Despina Rosales


	Home Press Articles Animals Writing Classes Bellydance Pilates Yoga Contact	Animal Stories (Human Animals That Is!) The stories below are answers to the question "What led you to leading a cruelty-free life?" You'll notice that although all the stories are different, they're also very similar as they are all stories of people whose innate compassion (the compassion we ALL have) was somehow awakened and led them to leading a life that is kind to animals. Read on and be inspired! Mary McKenna Melissa Quincy Sarah Shelley Sonja Sue What Do I Mean By Living A 'Cruelty-Free Life'? A cruelty-free life can be summed up in one word: VEGAN. A friend of mine put it so perfectly, so I’ll use his words: “Veganism is a lifestyle, including diet, where one tries to live a healthy and happy life using minimum possible natural resources and striving to abstain from using any animal products. Veganism is trying to live a harmless life in harmony with nature. Veganism, in brief, is a healthy, happy, kind, compassionate and cruelty-free lifestyle.” Veganism is not about being perfect, it’s about reducing suffering as much as possible. You’ll never be able to abstain from ever causing any harm ever…but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Here are more details on why veganism and love for animals go hand in hand: www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/WhyVegan.pdf. PS. The spelling in the stories below oscillates between UK English and US depending on where the person writing the story comes from. Mary I remember as a little girl asking my mother how the animals we ate died. She told me that they were hit quickly over the head and didn't feel a thing. Being the little girl that got made fun of for not stepping on ants and taking spiders outside (I still do this) I somehow accepted this answer. Maybe because I was being taught that meat was a food group and this had to happen. In my early 20's I got extremely sick from eating a hamburger and could not look at cow flesh again the same way. Ten years later a friend showed me some fliers put out by PETA (www.peta.org) and I was instantly horrified. I had never seen actual pictures of the cruelty before this and I went vegan immediately! Unfortunately the images wore off and I went back to my old ways but still cutting out so-called 'bacon' and other pig flesh. Then not very long ago I reconnected with an old friend through Facebook. She was constantly posting pictures and videos about the terrible suffering of factory farmed animals. I would initially look, but then look away because I felt that it obviously didn't work for me the first time. I couldn't get through the videos, but she kept on posting. After several weeks I thought, "She just isn't giving up. This highly intelligent and talented woman must have something important to tell me." I began visiting her page on a regular basis and reading and looking at everything more closely. I had MANY "ah-ha!" moments and I also noticed that she had a number of supporters which was something I didn't have on my first attempt. So for me I guess I just needed the guidance and support to get back to the connection I was BORN WITH. McKenna Last June 2009 I was signing a petition on Facebook against the clubbing of baby seals. I read through some of the comments and came upon this site: http://watchearthlings.com. I thought, "Oh, this sounds interesting" and clicked on the link. As I began to listen and see the visual horror before my eyes, I froze in complete shock! My heart raced a thousand times faster and I clenched my teeth. My stomach was a knotted and twisted mess. While crying, I said over and over again: "I had no idea, what the hell are these people thinking"? The long and short of it is that it took me three days to get through the documentary but I went vegan the first night after watching just thirty minutes of it. Realizing I had been fast asleep through all this misery happening to my sentient friends (that is, the non-human animals of this world) ripped me to shreds. Mentally I was devastated, emotionally I was broken, and intellectually I was pissed beyond belief! My life changed to the core. Every facet of how I lived changed from that moment forward. I gave away all my animal-based clothing to the homeless, gave all the food I had to my roommate and began Googling for alternative foods. I am blessed to have had God present to me this film. I truly believe it was divine intervention telling me to wake the hell up. I didn't go on Facebook that day looking to change my life, however in that moment of just one click I did...I am blessed and nourished by being vegan. I now gently share my story and my message with all that will listen. My life's motto: Until Every Cage Is Empty! Melissa In my youth I always loved animals and was so connected to them. I had a great Aunt Martha who lived in Norco, California. When I was five or six years old, my family and I would drive to see her, and along the way we passed a slaughterhouse. I remember smelling the blood in the air and feeling so horrible about it. I asked my parents why they fed me meat, and of course they answered with the myth: "You need meat to survive." Needless to say, as I got older and did my research, I realized that this was not the case. As a result, I became vegetarian. Then, many years later, I met a vegan who educated me about the dairy industry, and eggs as well, and I became vegan on the spot. I wanted to have no part in the suffering of animals because of my consumption. I have been vegan for about six years now, and it is truly the BEST decision that I have ever made. You can make that decision too - for the animals, for your health and for the environment: http://theveganchoice.com. Quincy Throughout my lifetime I think seeds were planted here and there, some would grow a little and then fade away eventually, but they never fully vanished - always dormant and lurking inside me. One day my aunt made a self-righteous indignant comment about how the Chinese are barbaric because they eat dogs. At that time a little voice came in to my brain saying: "What difference does it make really whether it's dogs, cows, chickens, etc? Why is one better then another?" (Mercy For Animals addresses the 'love one but eat the other' paradox: www.mercyforanimals.org/literature.aspx.) That question kept haunting me. Also I started thinking of who I would want to ask forgiveness from if I was on my death bed. I kept thinking of animals they were all I could think of. I started envisioning all the animals whose deaths I had something to do with. Huge crowds looking at me with wide open pleading eyes. Then one day I was rubbing my dog's belly and I thought: "He looks like a baby goat, or a lamb." And that was it for me. Right away I stopped not only eating animals but also cut out all animal products. In other words, I went vegan. Sarah I went vegetarian when I was eight years old. I was horrified by the fact that I was eating flesh from an animal. I remember the moment vividly: I was eating a steak and I made the connection that I was actually eating the body of a cow. Once this connection was made, I was done with eating animals. I just couldn't eat my friends. However, dairy and eggs I had no problem with - at least not until a couple of years ago when I made the full connection which was: dairy = dead baby cows (for veal), and eggs = dead baby chicks (male chicks - considered 'useless' by the egg industry - are ground alive or thrown into trash cans and left to suffocate to death). I've always been an animal lover, passionately so, but I truly had no idea what I was contributing to by eating dairy and eggs. When I found out the truth (which you can discover for yourself by going to this site: www.humanemyth.org) I made the switch from vegetarian to vegan. I love being vegan. It's the best decision I've ever made! Shelley Quite simply, when I found out I was eating dead animals, I freaked out. You see, I'd always seen animals as my peers. I was that little girl who told the teachers about the boys pulling wings off flies, and I often verbally bashed other kids for burning ants and spiders with magnifying glasses. I have always been driven by an unwavering sense of justice, yet still did not at all make the connection that what I was eating was in anyway similar to the animals I actually SAW suffering around me. At age twelve I witnessed the murder of animals for food. My mother and stepdad killed over a dozen roosters in our back yard. I heard the screams. The roosters were all brothers, unseparated since hatching. They were being held in the pen directly next to the cement slab, where they could see and hear their siblings heads being cut from their bodies with an axe. Their mother also was in the pen next to them. The sound of the screams haunted me. I could not believe that my mother could do such a thing and then expect me to EAT the bodies when she serve them up for dinner. I watched with my jaw open as she took bites saying how different and 'better' these bodies taste compared to the store bought ones. It made me sick. My mother told me that I was a hypocrite if I refused to eat these chickens, when they are no different to the store bought ones, and that my rebellious attitude towards the whole fiasco was stupid. I turned stubbornly vegetarian and cooked my own meals from then on. I didn't try to convert anyone to my way of thinking, and I constantly called "weird" for my views, and I just accepted that it was indeed probably the case. It wasn't until many years later that I met a vegan via Facebook (that was Faye Leister, author of the book Animals And Us: www.animalsandus.com.au) who put me onto the documentary Earthlings that I began to understand the enormity of the concept I had been toying with for my whole life. So I guess you can say that I'm still that little girl, standing up for the animals that my fellow humans torture for momentary enjoyment - and I always will be. Animals are the slaves of our society, and as fellow animals, we have no right to enslave anyone. I fight for this now. Sonja I grew up mainly in California, but I lived in Minnesota for a few years during high school and other kids would take time off from school to go deer hunting when it was in season. I had never been around hunters in my whole life and it just shocked me that someone would kill a deer. I guess to me, deer just seemed more like cats, dogs, horses or other animals you don't eat. I had grown up with deer wandering into our yard to eat grass and it never occurred to me to eat them. (If in doubt about the cruelty of hunting, check out PETA's fact sheet about the cruelty of hunting: www.peta.org/MC/factsheet_display.asp?ID=53.) Anyways, I began to wonder: "What's the difference between deer and cow or any other animal?" Before that, it had been pepperoni, bacon, ham, whatever to me, not the actual animal (ie. for the above list: pig). It became a dead animal's flesh to me and I just didn't want to eat it anymore. I didn't go fully vegetarian until college as this was all pre-internet and I had no idea where to find info or how to do it as I didn't know anyone else who was veggie. It was many years of educating myself before I finally went vegan after learning just how cruel dairy and eggs are. To me, there is no difference between animals as they all feel pain and can suffer just like us. Why would I want to contribute to that when clearly I don't need to? Sue I first heard the word 'vegetarian' when I was about seven years old and somehow I knew what it meant and knew I wanted to be it. I don't ever remember having to have the word explained to me. But I'd been born into a world of companion animals (or 'pets') and I always adored animals so it was just natural to me to gravitate to lifestyle that didn't harm them. Brought up by a widowed mother with two part time jobs and a whole heap of depression meant I didn't want to put more stress on her by asking for vegetarian meals at that time, but I vowed I'd do it when I grew up. I went vegetarian in my teens (when I could cook for myself) and then had to join up the dots to get the vegan message. Veganism grew on me gradually. It was something I wanted to do for a while but I was married with a full time job by then and living mostly on pre-prepared meals to save time. It took a 'Compassion in World Farming' video on live exports of calves and other animals to finally push me over the cliff I'd been walking towards. In the end it was two Irish coffees that did it. I always loved Irish coffee but that day I wasn't enjoying them and I knew it was because of the cream on top. My conscience was prodding me too hard to be ignored. I finished the coffees but I was vegan from that moment onwards. It's been seventeen years now and it's the best decision I ever made. You can make the decision to go vegan too with the help of this free vegan starter kit: www.actnowforanimals.com/vsp.aspx. I can't help thinking that something like this is just in you. The trigger can come at any time but it will come if you're pre-disposed towards human/animal rights and non-harm.

Animal Stories (Human Animals That Is!)

The stories below are answers to the question "What led you to leading a cruelty-free life?" You'll notice that although all the stories are different, they're also very similar as they are all stories of people whose innate compassion (the compassion we ALL have) was somehow awakened and led them to leading a life that is kind to animals. Read on and be inspired!

Mary
McKenna
Melissa
Quincy
Sarah
Shelley
Sonja
Sue

What Do I Mean By Living A 'Cruelty-Free Life'?

A cruelty-free life can be summed up in one word: VEGAN.

A friend of mine put it so perfectly, so I’ll use his words:
“Veganism is a lifestyle, including diet, where one tries to live a healthy
and happy life using minimum possible natural resources
and striving to abstain from using any animal products.
Veganism is trying to live a harmless life in harmony with nature.
Veganism, in brief, is a healthy, happy, kind, compassionate
and cruelty-free lifestyle.”

Veganism is not about being perfect, it’s about reducing suffering as much as possible. You’ll never be able to abstain from ever causing any harm ever…but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Here are more details on why veganism and love for animals go hand in hand: www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/WhyVegan.pdf.

PS. The spelling in the stories below oscillates between UK English and US depending on where the person writing the story comes from.

Mary

I remember as a little girl asking my mother how the animals we ate died. She told me that they were hit quickly over the head and didn't feel a thing. Being the little girl that got made fun of for not stepping on ants and taking spiders outside (I still do this) I somehow accepted this answer. Maybe because I was being taught that meat was a food group and this had to happen.

In my early 20's I got extremely sick from eating a hamburger and could not look at cow flesh again the same way. Ten years later a friend showed me some fliers put out by PETA (www.peta.org) and I was instantly horrified. I had never seen actual pictures of the cruelty before this and I went vegan immediately! Unfortunately the images wore off and I went back to my old ways but still cutting out so-called 'bacon' and other pig flesh.

Then not very long ago I reconnected with an old friend through Facebook. She was constantly posting pictures and videos about the terrible suffering of factory farmed animals. I would initially look, but then look away because I felt that it obviously didn't work for me the first time. I couldn't get through the videos, but she kept on posting.

After several weeks I thought, "She just isn't giving up. This highly intelligent and talented woman must have something important to tell me." I began visiting her page on a regular basis and reading and looking at everything more closely. I had MANY "ah-ha!" moments and I also noticed that she had a number of supporters which was something I didn't have on my first attempt. So for me I guess I just needed the guidance and support to get back to the connection I was BORN WITH.

McKenna

Last June 2009 I was signing a petition on Facebook against the clubbing of baby seals. I read through some of the comments and came upon this site: http://watchearthlings.com. I thought, "Oh, this sounds interesting" and clicked on the link.

As I began to listen and see the visual horror before my eyes, I froze in complete shock! My heart raced a thousand times faster and I clenched my teeth. My stomach was a knotted and twisted mess. While crying, I said over and over again: "I had no idea, what the hell are these people thinking"? The long and short of it is that it took me three days to get through the documentary but I went vegan the first night after watching just thirty minutes of it.

Realizing I had been fast asleep through all this misery happening to my sentient friends (that is, the non-human animals of this world) ripped me to shreds. Mentally I was devastated, emotionally I was broken, and intellectually I was pissed beyond belief! My life changed to the core.

Every facet of how I lived changed from that moment forward. I gave away all my animal-based clothing to the homeless, gave all the food I had to my roommate and began Googling for alternative foods.

I am blessed to have had God present to me this film. I truly believe it was divine intervention telling me to wake the hell up. I didn't go on Facebook that day looking to change my life, however in that moment of just one click I did...I am blessed and nourished by being vegan. I now gently share my story and my message with all that will listen. My life's motto: Until Every Cage Is Empty!

Melissa

In my youth I always loved animals and was so connected to them.

I had a great Aunt Martha who lived in Norco, California. When I was five or six years old, my family and I would drive to see her, and along the way we passed a slaughterhouse. I remember smelling the blood in the air and feeling so horrible about it. I asked my parents why they fed me meat, and of course they answered with the myth: "You need meat to survive."

Needless to say, as I got older and did my research, I realized that this was not the case. As a result, I became vegetarian.

Then, many years later, I met a vegan who educated me about the dairy industry, and eggs as well, and I became vegan on the spot. I wanted to have no part in the suffering of animals because of my consumption.

I have been vegan for about six years now, and it is truly the BEST decision that I have ever made. You can make that decision too - for the animals, for your health and for the environment: http://theveganchoice.com.

Quincy

Throughout my lifetime I think seeds were planted here and there, some would grow a little and then fade away eventually, but they never fully vanished - always dormant and lurking inside me.

One day my aunt made a self-righteous indignant comment about how the Chinese are barbaric because they eat dogs. At that time a little voice came in to my brain saying: "What difference does it make really whether it's dogs, cows, chickens, etc? Why is one better then another?" (Mercy For Animals addresses the 'love one but eat the other' paradox: www.mercyforanimals.org/literature.aspx.)

That question kept haunting me. Also I started thinking of who I would want to ask forgiveness from if I was on my death bed. I kept thinking of animals they were all I could think of. I started envisioning all the animals whose deaths I had something to do with. Huge crowds looking at me with wide open pleading eyes.

Then one day I was rubbing my dog's belly and I thought: "He looks like a baby goat, or a lamb." And that was it for me. Right away I stopped not only eating animals but also cut out all animal products. In other words, I went vegan.

Sarah

I went vegetarian when I was eight years old. I was horrified by the fact that I was eating flesh from an animal. I remember the moment vividly: I was eating a steak and I made the connection that I was actually eating the body of a cow. Once this connection was made, I was done with eating animals. I just couldn't eat my friends.

However, dairy and eggs I had no problem with - at least not until a couple of years ago when I made the full connection which was: dairy = dead baby cows (for veal), and eggs = dead baby chicks (male chicks - considered 'useless' by the egg industry - are ground alive or thrown into trash cans and left to suffocate to death).

I've always been an animal lover, passionately so, but I truly had no idea what I was contributing to by eating dairy and eggs. When I found out the truth (which you can discover for yourself by going to this site: www.humanemyth.org) I made the switch from vegetarian to vegan.

I love being vegan. It's the best decision I've ever made!

Shelley

Quite simply, when I found out I was eating dead animals, I freaked out.

You see, I'd always seen animals as my peers. I was that little girl who told the teachers about the boys pulling wings off flies, and I often verbally bashed other kids for burning ants and spiders with magnifying glasses. I have always been driven by an unwavering sense of justice, yet still did not at all make the connection that what I was eating was in anyway similar to the animals I actually SAW suffering around me.

At age twelve I witnessed the murder of animals for food. My mother and stepdad killed over a dozen roosters in our back yard. I heard the screams. The roosters were all brothers, unseparated since hatching. They were being held in the pen directly next to the cement slab, where they could see and hear their siblings heads being cut from their bodies with an axe. Their mother also was in the pen next to them.

The sound of the screams haunted me. I could not believe that my mother could do such a thing and then expect me to EAT the bodies when she serve them up for dinner. I watched with my jaw open as she took bites saying how different and 'better' these bodies taste compared to the store bought ones. It made me sick.

My mother told me that I was a hypocrite if I refused to eat these chickens, when they are no different to the store bought ones, and that my rebellious attitude towards the whole fiasco was stupid. I turned stubbornly vegetarian and cooked my own meals from then on.

I didn't try to convert anyone to my way of thinking, and I constantly called "weird" for my views, and I just accepted that it was indeed probably the case. It wasn't until many years later that I met a vegan via Facebook (that was Faye Leister, author of the book Animals And Us: www.animalsandus.com.au) who put me onto the documentary Earthlings that I began to understand the enormity of the concept I had been toying with for my whole life.

So I guess you can say that I'm still that little girl, standing up for the animals that my fellow humans torture for momentary enjoyment - and I always will be. Animals are the slaves of our society, and as fellow animals, we have no right to enslave anyone. I fight for this now.

Sonja

I grew up mainly in California, but I lived in Minnesota for a few years during high school and other kids would take time off from school to go deer hunting when it was in season. I had never been around hunters in my whole life and it just shocked me that someone would kill a deer. I guess to me, deer just seemed more like cats, dogs, horses or other animals you don't eat. I had grown up with deer wandering into our yard to eat grass and it never occurred to me to eat them. (If in doubt about the cruelty of hunting, check out PETA's fact sheet about the cruelty of hunting: www.peta.org/MC/factsheet_display.asp?ID=53.)

Anyways, I began to wonder: "What's the difference between deer and cow or any other animal?" Before that, it had been pepperoni, bacon, ham, whatever to me, not the actual animal (ie. for the above list: pig). It became a dead animal's flesh to me and I just didn't want to eat it anymore.

I didn't go fully vegetarian until college as this was all pre-internet and I had no idea where to find info or how to do it as I didn't know anyone else who was veggie. It was many years of educating myself before I finally went vegan after learning just how cruel dairy and eggs are.

To me, there is no difference between animals as they all feel pain and can suffer just like us. Why would I want to contribute to that when clearly I don't need to?

Sue

I first heard the word 'vegetarian' when I was about seven years old and somehow I knew what it meant and knew I wanted to be it. I don't ever remember having to have the word explained to me. But I'd been born into a world of companion animals (or 'pets') and I always adored animals so it was just natural to me to gravitate to lifestyle that didn't harm them.

Brought up by a widowed mother with two part time jobs and a whole heap of depression meant I didn't want to put more stress on her by asking for vegetarian meals at that time, but I vowed I'd do it when I grew up. I went vegetarian in my teens (when I could cook for myself) and then had to join up the dots to get the vegan message.

Veganism grew on me gradually. It was something I wanted to do for a while but I was married with a full time job by then and living mostly on pre-prepared meals to save time. It took a 'Compassion in World Farming' video on live exports of calves and other animals to finally push me over the cliff I'd been walking towards. In the end it was two Irish coffees that did it. I always loved Irish coffee but that day I wasn't enjoying them and I knew it was because of the cream on top. My conscience was prodding me too hard to be ignored. I finished the coffees but I was vegan from that moment onwards. It's been seventeen years now and it's the best decision I ever made. You can make the decision to go vegan too with the help of this free vegan starter kit: www.actnowforanimals.com/vsp.aspx.

I can't help thinking that something like this is just in you. The trigger can come at any time but it will come if you're pre-disposed towards human/animal rights and non-harm.