Why Vegan?

Most of us grow up eating meat and eggs and drinking cow’s milk. It becomes as natural as breathing air. The children’s books we grow up with are filled with farm pictures - pigs smiling, geese acting silly, cows lying reverently in the grass. And maybe our parents take us to a petting zoo - a sweet, irresistible picture of gentle harmony. 

But the meat we eat is not from these animals. Nor the eggs, nor the milk. 99% of the animal products sold in stores is from CAFO’s (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). CAFO’s are a new invention, started in the 1950’s, and their name elucidates the deep problem they pose for animals. The animals are ‘concentrated’ together in order to maximize the amount of 'product' sold. The space allotted is the minimum possible without the animal dying, not the space desired by the animal. For an egg-laying hen, a pig, or a male calf, this means a life in a cage too small to move in. And the O in CAFO is for ‘Operation’, which means it processes a product, as opposed to caring for an animal, an animal that without any doubt, feels and suffers.

A few viewings of pigs in gestation crates, hens in battery cages, and cows knee-deep in their own feces makes it easy to see the moral problem with eating meat and eggs, but why give up milk and cheese and yogurt? How is milking a cow harmful? It turns out that in order to get milk from a cow, you have to impregnate it once a year, and then when the calf is born, you need to take the baby from her mother so she doesn't consume the milk. When the baby is taken from her mother, the bellowing of distress from both the mother and baby is one of the most heart wrenching experiences one can witness on a farm. Also, if the calf is a male, after he’s taken, he’s chained inside a pen too small to move, where he stands, motherless, for 4 months, until he’s taken to slaughter. So when we drink cow’s milk, we absolutely support the misery of this little calf.

So the milk we might lap from our cereal bowl at breakfast, or the yogurt we spoon at lunchtime - what is quintessentially wholesome in our minds – we now can see for what it is – something taken without asking, forced from a mother against her will, and something that causes male baby cows to live a life of sadness. This is very hard to believe, but only because CAFO’s are off limits to the public, and advertisers make things very, very beautiful.