Is it a personal choice to eat meat, eggs, dairy, seafood or whoever else you want?

Personal choices have been used for a very long time to justify eating animals. There is just one problem with this…personal choices DO NOT have victims. A personal choice is coffee or tea, jeans or sweatpants, flip flops or sneakers, eating out or dining in.

We now know that eating animals is not essential for our health or wellbeing. Actually, quite the contrary is true. 80% of preventable human diseases come from eating animals and eating plants reverses many of them. As you will see if you keep reading, eating animals is incredibly cruel. We have also just been given the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report you can read it here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/ We know that eating animals is quite literally putting ALL LIFE ON EARTH in the danger zone right now. It is the largest emitter of pollution and humanity has literally been given a LAST CALL warning to make changes. The world’s leading scientists agree that: WE NEED A GLOBAL DIETARTY SHIFT TO A PLANT BASED FOOD SYSTEM NOW. I wonder why no one calls them pushy vegans?! 😉

Let’s explore the lies of personal choice and what that means to the animals when you choose to eat them:

What about the choice of the bull to not be electro ejaculated (it is worse than it sounds) to have his sperm stolen?

What about the choice of the mother cow to not be repeatedly forcibly impregnated, have her babies stolen at birth, kept in a crate being fed a supplement while they cry for one another for days and then mom is quite literally milked to death after 4 or 5 cycles of this?

What about the choice of the cow to not be skinned alive for someone’s jacket or shoes?

What about the cow’s choice to not be branded or have their horns disbudded (burned off)?

What about the baby male chick’s choice to not be ground up alive on his first day of life because people want to eat his mother’s ovulations (eggs) & use them for fluffier baked goods?

What about the hen’s choice to not have her beak seared off with a hot blade and no anesthesia or pain medication?

What about the hens right to be able to raise her arms or not live in a crate with 3 of her sisters going insane pecking one another, or having been genetically modified to lay hundreds of eggs per year (a very taxing event on her body-think of a human woman giving birth every single day) when in reality, they only lay a dozen a year?

What about broiler chickens’ choice to not be kept in a shed full thousands of other hostile prisoners. Forced to keep the lights on to grow faster all day and night, a toll so taxing on their bodies, they often can’t even bear their own weight and collapse only to be burned by the ammonia in the urine and feces covering every surface of their space?

What about the pigs right to not be sexually exploited by humans to become pregnant and be forced into gestation crates where they cannot even turn around or care for their own struggling piglets and often crush them to death with their own weight by accident?

What about the baby piglet’s choice to not have their teeth & tails cut without anesthesia or to have their testicles removed without pain medications right in front of their mothers who fight from their prison cells to stop it?

What about the pig’s choice to not be forced into a gas chamber to become a sandwich someone will eat and soon forget?

What about the fish’s choice to not be crushed to death or suffocated while huge nets plunder the bottom of the ocean dragging and killing them and many other sea animals with it?

What about the fish’s choice to not have hook in their face?

What about the deer’s choice to not have bullet between their eyes?

If you still think that eating someone else’s body and subjecting them to an entire life of imprisonment, torture, abuse, exploitation, slavery, painful mutilations, family separation, disgusting living quarters with no freedom to exhibit their natural behaviors, and then ultimately suffer a violent and brutal death for your taste pleasure, convenience, habit or tradition, you are forgetting someone…

All animals (including humans) are sentient. That means they can feel fear and pain. They have a central nervous system, a brain, pain receptors, individual likes and dislikes and personalities. Like us, they just want to be loved, be free to live with their families, have rights over their own bodily autonomy & not have violence inflicted on them for someone else’s pleasure or gain. If you want to know if any of these standard practices are humane, (yes, they do all of this on: local, free range, organic, cage free, humane, family run, grass-fed farms too), put yourself in the place of the victim, and ask if you want to have that done to you even though it was not necessary. If the answer is no, it is NOT humane.

The truth is that most people know these things are bad, they would not approve of them if they saw the truth on the packaging, many of them would never do any of these things themselves but they don’t realize that they are still paying someone to do it on their behalf. The only reason slaughterhouses are still in business is because of supply and demand. Their best customer is one who avoids the truth & lucky for them, most people will spend their whole lives choosing to do that and believe something humane is happening and it is their personal choice to do so.

The bottom line is a simple question can help answer it all. Which has more value? The taste pleasure of one, or the life of another? If you said that life is more valuable than pleasure, you understand veganism. Make the connection, choose to be vegan for them.

-written by Lauryn G 3/20/22 veganyogamomma.com