Why Did You Go Vegan?

Lesley

This is long, because I have included all the stages I can remember that contributed to my slowly awakening consciousness surrounding animal rights and veganism.

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I am sad to say that I spent the first 17 years of my life eating animal flesh, and for almost the next 3 years I was still eating eggs and dairy products. I first became vegetarian just before Christmas 1981. But now I have been vegan since Summer 1984, when I lived briefly in Scotland, and I am this way for life now, because of my firm belief in respect for life. I am not likely to go back on something that feels so right to my conscience.

My slow awakening to the horrors of animal exploitation began at about the age of 10, when I read about the tobacco experiments on beagles that were being carried out by ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) in my country, the United Kingdom. I took a petition around my school and almost all the children and teachers signed it. A national newspaper was organising this campaign, I remember.

Throughout my childhood in Cheshire, my mother was always an animal welfarist and was always taking in and finding homes for abandoned and neglected cats and dogs.

The next stage was when I was about 12, when my mother bred some turkeys for friends and family to eat at Christmas. Maybe she thought it was kind, because of the factory farming of turkeys, and she wanted one that had had a better life.

I boycotted the turkey that Christmas, although I still ate the pork sausages and any other meat that was served. I just could not eat the turkey I had seen running around alive only days before.

I knew it was wrong to be killing animals to eat and the turkey probably had a better life than the pig, but I didn't know that at the time. I was still at the stage where if it was out of sight it was out of mind, but I was slowly coming out of the denial regarding institutionalised animal slavery and murder, which basically plagues almost the whole of human society the whole world over.

The next memory is of being a new A level student, and hearing some of my classmates talking about their biology class where they had been doing dissection. Thankfully I was not studying Biology. I was appalled that one animal per student was being killed for something so trivial as this, after all there were pictures and films which could be used to teach anatomy. I expressed my horror and sorrow at this pointless slaughter, and was quite rightly called a hypocrite because I still ate meat. I couldn't dispute this so I gave up all animal flesh there and then, including fish. It was mind-blowing to think how many deaths I was myself responsible for.

I had never heard of vegans at this time and it was only when I joined the Vegetarian Society and the BUAV (British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection), that I read something about veganism, and learned that not only killing for meat was wrong, but that even the dairy and egg trades were cruel. I knew then within a few weeks of giving up meat, that I was an aspiring vegan.

I hadn't even known until then that it was possible to be healthy without dairy products, although I was in no doubt that I could thrive as a vegetarian. I was also soon active in an animal rights group based in Crewe by now but believe it or not no-one there was vegan. Some of them even ate meat, which appalled me! I thought they were hypocrites, told them so too. You just don't eat those whom you believe should have rights. So, I was vegetarian like many of the group.

I tried a few times to be vegan and found it difficult, but finally made the change just less than three years after I first gave up meat, when I was living away from home. I was sort of in a relationship at the time with another vegan (he was the local BUAV contact in the area), and I got to know several other vegans locally, and so I felt that the time had to be now, even though he didn't in any way push me, I had wanted to become a full vegan for years, I had just lacked the will-power. Sadly that relationship actually came to nothing, I don't think he was actually ever serious about anything long-term with me, but I have stayed vegan.

Since then I remained active in animal rights groups in the various places in the UK where I have lived, until I had children (now aged 7 and 4) in this my second marriage, and now I am finding that it is important for vegans to support each other locally, or else this vegan lifestyle can be a little isolating. I found it so easy to have a campaigning and social life with other vegans and vegetarians before I had kids. I was spoiled in that aspect for the first eight or nine years of my veganism, because I surrounded myself in my spare time, and to an extent in my work time (at one time I worked in a herbalists and many of my colleagues were vegetarian, occasionally there was another vegan working there too), with vegans and vegetarians. I simply didn't feel the need to socialise a lot with meat-eaters and I am not about to start now, just cos I am a bit lonely!

So, what I need now are some vegan friends locally, especially a granny/mother substitute-type friend, who is at least vegetarian. I'm 35 and still feel the need of having a "mum" around. We live in Harrow, near London.

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