What caused you to become vegan?

[Horsefriend]

What inspired you to become a vegan? Was it by talking to another vegan, watching videos, seeing cruelty first hand? Just hoping to hear some interesting stories. I thought this topic would already exist, but I couldn't find any.

[babble]

Years o' vegetarianism, with friends who held my feet to the fire and said, "look, you either believe in this or you don't." They had a point.

Well, that's the short answer. Heh.

I did the somewhat typical thing, I suppose. Toured dairy farms, etc. and saw firsthand what's actually going on. I played the "humanely raised" game for a bit longer, while trying to pretend spent dairy cattle weren't being sold for slaughter (which was idiotic of me, really), but in the end, it was just talking with other vegans who told me again and again and again until it finally sunk in that no matter WHAT we do, our use of animals for food is just never going to be shiny and happy and nice.

[Yukarangz]

Well, I guess I'd better start at the beginning. :3

It started, funnily enough, with being 15 and seeing a sticker on a post - KFC cruelty. The image, a cartoon of a bloody and terrified chicken in the clutches of a madman, shocked me--I'd never thought of meat production in such terms and yet it seemed somehow accurate. All of this was before I knew the slightest thing about animals - or the animal industry. It was at this time that I began to investigate welfarist campaigns, and anti-fur campaigns, etc., and seriously think about our impact on animals.

Fast forward to when I was 18, and decided I wanted to work with animals as a career. At this time I was still not a vegetarian, although I soon would be. (What can I say? I'm a slow learner. ) The course I was on was a general course about animal care and behaviour. In the process of my studies, I was exposed to some very callous attitudes towards animals. It made me angry but I felt like nothing I could do would make a difference.

I also met a great number of animals in person and realised that they were something other than I had believed - something far more alive, aware and precious. From that time on, I began to cut meat and animal products out of my diet, and refused to support animal industries. It wasn't long before I realised that giving that stuff up was not the wrench I thought it would be - in fact, it was the best thing I've ever done, and I'm never going back.

I still want to work with animals. It would be amazing to establish or work for a farmed animal sanctuary at some point...

[panthera]

[Horsefriend]

[panthera]

[Horsefriend]

Ew, bilious! Don't think I've heard that one before.

Thanks for the stories everyone! It's interesting how we all had different moments when we realized something was wrong and we had to investigate further.

I can't remember when it started for me. I never liked meat when I was younger. I became vegetarian in 1998, when I met horses. I felt ashamed to eat meat around them. I realized almost immediately that horses do not like being ridden and I quit doing that. In 1999, a friend mentioned that a kid in his class was a "vegan" and he didn't use any animal products. I was immediately interested in this new idea and I looked it up. That's when I learned about the horrors of factory farming. I learned more about farming at college: the filthy conditions cattle were forced to live in, the pain inflicted on horses removing their teeth with a screwdriver so bits can fit in their mouthes, the terrible things done to sheep, lab animals and other species... I've been to dozens of horse farms, some cattle farms, an alpaca farm, hobby farms... and they are all miserable places. I guess I started ranting. But I feel that explains my intense dislike for using other species.

[Faunus]

Thank you for that, Horsefriend! I always love what you share.

Moving beyond what I think of as limitations from decades of Buddhist practice, I do keep from the teachings that unnecessary suffering has its roots in ignorance, greed, and false views. My being a mere vegetarian for over 4 decades is prime example of ignorance and false views.

Ignorance
I stopped eating the flesh of other beings when I was 12 years old, and remained a "non-flesh eater" until 5 1/2 years ago. In my youth, my family's neighbour kept dozens of rabbits in cages in their yard, and I assumed it was because they loved them as pets. They didn't mind that I brought lettuce, carrots, and other veggies to them. I'd spent many hours every week watching these precious beings munch on them, and with assistance from their "owners" I could bring them out of their cages and gently stroke their beautiful fur. What magnificent creatures! It was pure joy. I needed that growing up as a victim of child abuse.

One day, with lettuce in hand, I went to see my furry friends. What I witnessed on my way there was a man brutally stabbing the rabbits in the stomach a knife. He callously threw their bodies onto the ground, and it was then that I learned that they were dinner. He yelled this fact out to me, and he was completely unconcerned about my crying and near hysteria, and least of all the precious life of the rabbits.

I went onto the front lawn of our house and simply lost it emotionally. Another neighbour driving past saw my distress and yelled out to me from a rolled-down window. I told her what was happening, and she said to me, "Well what in the hell do you think happens to animals when you eat beef, or chicken, or fish..." (something like that). At age twelve, I vowed never again to eat animal flesh. From that day, I still have not done so.

Ignorance plus false views

All of this time as a vegetarian, I was still wearing leather shoes, bought a wool coat, drank cows' milk, bought honey instead of sugar, vitamin A from sharks' liver oil, had a feather duster - ad nauseum. The list goes on! It was in 2005 that the facts hit me square in the face that not eating the flesh of other beings while paying to have them exploited in other ways was completely irrelevant to my intention. I was ignorant and had false views of the animal cruelty industries. That stupidity ended quickly. I was determined to get the facts and got them.

When I finally bought a computer and saw "Meet Your Meat",and read a myriad of web sites, I became a very determined vegan that afternoon. Mistakes were made out of ignorance (usually not reading labels closely enough), and even Panthera informed me not long ago that whey was an animal product. Duh.

I freely tell my history especially to vegetarians because I can relate to them if they're doing it "for the animals".

I became a brief and very premature member of PeTA at that time, but thanks to Dave_81 on ARCO, I saw the light about their "New Speciesist" philosophy. Deep thanks to Joan Dunayer for further enlightenment from her book, Speciesism.

Enlightenment is an ongoing process. It begins with the intention to see it, do it, have it - and share it all with others in the process.

[LiveVegan]

As if seeing a cow get her utters blowtorched and her tail cut off isn't bad enough...I think what got me the most was when I was I realized that if not for dairy consumption, there would be no veal calves. In a sense, every time I bought dairy (whether I ate it or someone else) then I was supporting this horror. I may as well have walked into the stall, grabbed the calf, sliped a chain around his neck and crammed him a crate myself. If I wasn't willing to this myself, then I wasn't willing to pay someone else to do it.

[Horsefriend]

I'm so sorry that you witnessed those terrible things, Faunus and LiveVegan. I suppose if we weren't exposed to these things then we wouldn't really be away of the suffering going on. Why do the innocent suffer, and why do those who care about them suffer because of it? It's all so backwards. There better be a really good afterlife.

[saflett]

I think my reasons from going from vegetarian to vegan after 10 years were similar to the ones that LiveVegan wrote about, I finally had to admit what deep inside I knew for a long time. If you eat dairy, you support the meat industry. If we don't eat meat, because we know that animals are conscious, feeling beings, how can we accept the horror of separating the mother and the baby, just so that we can drink her milk and eat the baby later? That's what I think prevents so many vegetarians from going vegan - realising how the piece of cheese or a glass of milk is a product of unbelievable psychological and physical torment.

[panthera]

Yeah, once I got past the factory-farm type of abuses, I still had to face the notion of separating mother from child, even in the best of farms. I talked to the dairy farmer I bought from, and he told me that he separated them after about 12 hours, so they would form less of a bond. I was horrified, and asked if the cows weren't stressed out, and he admitted that a few seemed to be.

I was just learning about the way that hormones regulate the whole birthing process (we called it "parturition" in Animal Science class), part of which involves a surge of oxytocin, which stimulates uterine contraction, assists in milk letdown, initiates maternal behavior, increases trust, and reduces fear. We take someone in this state and deprive her of the child she has labored 9 months to nurture. And we do it early so that she'll have less time to bond?



No thanks.

[Yukarangz]

Panthera: my "farm management" lecturer said the same thing. Basically, she said "it hurts if you leave the calf with it." Also, my biology teacher commented on a video where a pregnant rabbit had her babies cut out. When someone said, "doesn't it hurt later on?" she said "They'll kill it, it's cheaper to use another one."

It made me feel ill to even think of supporting these things... so in the end I had to own up to my part in it. Now, to see people using dairy, etc. makes me feel ill, although I know the extent of public ignorance on these issues...

[panthera]

What amazes me (well, it's not the only thing...) is that the cow & the human have the same gestation length, and yet people see no parallel. Would taking away a newborn human in the first few hours make it "hurt less"?

[samaritan]

My reason isn't that noble. I cannot digest meat well, it makes me very sick. :/