetrated by factory-farm workers remind me of psychopathic murderers.
A Compassionate Approach
I cannot advocate a compassionate approach towards animals without acknowledging how the feelings of helplessness or the perceived inability to find other jobs can drive cruel behavior at factory-farms, slaughterhouses, or animal labs. During my years of doing brain surgery on rats, I was like those who remained complicit and tried to fit in with a vile culture of oppression and violence towards sentient beings who do indeed feel pain and bleed like us. As I eventually gave up sacrificing animals to the god of science, many their jobs at abattoirs due to the daily traumatic stress of participating in injuring and killing animals.
As information about the harsh realities of animal cruelty circulates, compassion leads a and the number of vegans grows dramatically worldwide. This growth is related not only to compassionate care for animals, but also to the need to decrease and recognize the identified by the World Health Organization.
For these reasons, for as long as I can remember, I have been on a journey to become a person who eats a strictly plant-based diet. Individually and collectively, I am confident we can change, but I still suffer from daily anxiety knowing animals continue to suffer at the hands of industries devoted to meat-consumption.
In sum, detrimental health impacts of meat-eating and food-related greenhouse gasses seem like good enough reasons to actively shift toward non-meat protein alternatives. But my single best reason is to join with others to treat animals in ways that spare their lives and their suffering.
