Livia and Veganism - Is it really SO bad??

Liv grew up in (what she sees now as small) a Romanian town in the late 80’s, early 90’s. Always surrounded by animals of all kind, she always knew she was an animal lover. She had a cat and a dog in the back garden after all! She fed them, brushed their fur, took them to the vet whenever they needed it. From a very early age Liv was taught that we are superior to animals and that we own them. The idea of animal rights didn’t cross my mind until she was about 17 or 18 years old.

On the other hand, we had chickens, sometimes ducks and for a very long time we had a pig as well – one pig, a different pig every year. It’s traditional to slaughter your pig just before Christmas so you can “enjoy” “fresh” meat and all the home made delicatessen you can make. But this is only Christmas, the rest of the year some of the “lazier” egg laying chickens got it as well – they became soup, stew, barbeque, etc. The ducks were victims from day one, they only had one purpose: to “give” meat.

Every weekend, for so many years, her family used to take me and then after by brother was born, they used to take us both to a mini zoo. Thinking about it now makes my blood go cold. The cages they were kept in were so small and there was no space for them to run around. Some of the animals were kept in a cage by themselves – how can you do that?! That is worse than slavery and prison together! Liv knows some animals are rescued from the wild and that they need medical care in order to recover, but we should do our best to help them integrate into their natural habitat, not cage them for our own amusement and profit.

And now come the pests – nasty, disgusting, disease carrying creatures. On top of it all they multiply like crazy so they have to be exterminated. It’s so easy to just think about it this way rather than think about the environmental imbalances caused by humans, that eventually lead to pests multiplying. It’s so easy to treat the problem with some poison rather than fix the actual cause.

So, do we actually have animals rights or do we just favour pets and endangered species? What rights does a sheep have? Or a cow? Or a 6-week-old calf? Or a chicken that’s so heavy it spends most of its life laying in their own feces and never see the sun light? God forbid you leave your cat or your dog suffer the same atrocities as a chicken. God forbid you kill the male kittens hours after they were born, you would probably get a fine or get locked up.

Now it’s probably the right time to bring up humane slaughtering. How many meat eaters would never ever kill an animal themselves? Take my mum for example. She’s always been a meat eater, she loves the taste she says… Liv says she did too! Liv was hooked up on it, she was addicted to KFC, she used to spend all her money in there, double menus, 3 times a day! Taste was never the problem. How many vegans used to love bacon? Her mum loves veal, she loves it! She said she would never ever kill the calf herself, but someone else kills it anyway and if she doesn’t eat it somebody else will. She’s correct so far. But she denies one basic, simple and logical fact: she’s contributing and increasing the demand of meat on the market! So she’s paying for the system to go on. Liv tried to show her the movie Earthlings. Her answer was, 30 seconds into the film, that she cannot watch something like this, she doesn’t agree with it, doesn’t support it and here comes the icing on the cake – she doesn’t think that factory farming is like that at all. This is just an exaggeration put together by vegans to justify their strange choices.

As humans, we will always tend to resist change and defend our current choices, situation, etc. So does this basic instinct make it OK to ignore the suffering, the desperation and the horror animals endure in factory farms as we speak? When I became vegan, the least of my worries was my health.