thevegansinner-blog

[thevegansinner-blog]

Dear Barbara, Tyler, Mia, and Mariel

I’ve just watched Always Open #42 and there’s some thoughts I want to share with you. You're well within your rights to ignore, dismiss, or argue against what I have to say, but equally I have a right to speak my own mind and ask for a smidgen of your time. What I have to say is something that is incredibly close to my heart, something I feel passionately about, and I was raised to believe that when you are passionate about something then you should share it with the world.

I wasn't particularly surprised or offended when you guys started ribbing on vegans and vegetarians. I get it. For the first 28 years of my life I ate meat and thought vegans were a bunch of extremist nutjobs. I hated the implication that there was something inherently evil in eating the foods I enjoyed, in living my own life, in making my own personal choices. I also can't stand it when people tell other people how to live their lives. It's rude, and unnecessary.

It was with that attitude that I watched my first ever vegan YouTuber. She'd stirred up some controversy and I was intrigued. I loaded up one of her most popular videos fully prepared to think she was an idiot, an extremist, a bitch, even. What completely shocked me was that I couldn't actually disagree with anything she said. I watched another video, then another, then I found these documentaries, and I spent about two weeks going down a rabbithole and having my mind blown wide open.

And I realised something profound. Vegans aren't close-minded; they're the exact opposite. It takes the abandonment of ego, tradition, family ritual, social pressure, pervasive advertising, culture, habit, and convenience to go vegan. I cannot tell you how many vegans I've met who've described the process as like opening their eyes and really seeing the world for the first time. It's not an acquisition of prejudice; it's the opposite.

One of the things I've found most interesting over the past 18 months of being vegan is that even among my most liberal, empathetic, socially aware friends there is a blind spot. If I stand up (and I do) for LGBT rights, BAME rights, women's rights, no one has a negative thing to say about it (no one I consider a friend anyway). If I campaign for equality on any other front the beautiful, kind, compassionate people in my life support me 100%. It's a wonderful thing.

But once I started to fight for an end to the exploitation of some of the most oppressed and powerless beings on the planet? That group of sentient beings whom we've said for years that we love? Animals? As soon as I started to stand up and shout for their right to live free of exploitation, for their liberation from the most despicable and cruel conditions in industrial farms, for true and equal compassion that includes pigs, cows, sheep, fish, and chickens alongside cats, dogs, horses, and hamsters, that's when I noticed the defensiveness and resistance that lived within the people I loved the most.

[fuck you, little guy]

And I realised that I had lived with that same defensiveness for a long time myself, and made the same shitty jokes, and programmed myself, and allowed society to program me, not to care about the suffering and unnecessary death of the animals we use for our food, clothes, cosmetics, toiletries, medicine, and entertainment. We keep our eyes closed tight in the face of our own participation in some of the cruellest and most exploitative industries on the planet. We make excuses. We make jokes. We choose not to think about it too much. This might even be the paragraph that makes you stop reading.

I'm writing to you now not because I think I have the power to 'make you go vegan'. I'm not even going to ask you to go vegan, or say that you should, or that you're a bad person for not (I don't think I was a bad person for the 28 years I ate meat, so nor do I think anyone else is). I just want to share this Maya Angelou quote with you-

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better”

-and ask you to open your minds to the fact that it is not only possible, but easy, to do better.

To that end, I'm including a list of just some of the resources that helped to open and change my mind. It would be amazing if you found the time to look into just some of these.

1 – Earthlings (found at http://www.nationearth.com/)

2 – Cowspiracy (Netflix)

3 - Forks Over Knives (Netflix)

4 – What the Health (Netflix)

5 – Okja (Netflix)

6 – James Aspey - This Speech is Your Wake Up Call (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHOcox2lvQo&t=1140s)

7 – Gary Yourofsky - Best Speech You Will Ever Hear (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K36Zu0pA4U&t=4s)

There are two things I know every vegan to have said in their lives. The first, 'I would never go vegan', and the second, 'I wish I had gone vegan sooner'. It pains me when I hear people I admire, people I believe to be kind and compassionate, being so dismissive of the best decision I have ever made. Not because it hurts my feelings – this shit has nothing to do with me – but because there is such an abundant opportunity to know better, and thus to do better, and that despite this billions of thinking, feeling, loving, curious, gentle, intelligent animals are exploited, abused, and slaughtered every year. Just because we like the taste of their bodies and excretions. For a reason as slight as that.

If you believe that it's possible to rear and slaughter animals without their suffering, that there truly are farms that raise happy animals, I ask you this: that if I killed your pets while they were sleeping, and guaranteed that they neither saw it coming nor felt pain, and then I ate them, would you not still feel that something injust and inhumane had happened? If I killed you? Crept up behind you one day and bonked you on the head. Would a jury let me off because you'd led a happy life and felt nothing when you died? Of course not.

So why do we believe it's okay to treat other animals in this way? Because it is convenient for us to do so? Because it's legal? Because we've been doing it for years? Those same reasons have been used to justify so many evil things. Oppression is oppression. Discrimination is discrimination. Exploitation is exploitation. Violence is violence.

There is nothing humane about the way we use animals. I bet you couldn't watch a group of piglets being ushered into a gas chamber, terrified and screaming, and tell me that you feel good about it. Watch a cow get a bolt gun to the head. A chicken get the end of its beak cut off with a hot blade. A dairy cow impregnated over and over and over again and having her calves taken away from her so that we can drink her milk. A baby lamb having its throat slit.

You can't deny violence when you see it. You can live your life pretending that it isn't happening, that you're powerless to prevent it, that it's somehow justified because it's happening to an other, or because it benefits you in some way. But violence is always violence. Suffering is always suffering. Once you've seen it, and let it touch your heart, it becomes obvious how wrong it is.

[a gas chamber for pigs]

It's fine that you laugh at vegans. We don't give a shit what you say about us. We just want you to face the truth that drives us and tell us if it doesn't move you, too. There is a global movement to end this exploitation and we want you on our side.

And it's easier than ever! They even have vegan Ben and Jerry's now, I shit you not. It's not bad (the peanut butter flavour's my favourite). There are countless pro athletes ditching animal products from their diets and seeing their health and fitness only improve. Tyler, there are vegan bodybuilders who build muscle easily on plant protein alone. Even Arnie's ditching meat. More and more doctors are discovering the data and coming to understand that a fully vegan diet is not only possible, but also potentially healthier. Dairy has been linked to both breast and prostate cancer. Processed meat is now a class 1 carcinogen alongside smoking and asbestos. A plantbased diet is the only diet that has been proven to reverse the US' number one killer, heart disease. Check out the work of Drs Neal Barnard, Michael Greger, Pam Popper, Cauldwell Esselstyn T. Colin Campbell for more information.

[This dude’s vegan, just saying]

And the environment! Did you know that if the USA just switched out beef for beans you'd near enough reach your climate change goals? That 91% of Amazon deforestation is due to animal agriculture? That we could be seeing fishless oceans by 2048 if we don't stop fishing? That it takes 18x more land to feed an omnivore than it does a vegan? That animal agriculture contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than any other industry on the planet? I don't know about you, but I have godkids and a nephew, and I want them to be able to grow up and thrive on this Earth. I don't want more and more devastating hurricanes. I don't want us to so deplete the soil that we can no longer grow crops. I don't want the oceans to be covered in dead zones from the run-off from cattle feed. And more than anything I want them to grow up and know that I did everything I could to protect this planet and the animals that share it with us.

And that includes writing to you. This could change your life, change all our lives, if you let it.

Just think about it.

With love and respect,

Hannah