Thoughts about anti-specism

Lately, I've been confronted with many people, articles, videos speaking about veganism. Many of them I was actually enquiring for. I felt like sharing some information I gathered about it wouldn't hurt anybody, actually on the opposite.

Image from Pixabay

In the past, I was eating vegetarian for quite some time, almost a year round. This choice, I've made it for ethical reasons back then. Because of all those videos you see of animals being maintained in such horrible ways only to end up on our table for an affordable price. But, I've stopped. Not because these ways of keeping the animals in small cages changed, no! Purely out of egoïsm.

Mainly, I stopped because I got frustrated of not being able to try the multitude of food from where I was travelling. There's not much traditional food without animal suffering in Brazilian cuisine (and I'm only thinking about the pão de queijo for now). Since I'm probably the most curious human on earth I just tried anything new: the weirdest the name to me, the highest probability I'm going to try it. Another reason why I stopped is that when I was invited by someone for some food, cooked or bought by them, I'd feel terribly impolite to refuse it just because of its ingredients. If anyone makes the effort to think about making or buying something for me, of course I'm going to eat it. And finally, I've chosen to stop for an issue that is very near and dear to my heart: food waste. This problem concerns all of us! So many people would need the food we are currently casually throwing in the bin. I'm not throwing the shade, I do it as well, even if I do my best to avoid it. In the past years, I haven't been living at my own true place. This means, there's some food around me that wouldn't be normally the food I would eat. And that could potentially be thrown away. And if a steak or a yogurt is about to hit the bin soon, I would propose to eat it. Because it's wasted energy. That cow that is now a steak would have died for nothing, it's calories that it gave to us would have been wasted. So even if it's counter thinking of the vegan ideology, I would eat animal products in that case.

Cats living in Masca, Tenerife

It's only since a few weeks that I've sincerely thought about going vegan. Why not? Our society makes it quite easy, there's a lot of choice available, and it's actually not so expensive, since meat and milk products are quite an investment currently. Why did I only thought about going vegetarian until now? Because cheese is sooo good, right? Only the look of it drooling on top of a pizza makes me very hungry. In fact, I found an article on that matter. Wait, no, thousands of articles! It's not just a black sheep trying to get some attention. Because, yes, cheese is addicting, it's literally a drug. When you think about it, in its initial purpose, milk is supposed to make a baby grow to the size of an adult, it has to become big and strong. And what a pity it would be, if the mother's milk wasn't so delicious and accustoming? But after a while the mother naturally doesn't produce milk anymore, because the child is now healthy and full grown. How can we, humans, justify the fact that we go take the milk of another mother to drink it on our own?

When extreme vegans present you a video, it usually shows the horrors of the slaughterhouses, the screaming animals with the throats slit open, with a lot of blood and noise. It's almost a documentary about war. It's undeniably horrifying. But there is also one aspect I haven't considered until now, and I feel many of us don't. Usually, when we think of milk, we just think that the cows gaves us very peacefully the milk, that she didn't suffer from it, that it's just her natural process. Sadly, that isn't the case at all. Let's just start by saying that milk cows have a life span of approximately 5 years. Compared to 20 years to live if they weren't forced to live a certain way. That's quite a difference. The cows are actually forcefully inseminated, usually when they are still giving milk, to avoid having the milk flow stopped. They are separated from their calfs as soon as they're birthed. If it's a male he'll be slaughtered for his tender meat, and the rennet (an enzyme) contained in his stomach will be used to make cheese ; if it's a heifer (female calf) she'll endure the same life as her mother. All their life long, they will be impregnated to bring milk, that will be sucked out of them every day, they will eat food completed with hormones to make them more efficient milk-machines, if they're lucky they will be in a farm where they are allowed to go outside sometimes, if not they are obligated to stay in closed buildings, stepping in their own excrements. And after 5 years of hard work, when they're of no use to us anymore, they will be brought to a slaughterhouse and end up in our plates.

Could you imagine living even a day of this life? At least, I can't. And that's the main reason why I'm leaning towards a vegan lifestyle.

Of course, I know, I'm going to get judged by people thinking I'm just following a trend, I'm going to get comments and remarks about it, it's going to be a difficult journey.

But I don't do it for myself, I do it for the animals.

Image from Pixabay

If you understand french this is a very well written article "17 Reasons to stop milk-products".

My goal for the moment is reducing animal-based food consumption in my day-to-day life. Maybe for now I still eat animal based products for many of the reasons I talked about in the first paragraph, but isn't any first step of a change getting informed? First, I'll need to know where I'm going. But now I've decided to go beyond this step. And I welcome you to follow me on this journey

I truly hope this reading made you think about this matter, maybe I even convinced you. If not I would love to talk about it with you. As you see, I'm still on the opposite side of veganism, and I can understand a well-thought opinion.

To finish off, I wish you a very good day !