DON'T HAVE A COW, MAN WORDS BY SOPHIE HUNTER-ROSE
WE ALL KNOW ONE. Maybe they’re your weird relative, the eccentric girl at school, or that one guy on Facebook that never stops posting about animals. That’s right, we’re talking about the dreaded Vegan. It’s funny, because before I went vegan, or even vegetarian, I saw them as aliens: Chicken loving, earth hugging, radical Greenies, they were just plain weird. But in a way it was just because I always felt a little guilty. Now don’t get me wrong, this article isn’t going to call you a hypocrite or abuse you for eating animals. I just want to share how your whole world can change because of a single decision.
you want. But this wasn’t enough. For a year I researched. I read articles on protein, human evolution, sentience, calcium, how you can make meringue from chickpeas and bacon from carrots. I discussed my latest discoveries of agricultural practices and pig’s feelings over dinner. I started eating less meat, and so did my family. I wanted to phase it out, to get a feel for what being vegetarian was like. My New Year’s Resolution of 2014 was to go vegetarian. And despite the scepticism of how effective resolutions are, I stuck to it. Two years later and I’m sitting here, slurping my almond-milk-berry smoothie and watching my dog roll around at my feet. I’ve been vegan for 545 days (not that I’m counting) and I’ve never been happier. I’ve never been really focused on my diet and what I put into my body, and to be honest, I’m still not. Trust me, not every vegan is a skinny yoga-doing lentil-eating hippy. I eat way too much cake and probably have pizza too often, but in the end, I’m not doing it for me. I’m doing it as a form of activism. I’m doing it for the approximately 9 billion chickens killed for their flesh every year in the United States alone [1]. I want to raise awareness for what’s causing 51% of greenhouse gases[2]. But most importantly, I’m doing it because I care.
I was fourteen when I first met her. Her hair shimmered like the sea and her eyes were the sun high above. However this not was not why I loved her. It was when she spoke - and oh, how she spoke - that I would get a glimpse into another world. It was a plane of existence where we were all one. Where the smallest ant was just as worthy of life as the grandest elephant. It was fascinating to watch her pick a slug off the concrete path and place it in a bush, to feed sugar-water to dying bees. When I was fourteen, I understood what it meant to be vegan. It meant not drawing a line between dogs and chickens, cats and pigs. It meant living life treading as gently on 1 - HTTP://WWW.UPC-ONLINE.ORG/ the Earth as you can. It meant living kindly. CHICKENS/CHICKENSBRO.HTML
For the next two years I tried to push away 2 - HTTP://WWW3.EPA.GOV/ the feelings. In my mum’s words, it was easier CLIMATECHANGE/GHGEMISSIONS/GLOBAL. to eat meat. Just eat what you’re given and HTML when you move out you can eat all the lentils 12 ORE NDA