Go Vegan & Save Over 100 Animals Per Year!

Living a vegan lifestyle is one of the best things you can do to help animals. On average a person switching from the standard American diet to a vegan diet will prevent the abuse and killing of over 100 animals per year.

If you are not already vegan, please resolve to cut all meat, egg, and dairy products out of your diet. Please also resolve to stop buying all leather, wool, and down and any household products and personal card products that have been tested on animals.

If you would like more information on why and how to become vegan, please request a starter pack from:

Action for Animals: www.VeganStarterPack.com
Mercy for Animals: www.chooseveg.com
PETA: www.goveg.com
Compassion Over Killing: www.tryveg.com

Note that the "Vegetarian Starter Kits" are actually vegan starter kits.

For a list of companies that do NOT test on animals, please see: http://www.caringconsumer.com/pdfs/companiesDontTest.pdf
If a company is not listed, assume they test on animals.


If you are already a vegan, or on your way there, please resolve to become more active in vegan outreach and education. Being vegan yourself is great, but unless we educate others by promoting a vegan diet and lifestyle, billions of farmed animals and billions more fish are still going to suffer.

It is very likely your decision to become vegan, or to start on the path towards veganism, was the direct result of someone else's vegan outreach and education efforts.

If you are interested in getting more involved in outreach and education please contact the groups listed above. AFA and other groups can provide leaflets and videos that you can share with your friends, family, students, coworkers, or just with random people on the street.

Some ideas for outreach include:
- Set up an info table at your school, at the local college, in front of a grocery store, at a Sunday Market, etc
- Leave flyers and CD-Roms in the free literature section of your local library, animal friendly restaurants, stores, cafes, etc
- Have a vegan bake sale at your school and pass out flyers and videos to people who stop by
- Host a vegan potluck and introduce non-vegan friends to vegan food and information
- Start a weekly vegan lunch outing with your coworkers
- Host a feed-in: Get some vegan 'chicken' patties or nuggets or Tofurkey Italian Sausages or some other fake meat product. Cook and cut them into sample sizes with toothpicks in them and pass them out in a busy public place [downtown, near a school, outside a grocery store, in front of a KFC, etc] and offer people who take a sample free CD-Roms and literature
- Pass out flyers about dairy and eggs at your local Whole Foods, Wild Oats, Trader Joes, etc - where people might be conscious but might not yet be vegan

You can get started right away by printing your own flyers or by downloading fact sheets and emailing them to your friends.
You may open and print all the flyers from this MySpace page.
Or from:
www.afa-online.org/veganinfo.html

Thank you for caring and for making 2008 a great year for the animals!

7:39 AM - 3 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

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Free Me by Goldfinger







7 Minutes of Reality by Pink Floyd



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Is going vegan really the best thing you can do for animals?

Is going vegan really the best thing you can do for animals?

As a vegan activist, I have always told people that the single best thing we can all do for animals is to go vegan. After some critical thought, even we vegans have to admit that that is not correct. Going vegan is only the second best thing anyone can do to help animals. The single best thing anyone can to help animals is to not reproduce.

There is no way anyone can completely control what his or her offspring does. Even a vegan who has children cannot guarantee that his or her child will be vegan for his or her entire life. It is even less likely that the grandchild of a vegan will be vegan, and yet more of a remote possibility that a great grandchild of a vegan will be vegan.

If you are vegan and have just one child who is not vegan, you will have countered the personal positive effects of your entire life of veganism [not counting, of course, other people you get to go vegan by being a good example]. While it may seem far fetched, I propose that it would be better to eat the Standard American Diet based around animal products for your entire life than it would be to have even one child who is not vegan.* [It is also important to note that even vegans have a tremendous impact on the Earth and on animals (oil consumption and the resulting pollution, packaging and solid waste production, water and energy consumption, animals killed in crop rotation and harvesting, etc.).]

*Again, that assumes you do not encourage others to go vegan by your example.

If you knew that having a child would result in even one animal being tortured and killed, would you knowingly get pregnant or get someone else pregnant?

While a couple may only have two children, supposedly just replacing themselves, there is no way to control how many children their children will have, and so on. For example: If a couple were to have two children and those children in turn have 3 children each and those children in turn have 3 children each, that couple could claim responsibility for producing 26 offspring in just 3 generations. If all those offspring were to eat today's Standard American Diet, they would be consuming over 2,600 animals every year or nearly 200,000 animals over their lifetimes.

I have proposed this example or a similar example to every vegan I know who wants to have children and I always get the same reply. For some reason, every vegan is convinced that his or her child will be a perfect vegan angel and that he or she will have some magical control over his or her child and all his or her child's future offspring. The truth is that there is simply no way to have that much control over your child or future generations.

Many people reply that we are part of nature and part of the planet and have the same right to live on the Earth as other animals. In an ideal world, with much fewer people, living in and among and in balance with nature, perhaps that would be the case. I think, however, that it is fairly obvious that humans are far removed from nature, and we simply cannot be trusted to control ourselves. We do not help preserve any natural balance; we do not provide anything that other plants or animals in a natural setting need for survival. Ultimately, the animals and the natural environment would be far better off with fewer or no human inhabitants.

There is a solution for those who care about animals but want to raise children: adoption. By adopting a child, you will not only be giving a needy child a good home, but you will also be able to have a positive influence on his or her life. Not adopting and insisting on having a biological child or children is not only detrimental to a child who needs a good home, it is detrimental to the thousands of animals that may die as a result.


Why vegan activists should also be population control activists

The simple fact of the matter is that people are being born faster then they are becoming vegan. I always used to think that going vegan was the best thing anyone could do for the animals and the environment, but I was wrong. The best thing any one of us can do for animals and the Earth is to not breed. That being said, promoting veganism, while very important, is not the best thing we as activists can do to help animals. Rather, the best thing we can do for the Earth and animals is to convince people not to have children – or to adopt children. Let's face it - for all our struggles and all our work, we are loosing the battle. More animals then ever are being factory farmed and slaughtered for their milk, eggs, and flesh. While it is still true that one person becoming vegan saves over 100 animals every year, and it is every individual's moral responsibility to become vegan, people are simply being born faster than they are becoming vegan. Unless we curb the rising human population, we cannot hope to significantly reduce the numbers of animals tortured and slaughtered for food, clothing, etc.

The problem we face is that population control is a hard issue to tackle. Veganism has proven facts and ethical arguments to back it up. It is something tangible for many people and has many appealing qualities and a variety of selling points. Population control is not so simple. How do we convince someone who is not even vegan to not have children [for the sake of the animals and the planet]? What about the people who get pregnant unintentionally? I don't claim to have the answers to these questions. What I do to know for a fact is that if we are vegan and claim to care about animals and the environment, we need to stop breeding, promote adoption, and work to keep others from having children.

5:36 PM - 122 Comments - 74 Kudos - Add Comment

The Reality of "Free-Range" Eggs

The Reality of "Free-Range" Eggs

There are very few places that have truly free-range eggs. If a farm produces enough to package their eggs and put them on a store shelf, you can be fairly certain that it is a small farm. A small farm would have fewer then 100 hens. Once hens number over 100 or so, they are unable to establish a pecking order, so they fight constantly. When that happens the farm usually cuts off the hens' beaks, their primary weapons, with a hot knife [see picture below]. This is very painful and crippling procedure. The beaks do not grow back, and the pain and mutilation from de-beaking [see picture below] causes many hens to not to be able to eat or drink, resulting in death from starving or dehydration. Fewer hens die from de-beaking than would die from the stress-induced fighting, so the industry looks at de-beaking as a money saving procedure. The majority of "free-range" eggs come from de-beaked hens.

If a small farm gets a lot of support and does well, it often intensifies its production and therefore is no longer a small farm. Also, realize that only females lay eggs, so any farm that has layers has either killed or sold off the males (if the farm hatches its own eggs). It is more likely, however, that the farm bought its hens from a hatchery. All hatcheries that hatch egg laying hens kill the males at a few days of age [see picture below], or, as investigators have repeatedly discovered, they dump the male chicks in a dumpster alive [see picture below]. Males do not lay eggs and are of the wrong stock to be profitable for meat production.

Once a hen is no longer producing profitably, she will be killed. Most free-range hens, like chickens killed for meat and all other hens no longer profitable for egg production, are transported to the slaughterhouse crammed into small cages on the back of a semi truck [see picture below]. They are hung upside down and have their throats slit [see picture below]. If a hen misses the whirling blades that are intended to cut her throat, she will be scalded to death in the feather removal tank. There are, I am sure, small family farms that have a dozen or so chickens that do not kill the hens, but those farms barely produce enough eggs for themselves and perhaps a few neighbors. If you find a farm like that then I will not take the effort to dissuade you from eating those eggs - that is if you do not care that eggs have three times the cholesterol your body can excrete in a day, meaning 200 mg of the 300 mg of cholesterol in the egg sticks in your arteries.

There is another reason to go 100% vegan and stop fussing with trying to find that one farm in a thousand that might have truly cruelty-free eggs: animals are here for us to use. As long as the idea persists that non-human animals are commodities, we will not achieve animal liberation.

A final reason it is better to just go vegan then to try to search out eggs that might be truly free-range is that eating ANY animal products can be a Pandora's box. If you eat an egg from a farm that is truly humane, it's much easier to let other eggs slip back into your diet. It's much easier to just go vegan. It's healthier, it supports the vegan market, it shows you have taken a stand against all exploitation of animals, and it is much healthier.

More information:
What's Wrong With Dairy and Eggs?
The "Free-Range" Myth
The Reality of Organic and Free-Range Animal Products

4:33 PM - 8 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

“I was raised eating meat. It’s customary, humans have been doing it for years...

"I was raised eating meat. It's customary, humans have been doing it for years, and I need my protein."

- Carnivore

Dear "Carnivore":

I was raised eating animals as well. I gave it up after 14 years, and gave up eggs and dairy after 16 years. It really is not that difficult. I would estimate that 90% of people who are veggie and vegan were not raised that way. If those millions of people can do it, so can you. 

All the protein in meat comes from plants and is stored, along with a lot of cholesterol and saturated fat, in the meat. Elephants, race horses, and elk all eat only plants and they are among the largest and strongest land animals. Humans, like other vegetarian animals, have primarily flat teeth and grinding jaws that move side to side. Protein is not an issue for ANY vegan; I have never heard of anyone not getting enough protein. Most non-vegans get 2 to 4 times the protein their bodies need or should have. Excess protein causes calcium loss. Many cases of osteoporosis in older humans may not be from a lack of calcium, but rather from an excess of protein.

Protein is available in large quantities in anything made from grains [wheat, rice, corn, oats, etc – breads, pastas, oatmeal, breakfast cereals, etc] beans [including soy and soy products like tofu and all the varieties of fake, soy-based meats, hummus and other Middle Eastern dishes, etc], legumes and nuts [including nut butters], and seeds. For more info, please read the Protein Myth flyer on our page. Look for the hyperlink that says "The Protein Myth."

As for custom, that simply is never a justifiable excuse for anything. All the forms of abuse and enslavement that we have overcome in human history were justified by saying that they were customary, and we have realized that they were wrong. Just because we have been doing something wrong for X number of years is not a reason to continue doing it. In fact, realizing that something is wrong and that we have been doing it wrong is a very strong incentive to change, as soon as possible. 

I hope the videos and fact sheets on this page will provide you with some encouragement to stop the unhealthy, barbaric, and unethical custom of eating animals and animal products.

-Vegan

5:22 PM - 10 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment