“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” Mark Twain

The notion of using other animals is ingrained in our collective consciousness and speciesist culture. It’s drilled into us from an early age, and it is present in all of societies institutions. Indeed, animal use runs so deep that many well-meaning people fail to question the injustices of animal use, even though it’s ubiquitous.  I submit, I never knew what it felt like not to use other animals because using animals was a part of my identity; it was an integral part of who I believed I was. Before I started living vegan, I had lots of reasons to keep on doing what I was doing: “Where do I get my protein? We need to eat animals to survive; Living vegan is too hard, too expensive” and so on. 

In hindsight, the best justification I had for using other animals was because I believed it was necessary for human health. However, after I considered the totality of the evidence, I realised that a plant-based diet was more than adequate for individuals in all stages of the life cycle.¹ Despite this realisation, I continued to justify the unjustifiable. It wasn’t until one day, as I was about to jump down that rabbit hole of excuses again (no offense rabbits!) when I asked myself: Do you want to be that person anymore? Do you want to be someone that tries to justify the needless breeding, using, and killing of other sentient beings? A voice inside me answered: No, I don’t. I was left with a simple choice, do I continue brutalising others for my benefit, or do I pull the plug on these injustices? Naturally, I had no other option but to live vegan immediately. 

Once I internalised the ethical position – once I knew that my non-vegan choices created victims, there was no turning back. When I reflect on that whole experience of going from non-vegan one second to vegan the next, I realised the only person stopping me from living vegan was me and my ballooning ego. From that same experience, I also learned that I was selfish, wilfully ignorant, and I just wanted to be right no matter how irrational my arguments against veganism were. 

If you believe other animals are worthy of moral consideration, please take a minute to pause, reflect, and question your behaviour: “Do my actions (using animals) align with my values (moral concern for animals)?” If you find that you are living in misalignment with your core beliefs, come into congruence; come into alignment with who you are. And to do that means living vegan. 

It might just be the best decision you will ever make. 

By Alan

We hope you enjoyed our guest blog. If you have any feedback or if you’d like to become a Happy Vegan Living contributor – contact us via our social pages or on our Contact Us page.

I had hiked well over 50km of Petra, which barely touched the sides, absorbing everything I could in the little time I had. The feel of the sand, which is heavy yet fine, the touch of the dry air on the skin and in my lungs, the smoothness of the ancient carved stones. Imagining the early Nabateans creating and carving the “Lost City”, one of the world’s most ingenious architectural sites. Seeing the city bear the marks of geographical, cultural and religious changes, through historical conquering and mother nature. The very essence of Petra talks to you intimately, independently, and on that beautifully clear warm morning, sitting on that ancient rock I felt this.

With each inhale we absorb the story of life and death on earth, the idea that we are inhaling history’s exhalations is thrilling to me. The implications are wild, I am sitting at The Monastery, a childhood dream. I’ve inhaled the breath of the Nabatean who carved the final pillar, and that of my young self – saying the word Petra, the breath of my children when they took their first. I’ve inhaled the last breath of my beautiful Nana Bess, that of Hilary and Tenzing, Caesar, a podium finisher, a moon walker, A Byzantine merchant and every breath there was, including the breath of all sentient creatures. We are inseparable you and me. It has been said that a breath taken when present is a compression of time and space, and I felt that.

A month after that November morning the world was hearing whisperings of an unknown illness. Literally what can happen in the blink of an eye? Covid-19 can. Here we are in June and globally our individual landscapes have changed in an unprecedented and alarming manner. Our future choices will forever be affected. There is light though, and it’s begging to reach the tunnel but the light, it needs for us to make better choices.

The incredibly esteemed, beautiful late poet, Mary Oliver has coined a stunningly, solid question that is more relevant today than it’s ever been.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”.

Surely we should be roused to act on pure fact, that is, if we want to continue to see the world, to be inspired by nature, to feel the smoothness of ancient carved stones, to see our loved ones, to move freely, to stand close to someone, to not put our front line workers in an unprecedented firing line. And that pure fact is that animal exploitation leads to human catastrophe.

Slaughterhouses, live animal markets, animal agriculture, historically, these industries are responsible for many devastating disease outbreaks. Obeying the #Stayathome policy saved lives. But if we want to save more lives in the future, we need to truly understand the power our purchasing choices have.

Do we purchase to support industries that historically create all zoonotic diseases and we permanently live with staying at home or do we choose to use our purchasing power in a way that allows for a magnificent answer to Mary Oliver’s question?

Our choices make us inseparable and I feel that, today the world feels that. What I hope to do, one day, on an adventure, is to take that future breath, the one that is a compression of time and space, with an inhalation that is abundant with exhales that are born out of choices made with love and compassion.

Written by Barbarah White

We hope you enjoyed our first guest blog. If you have any feedback or if you’d like to become a Happy Vegan Living contributor – contact us via our social pages or on our Contact Us page.

You don’t have to look very hard online to find gory images or video footage of unfathomable things happening to animals.  These images may, in some cases push people over the line to become vegan at a time when they are receptive. But we have observed that even when faced with violent and graphic images or footage, most people are able to quickly rationalise their continued consumption and use of animals. Some of the reasons for this are as follows.

It is natural to want to believe that you are not supporting horrendous activities. Sometimes footage comes from unknown sources. This leads to an assumption that it’s come from a far-off place. People are quick to rationalise that there are laws or regulations that protect animals “at home”.  It is easier to believe terrible things only happen overseas and that things must be different and “better” locally.

It’s natural to try to find and believe information that supports your current view.  Often graphic and violent footage comes to light through undercover investigations. Regulatory bodies are quick to respond after an exposé and assure us that a facility has been shut down, staff have been reprimanded or removed, or there was some other anomaly that has since been rectified. This can make it easy to think that issues are not widespread, or that the upsetting incident was an aberration, a once-off, and everywhere else is okay.

In any case, a big problem with graphic and violent imagery is that it leads vegans and non-vegans alike down a path of focussing on a certain activity or species. This shifts the focus of advocacy to treatment and welfare rather than use.

There is no “good” way to exploit sentient beings who can never understand why they are being exploited or give informed consent. A focus on better treatment and welfare can leave people under an impression that it is acceptable to exploit animals if it is done in a “better way”.

We don’t want to get bogged down in conversations about “animal cruelty”, bigger cages or banning certain farming practices for example. In other words, we don’t want to get bogged down discussing matters of animal welfare. This is because animals have the right to not be used as human property, period. Whether that is for food, clothing, entertainment or any other use. This is an important distinction between animal rights and animal welfare. When we focus on animal welfare, we are unwittingly condoning animal use.

These are a few important reasons why we don’t use graphic imagery on our pages. It’s been a long while between blog posts, so we’ll be working on getting more writing done as well as having some guest bloggers contribute to the page. Thanks for reading and supporting the page, it means a lot!

If you have any feedback or if you’d like to become a Happy Vegan Living contributor – contact us via our social pages or on our Contact Us page.

Thank you so much for clicking the link to read this – it means a lot! We’ll try to keep it short and sweet as we know time is precious.

Whether you are vegan or not, we hope that you enjoy the Happy Vegan Living community.

We are 100% volunteer run, so we do this in our “spare” time (ha! What is that?) between working full time, and generally living life. We won’t ever ask for donations to run the page, and we want you to know that. Your company is enough for us .

We find people assume we must be activists or health buffs or gluten free (what’s with that?). Online it can be quite a minefield of graphic images and heated arguments. To make matters worse, there is also a lot of confusing information about what veganism really is.  Not to mention vegans arguing with vegans making it hard for newcomers.

We can’t help but wonder, is this helping animals? Is this helping vegans? Is this helping people to become vegan?

Cue Happy Vegan Living.  

As the name suggests, we are Happy, we are Vegans, and at the time of publishing, we are Living .

We have created this space for both vegans and for people thinking of going vegan that is positive and friendly.  As we mentioned above, this is a community, not a business. We share ethical vegan education, (always minus the graphic imagery), recipes and vegan businesses and events.

You’ll see the words “easy” and “quick” on our recipes (we work full time remember!). We do apologise in advance for our bad food pics. The meals we post are our meals, if a photo is standing between us and eating, the photo is going to lose each time! In saying that, we think our recipes are actually pretty good, so we do hope you give them a go and enjoy them.

Supporting vegan/100% plant-based business and events is important to us. Please know that we do not receive any “kick-backs” or freebies from the businesses we share. Sometimes we will have visited as paying customers, and others we have become aware of online. If you know of or run a vegan business or event you would like us to share on our pages, we would love to hear about it.

This is a space we have created for you, so if there are other things you want to see on the page, please get in touch with us. 

Thanks for reading our first blog post! Love it? Hate it? Don’t care? Let us know anyway – contact us via our social pages or by emailing contact@happyveganliving.com