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Weekly Update

September 30—October 6

Hi, folks. It’s been one week since I *officially* launched this blog— yay! My goal is to spread awareness about veganism, environmentalism, and humanitarianism, so I just wanted to quickly express my gratitude for the opportunity to do so.

This past week has been pretty good to me, actually. I landed a dog sitting gig, so I’ll be taking care of thee freaking cutest pups for the next couple of weeks. I’ve been participating in Inktober, a drawing challenge that requires you to create one drawing every day of October. It’s supposed to help you make drawing every day a habit. You can check out what I’ve drawn so far > here < and give me a follow too, hehe. I want to dip my toes into the pool of freelance writing, so this blog doubles as a portfolio with the niche being pretty obvious.

And that’s it! How have your weeks been? What kinda of new endeavors are you undertaking? Tell me about them— I’d love to here it all, big and small!

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Fairyland Cottage ||  Self-Care Rituals - Simple and Low Waste

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On Hunger

The animal agriculture industry is extremely wasteful and inefficient. Livestock animals require more food from the global food supply than humans do, meaning there are more crops being grown to feed livestock animals than there are to feed humans directly.

Currently there are seven and a half billion people living on Earth. We feed sixty billion livestock animals every year to be killed for human consumption (more specifically to those who can afford it), when there are one billion people who are currently malnourished. Even more daunting, six million children starve to death every year because this world cares more about feeing livestock animals than human beings— than young children. The yearly estimate for food that could have been consumed by humans that instead went to livestock is about 700 millions tons... Sad, right?

Scientifically speaking, only a small percentage of plant energy consumed by livestock animals is converted into proteins edible to humans, amplifying animal agriculture’s inefficiency. Animals that eat plants (omnivores) receive a tenth of the energy absorbed from the Sun, when animals that eat other animals (carnivores) only receive a thousandth of the energy that the plants they had eaten had absorbed from the Sun. Why should we support a food system that isn’t nutritiously practical and it only benefits a select ‘fortunate’ people?

In addition to these inhuman inefficiencies, the animal agriculture industry is a colossal waste of natural resources. Raising livestock animals requires significantly more land, water, and energy than cultivating plant foods for direct human consumption— just one acre of land can yield between twelve and twenty times more plant food than animal-based food. Better use of existing crops could easily feed four billion people, recalling that just one billion are currently malnourished.

The present food system disproportionately affects the poorest people all over the world— it uses crops for livestock animals instead of for people. Take a stand against this wasteful and inefficient food system. The Earth has limited agricultural land, and a plant-based diet requires only one third of the land necessary for a diet that includes meat (and dairy). The industrial production of livestock animals is not just unsustainable; it’s unjustifiable.

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Photo Credit

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On Wildlife

The United States is responsible for about nine billion farm animals deaths each year which yields to around 25 million farm animal deaths each day, but that doesn’t include the deaths of native wildlife animals. In 2017 alone, 2.3 million wildlife animals had been shamelessly exterminated. There was a secret branch of the United States Department of Agriculture, the USDA, that brutally killed wildlife animals including ‘protected’ endangered species. This program, The Animal Damage Control, was established in 1931 to police and destroy wildlife animals considered detrimental to western livestock. It is now publicly known as Wildlife Services.

To name a few, Wildlife Services kill native predators such as coyotes, wolves, bears, and mountain lions— all on behalf of the livestock industry. They are gunned down by helicopters, poisoned, gassed, torn apart by hunting dogs, strangled to death by neck snares, and caught in leg-hold traps where they slowly die. Collette Adkins, a biologist and attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity has stated that The Department of Agriculture needs to get out of the wildlife-slaughter business. “There’s just no scientific basis for continuing to shoot, poison and strangle more than a million animals every year. Even pets and endangered species are being killed by mistake, as collateral damage.”

The agency’s reckless, brutal, and unnecessary behavior is destroying ecosystems, depleting biodiversity, and violating animal protection laws— a 100 billion dollar yearly cost paid by lucky taxpayers. Wildlife Services wastes millions of taxpayer dollars by spending far more to kill predators than the actual damage those predators cause. If you thought Wildlife Services’s mission was to help wildlife and humans coexist— their motto is “Living with Wildlife” after all— sorry, but you’ve been punk’d. Private ranchers are in cahoots with them to protect their farmed animals.

Taxpayers fund wildlife agencies— we deserve a wildlife management program that’s honest and transparent with the public. Ecosystems can be protected by using nonlethal methods of capture to preserve native wildlife animals who are essential to these environments.

When you stop supporting the animal agriculture business, you stop supporting Wildlife Services and all their gruesome practices.

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For the Animals

The term “vegan” was coined in 1944 by a British woodworker named Donald Watson to differentiate the vegetarians who did not consume eggs or dairy products. According to The Vegan Society, veganism is “a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.” Veganism is closely linked to the Animal Liberation Movement, a social movement which seeks to end the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals. It also seeks to end the status of animals as property, and to end their use in the research, food, clothing, and entertainment industries.

Animals want to live, but instead they are being exploited for human greed. They develop depression and madness while being confined in dark, diseased spaces so small they can’t even turn around. They experience abuse and trauma as they’re beaten and raped to fulfill their roles. They become overwhelmed with anxiety, they scream and they cry, while on the only walk they’ve ever been on just to be slaughtered or gassed years before their lifespan would be up. They experience heartache as their children are violently taken away from them. They’re ground up alive when the industry deems them useless. The horror that is their lives is real. Every year 60 billion land animals and over a trillion marine animals are killed for food worldwide. Their reality is outrageous when you consider that all they want is to preserve and cherish their only life— just like us.

And honestly, non-human animals and human animals have a lot more in common than you would think— they can form deep friendships and emotional bonds; they have facial expressions; they have communication skills; and some species even have regional accents! Nature is always around us whether you personally feel connected to it or not. Animals inhibit the world right alongside us, so it’s only reasonable that there are qualities that overlap— especially the ones about seeking a life of freedom, and avoiding harm and danger.

But Veganism a lot more than the animals that end up on plates. Veganism means respect for all animals, everywhere. Animals are suffering in other captive environments such as fur farms, zoos, aquariums, circuses, and laboratories. Institutions like these don’t care for the well-being of their animals. Zoos and aquariums deprive animals of their natural habitats, and they too will slip into depression and madness. Safari parks aren’t any better— they still force animals to live in a restricted space against their will and they still ship animals around to other parks. Also, like in circuses, safari park animals perform in ‘shows.’ With this being said, aviaries should be a no-brainer— birds should never be restricted to fly. Testing on animals is unethical, wasteful, and archaic. People living a vegan lifestyle don’t buy products that test on animals or purchase clothing that contain animal by-products (fur, leather, down, wool, or silk).

There is one quality that non-human animals don’t have that human animals do, and that is the ability to cope with unnatural and traumatizing situations.

The pain animals endure can end with us. Animals can once again feel joy, affection, and pleasure when we embrace an ecocentric system of values— when we make the moral choice to not murder or exploit our animal equals. Veganism is the answer for a compassionate life.

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A Very Vegan Story

Hi, folks! I decided to share my story on making the switch to a vegan lifestyle. I cringed recalling bits and pieces of it, but good stories always show character development. Hopefully this recollection resonates and inspires.

Check out the directory for tons of useful information! www.squashingthestandard.tumblr.com/directory

I had never even heard the word “vegan” be uttered until my Freshman year of college. I had befriended someone in my writing class, and we were on our way to the coffee shop they were working at part-time when I noticed a tattooed green “v” with a plant stem topped with a leaf for the right side on their inner forearm. I know it’s super cliché to ask people what the meaning behind their tattoos are (or lack there of because, y’know, #wheninrome ), but my curiosity had gotten the best of me. As emotionless as they could manage because yep, I had crossed that don’t-ask-about-my-ink line, they said, “Oh, this? I’m Vegan.”

“Okay, and what the hell is that?”— I had excellent social skills. They graciously explained what veganism was and I simply replied with, “I could never give up bacon.” Yikes.

Then my best friend went vegan. They came in from out of state, and all I remember from their visit was terrorizing them in the grocery store— “That rice was grown to be killed! You’re a monster!”, as I’m carrying around a bag of beef jerky. You know the saying: you are what you eat.

To this day I cringe thinking about how I responded to veganism. I was defensive and I was irrational just like so many others are when they’re presented with the hard facts— but I was wrong to be that way.

Fast forward to junior year of college, and I’m in my dorm room laying in my twin xl bed with my then-boyfriend trying to find something to watch on Netflix instead of studying. We were still in a documentary mood from watching alleged alien sightings the night before, so, for no real reason at all or maybe it being fate, we had chosen Cowspiracy. And, folks, I freaking cried. It was so upsetting. Despite loving the documentary for the information it provides and for giving me the push I needed to change, I’ve only ever watched it once because the imagery is brutal. But it was that night that I decided to stop eating meat. Yeah, I had my weak moments— I grew up eating meat like so many of us do, but I couldn’t get that documentary out of my head.

Then one late spring afternoon I was walking out of an academic building on my campus, and there were volunteers from Vegan Outreach handing out pamphlets. As I took one, I said to myself, “Okay, Universe. I can take a hint,”—my social skills had improved by this point. I went straight to the computer lab and sifted through their website. I sat there lost for words, but I knew exactly what I had to do— I started cutting out and replacing animal by-products from my diet one by one, and by the end of that summer I was vegan.

It’s been three years now and I’ve learned so much about what it means to be vegan. According to The Vegan Society, veganism is “a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.” But it’s a lot more than that. It’s about fighting for the exploitation of farm workers, fighting for the low-income communities that are directly impacted by factory farming, and realizing that veganism alone will not save the planet— corporations are to largely to blame for Earthly destruction and veganism cannot thrive under capitalism.

It’s not going to be perfect at first, or ever because this is a carnist’s world, but I can assure you that it does get easier and the accidents will become increasingly rare. And, yeah, it is kind of weird saying you’re vegan, and more often than not other people will announce it to a whole room of strangers for you, but that’s only because it’s ‘abnormal’ to folks. If you ever feel discouraged, turn to the vegan community for reassurance— you are never alone on any journey you decide to embark.