“Witnessing the unjust plight and horrific suffering of other animals, I must also try to understand why my feelings of grief, loss, rage, helplessness, unending sorrow, and panic sometimes overwhelm me and threaten to paralyse me. Other animals are innocent, vulnerable victims of unconscionable injustice and violence. The passionate devotion of advocates to this cause arises out of a sense of justice and respect for rights, compassion, and empathy, which by their nature are rooted to some degree in one’s personal identification with the suffering and oppression of other animals. I suspect that there are a very few of us who have not been recipients of acts of violence upon our bodies or within our lives and who been spared the fear, confusion, helplessness, pain, sorrow, and rage that follows a violation of one’s bodily integrity and self-ownership. I must therefore accept that there may be more than a little self-centredness in my own apparent ethical altruism, and empathy. I fight for them in part, to free myself. My outrage is deeply personal. As well as our mission being altruistic in its ideal form, I suspect that for many of us, it also embodies what is a palpably personal fight. “

And this.

Thirteen years ago, I looked at my dinner and an thought cut through me like a knife “this is the flesh of a cow that had been living a life that s/he wanted to continue living but died, for me.  The image of that individual cow was crystal clear in my mind. I felt ashamed and repulsed. I stopped eating animal flesh but uncharacteristically for me did no research, probably because I was afraid of what I might learn. I continued to consume dairy and eggs because I very mistakenly didn’t think that dairy cows and laying hens were suffering or dying for me. Three years ago, my husband and I watched the documentaries “The Game Changers” (2018) and “Dominion” (2018), films that examine the health benefits of a plant-based diet, the staggering environmental damage and significant contribution to climate change that comes from industrial animal agriculture and reveal the horrific standard, approved practices and procedures in industrial animal agriculture and slaughterhouses. My husband became so angered witnessing the abominable suffering of these terrified, vulnerable beings that he almost put his fist through the wall. Utterly heartbroken and traumatized, I lay in bed sobbing, unable to function for hours. Our participation in this suffering was unacceptable to us and our ethical obligation to these sentient beings was clear. We had to attack our own hypocrisy as self-professed animal lovers and to the best of our abilities begin to align our everyday choices and behaviour with the anti-oppression and pro-justice values we espoused. We could no longer, would no longer participate in the injustice against these other animals and infliction of an unfathomable degree and scale of suffering upon them. They had valued their lives, had a right to them, and had fought for them in every way that they could. With that decision, although we knew very little about veganism, we had become vegans.