(Archive February 2019) Making the Case on Becoming Vegan

By Gabriela Villa | Observer Contributor

I went vegan when I was 19 and I have been vegan for 5 years. Like most people, I wasn’t born a vegan. I was raised having meat, dairy or eggs with every meal.

I didn’t go vegan because I liked the taste of meat or cheese any less than anyone else. I actually loved the taste of cheese and meats.

Whenever someone brought up veganism, like most people, I thought, “I could never do that!” I claimed I loved cheese too much, and to most of society that was an acceptable excuse.

Most of us think that consuming dairy and eggs is less harmful than consuming meat, which obviously involves the suffering and killing of animals. But the dairy, egg and even wool industries also end in the animals being killed once they cease being productive enough to turn a profit, and in the process these animals endure extreme acts of torture and abuse.

In the egg industry once a hen stops producing eggs at a profitable rate, she is molted. Molting is torturous for the hen. Hens are put into cages and deprived of food, water, and sunlight for days at a time, putting them into a state of extreme mental and physical distress which causes them to lay eggs at a rapid rate, and often kills them. If they happen to survive the molting, they are molted again until they finally die.

Another standard practice within the egg industry involves baby male chicks, who are unprofitable to the industry since they do not produce eggs, to be ground alive with steel blades within 48 hours of hatching.

Veal, meat that comes from baby cows and something that most people refuse to consume by ethical standards, is actually a byproduct of the dairy industry. In the dairy industry male calves, being unable to produce milk, are torn from their mothers at birth, locked up in tiny boxes where they can’t even turn around, and kept that way the entire 8-10 month duration of their lives. This causes their flesh to become more fatty and they are then killed to make veal.

We must ask ourselves: Is eating an omelet or a piece of cheese more important than the lives of the animals that were killed to make it? Was their suffering and death worth it?

Since animals are bred into existence because of our paying for things like cheese, eggs, leather, meat, and wool, we must recognize that we are therefore responsible for their lives–for their existence. The people who we “trust” to care for them, and who are “supposed” to be caring for them are the people whose jobs it was to make “farming” them as efficient as possible, and in order for them to make it efficient and cost effective, they have to perform horribly abusive practices on them.

In the wool industry, baby lambs have the skin around their anuses chopped off with sharp scissors, without anesthesia, so that their feces doesn’t tarnish the wool. Baby piglets have their testicles torn out without anesthesia after 1-2 weeks of being born so their bodies can be turned into bacon, pork, and ham.

Any caring, gentle, or compassionate part of those workers must be destroyed in order for them to carry out their duties effectively, and be able to keep their jobs.

So then, who is left to care for those animals? The whole of humanity has turned its’ back on them. It is animal neglection on a mass-scale and we are all guilty.