Becoming to Vegan

What is a vegan? And what are the reasons for becoming a vegan?

A vegan is someone who removes themselves from any form of animal cruelty and exploitation.

A vegan doesn't eat, wear or use any animal products.

This means the exclusion of all meat, fish, milk and eggs and all products containing these things.

It also means the exclusion of leather, fur, silk and wool, and the choice to use cleaning products and cosmetic products that are made by compassionate companies who do not test on animals.

"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men."
Leonardo Da Vinci.

What is a vegan?

A vegan is someone who believes that speciecism is NO different from racism, sexism or any other kind of exploitation of one for the benefit of another.

Becoming A Vegan Reason One - Compassion: Being Vegan Just Feels Right

The first time I met someone who was interested in becoming a vegetarian for moral reasons my reaction was defensive.

What a fool, I thought. I laughed derisively when I heard about her picking some beef off her pizza and eating the pizza anyway. The meat was already there, how was she helping the dead animal by her fussiness? I wondered.

And how stupid not to eat the beef but to eat the meat sauce on the pizza! What kind of useless gesture was that?

I never for a moment wondered what I was doing for animals that gave me the right to be scornful of her efforts, nor did I take a second to wonder why her refusal to eat meat should bring out my nasty side!

When she eventually gave in to the pressure of all her meat-eating peers and went back to her carnivorous ways, I felt validated.

Why was I defensive? Why did vegetarians get my 'tude on? And why did her capitulation allow me a moment of smugness? Why did I care about what she was eating or not eating? Did I care whether she ate carrots or not? NO!

When the standard accusation leveled at vegetarians 'do you wear leather shoes?' was fired off, I was on the side of the questioner, ready to judge someone for their hypocrisy, never considering what gave me the right to judge them for doing SOMETHING, maybe not EVERYTHING, but SOMETHING, while I did NOTHING!

Why does the meat issue come up so frequently between vegetarian/vegan people and non-vego people?

I feel the reason it comes up so frequently (and is usually brought up by the non-veg folk - contrary to popular belief most vegos really DO NOT want to shove their beliefs down anyone's throat), is because when we eat meat we KNOW that we're doing something questionable.

I have rarely met anyone who DIDN'T have a defensive reaction to the subject of eating animals while they were still eating animals.

Whenever something challenges us and brings out a defensive reaction, we should always look deeper. The folks who are the MOST defensive about eating animals today, are quite likely the ones who become vegans tomorrow. After all there are three stages of truth:

1. Ridicule
2. Violent Opposition
3. Acceptance

These are the stages everyone goes through in accepting the truth, and this has occurred throughout history. So those people who are the most opposed are actually already in the second stage of truth and that is a good sign!

After a couple of years of feeling defensive about vegetarianism but never looking into it, I saw a window display in Covent Garden showing a scene of destruction and carnage. A mannequin in a chef's hat held a blood-soaked headless chicken in one hand and a carving knife in the other. Blood was sprayed over the walls and written in blood it said 'Go Vegetarian'. Suddenly I saw it clearly. I was the killer with the knife. This was wrong.

I found a book about vegetarianism that detailed the horrors of factory farming, read it in a single sitting and immediately became vegetarian. I wanted nothing more to do with the horrible cruelty suffered by animals on factory farms. I suddenly saw things so clearly: if I could not kill and eat my dog, why should I pay others to do it for me? The idea that certain animals are food and other animals are companions made no sense to me at all when I thought about it. Pigs are more intelligent than dogs after all, and make excellent pets.

Why not eat the dog and have the pig as a pet?

How do we get past the hypocrisy that has us patting an animal with one hand while holding the dead flesh of another animal with the other?

Speciecism makes no sense. It is just the same as racism, sexism or any kind of othering

Almost as soon as I became vegetarian I heard for the first time of the folks who took it one step further and became vegan. Wow, I thought. That was extreme. What would you eat?

Nevertheless I instinctively knew that if vegetarian was good, vegan could only be better. I tried being vegan for a month or so, but I didn't put my heart into it, I set myself up to fail and then came up with the half-assed excuse that it was too 'hard'.

I remained vegetarian for around six years before beginning to transition to becoming a vegan. Almost as soon as I started becoming a vegan I started hearing about people who were RAW vegan and then I just started to get annoyed!

Would it never end? However, the same as with becoming a vegan, I knew that one day I'd probably go for that too.

Becoming A Vegan Reason Two - Karma

A powerful reason not to eat animals or participate in their suffering is karma. Do you really expect to experience true joy and happiness when each day you take into your body the pain and suffering of another?

When animals die the adrenaline response from their terror and pain is released into their cells.

When you ingest that adrenaline from their flesh, you may feel a charge. You may feel energetic, strong. This is nothing more than your body being pumped up on the adrenaline of another beings dead flesh.

Is this the way you would choose to feel strong? Wouldn't it be better to feel strong and energetic through your own self-growth, through nourishing yourself with real foods rather than the murder of another?

I can assure you that I feel a thousand times stronger now than I did when I was still consuming a diet containing animal products. There are those who choose to feel strong from conquering others, from causing others pain and humiliation, from enforcing their dominance over others. However, most of us, who buy pre-packaged meat from the grocery store, do not have this sadism in us. We do not choose to triumph over others through violence and pain.

Most of us would not be able to kill our own dinner

Yet, we feel absolved from all responsibility when someone else has done it for us.

The catalyst for me in transitioning towards becoming a vegan was health. I came to understand the chronic health implications that consuming dairy products and eggs contain. However, without truly feeling it in my heart as well, I remained at 98% vegan for a while.

I continued to justify a tiny amount of milk or eggs by imagining the family farm where the chickens run free and the happy cow doesn't mind giving some of her milk.

However, unless this is your own farm, you have no way of ensuring this is the case. (And even if it was your own farm, why would you want to eat other animals body fluids and secretions? They're not meant for you!) Therefore this is just a lie you're telling yourself. The horrors of the dairy industry and egg industry are NO less than the meat industry (they're often worse), and they all go hand in hand.

It was only when I read the book Skinny Bitch that my consciousness was raised and I realized that becoming a vegan 100% was no longer optional as I could not take part in anything to do with animal suffering any longer.

I became 100% vegan and I have been that way ever since. Now, I actually cannot imagine an ethical vegetarian as there is nothing ethical about consuming dairy or eggs.

If you look into these industries you will see that there is simply NO WAY to use animals for profit without incurring massive cruelty.

Slavery was once legal and considered by many to be acceptable

Of course now we all know how horrific a concept this is. The enslavement of animals so that we can steal their bodily fluids, kill their children, pump them full of drugs so that they can produce more, wrench the very last drop from them and then slaughter them is no less depraved.

I hope you will consider becoming a vegan as it is the best thing to do for YOU as well as for the animals and for the planet.

Becoming a vegan is the most rewarding thing you will ever do!

Becoming a vegan was a transition for me and it may be that way for you. But if you truly look into your heart you will find all you need to know. It has been hard for me to accept that there are many people who may never feel that becoming a vegan is something they need to do. We all came here to learn different lessons. On a spiritual level it is not about right or wrong, it is about opportunities for growth. It is about consciousness.

Are you making your choices consciously? Are your choices contributing to your growth? Are your choices allowing you to resonate with joy? Are you fully comfortable and congruent with EVERYTHING in your life? You are responsible for it all, middle man or not. Are you happy with that?

Becoming A Vegan Reason Three - A Higher State Of Consciousness

Becoming a vegan enables you to reach a higher state of consciousness. While you may block it out, your consciousness recognizes the hypocrisy between your confessed love of animals and your torture and murder of them through the middle man down the road at the slaughterhouse.

When this incongruity is removed from your life, you feel a weight lifting from your shoulders that you didn't even realize you were carrying. Becoming a vegan can feel as if a veil has lifted from your eyes and there are suddenly so many things you see clearly that were cloudy before.

Becoming A Vegan Reason Four - Health

There are plenty who have been drawn to becoming a vegan for health reasons. It is enormously unhealthy to consume animals and their fluids, while we can consume these things and survive, they are not our food.

The reason most people consume animal protein is that they believe that we need it. Most people feel that the cruelty involved in killing animals should be minimized but they feel that overall it is inevitable, as we have to eat.

However, we are not designed to eat meat. We do not have anything in common with a true carnivore. People love to point to our little pointy teeth as evidence that we're meant to eat meat.

Have a look at a TINY carnivore, like a domestic cat. It is a fraction of our size and check out the teeth on them! Compare those teeth, the teeth of a true carnivore with our little slightly pointy teeth. The test as to what our natural food is and what it isn't, doesn't come about from what smells good roasting on the barbecue, all marinated and spiced. The true test comes about from how you feel when you see a cow grazing in the field. Do you want to pat it and say hello or do you want to rip it apart?

Do you want to kill it with your bare hands, rip open its throat with your teeth, drink its blood and eat its organs as they still pulse with life? No? A real carnivore wouldn't hesitate. It would see its prey and start to salivate - it would see FOOD! It doesn't have to cook it and spice it and marinade it before it becomes food.

When it comes to our physiological design, we are virtually identical to primates.

The closest physiologically to humans is the bonobo.

What do bonobos eat? They eat fruit, lots of it, and tender greens.

What happens to us when we see a delicious juicy mango when we're hungry? We salivate - we see food. When we're hungry and we see the neighbor's pet rabbit we don't salivate. We don't see food. We see an animal.

We are designed to love animals, and to eat fruit and vegetables

We are natural vegans. Becoming a vegan therefore feels like the most natural thing in the world, because that's exactly what it is.

Sure, we CAN eat meat. We CAN eat a lot of things. It doesn't mean that it is our perfect food. We can survive on almost anything, but surviving and thriving are two very different things.

When we eat meat we compromise our health in a number of ways and lay ourselves open to a host of diseases. There is TONS of literature out there. Be proactive, READ The China Study.

What about dairy?

Cows milk is designed to grow a 90-pound calf into a 2000-pound cow over a couple of years. That's right. 90 pounds into 2000 pounds! What do you think this stuff is doing to you?

And let's just think about it for a moment. How 'natural' could it POSSIBLY be, to drink the milk of another species? How did it even come about? I wonder who looked at a baby calf drinking from its mother and thought, 'mmmm I'd like to get me some of that!'

We are the only species on the planet that drinks another species milk. Why? Cos we think we're cleverer than every other creature? If we're so clever than why are we also the only species (with the exception of those we domesticate and feed the same cooked/processed/biologically inappropriate diet as us) that suffers from so many degenerative diseases?

Cows milk is not human food. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The idea that drinking it will make you grow faster, may be correct, but that isn't a good thing.

It causes everything to grow faster, including the cancer cells. It causes them to grow so fast that the body can't eliminate them fast enough.

The protein in milk - casein - stimulates the growth of cancer cells

For the most comprehensive scientific study of human nutrition ever conducted, look no further than The China Study by Dr T Colin Campbell.

Over decades of study Dr Campbell was able to study the causes of disease and animal protein came in very high on the list of causative factors.

The populations that consume the lowest percentage of animal protein, whether from flesh, dairy or eggs, suffer the lowest incidence of disease.

The populations that consume the most animal protein suffer the highest rates of cancer, the highest rates of osteoporosis, the highest rates of diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, alzheimers and other degenerative diseases.

Doctors such as Dr John McDougall, Dr Caldwell Esselstyn, Dr Joel Fuhrman and Dr Neal Barnard, have been able to reverse disease with diet alone. No surgery, no drugs, just diet.

So-called incurable diseases such as arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, are all cured within a short while on a low fat vegan diet. The science is there. It is available to any of us who choose to seek it out.

Becoming A Vegan Reason Five: Environment

"Those who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forest..."
Peter Singer

"The meat-eating Prius driver has a bigger carbon footprint than the vegan Hummer driver, not that there are probably too many of those!"
John Robbins

Need I say more? I know this is a HUGE issue, and I'm not going to get into it in detail here other than to quote from John Robbins's book Diet For A New America from the section "How To Win An Argument With A Meat Eater".

"The Environmental Argument

Cause of global warming: greenhouse effect
Primary cause of greenhouse effect: carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels
Fossil fuels needed to produce meat-centered diet vs. a meat-free diet: 3 times more
Percentage of U.S. topsoil lost to date: 75
Percentage of U.S. topsoil loss directly related to livestock raising: 85
Number of acres of U.S. forest cleared for cropland to produce meat-centered diet: 260 million
Amount of meat imported to U.S. annually from Central and South America: 300,000,000 pounds
Percentage of Central American children under the age of five who are undernourished: 75
Area of tropical rainforest consumed in every quarter-pound of rainforest beef: 55 square feet
Current rate of species extinction due to destruction of tropical rainforests for meat grazing and other uses: 1,000 per year"

Suffice it to say, if you care about the environment AT ALL, then the most important thing you can do is becoming a vegan.

Becoming a vegan was the best decision I have ever made, and it has been one of the most defining decisions of my life!

I cannot recommend it highly enough! I hope I'll see you on the vegan road!

Alison Andrews is a raw food and wellness enthusiast and coach. She is also a singer, actress and author. For more information on Becoming A Vegan please see http://www.loving-it-raw.com/becoming-a-vegan.html. For more information on the RAW FOOD DIET, see Alison's website: http://www.loving-it-raw.com