VEGAN VEGAN VEGAN OI OI OI

I tell people I want to find vegan hiking shoes because it turns out that even if the shoe doesn’t have leather on it, the glue is made with animal bones.

They tell me I am getting too extreme.

There are pus and antibiotics in dairy from infected udders. Cows are raped and kept perma-pregnant to give us pus milk. Pus cheese. Antibiotics pus dairy. They wash fast food meat in ammonia and it goes through further processes to render it fit for human consumption. They can trace the DNA of fifty plus cows in a burger patty. Meat fat gives us cancer, it rots our guts. The population around slaughterhouses develop high abuse and mental health issues because the workers can’t deal with what goes on in there and perpetrate the abuse at home, the vicious circle lives on.

I’m getting too extreme, they tell me.

I couldn’t foresee the amount of tongue biting I would have to do. I have to pretend to be tolerant of people who defend eating meat. “You know Soph, you were eating all of this recently, stop preaching, people don’t like that”. THE ANIMALS MIGHT FUCKING LIKE THAT YOU FUCKING DICK FUCKS.

I don’t scream, I can’t. I have a job. I can’t. I am not allowed. The hysterical preaching woman. They make fun of me for advocating equal rights, putting down their put downs aimed at women. No one likes a preacher, Sophie. They stop listening. Equal rights bleeds into speciesism, people. I can’t get too loud. They don’t like it.

“How do you know if someone is vegan? They’ll tell you”.

There was one vegetarian chick in high school, we called her “Veg” and chased her in hallways throwing pieces of ham at her. That’s the world I grew up in. People, they don’t like getting preached at.

HATE MUSLIMS – FEAR TERRORISM – DON’T BE FAT- LOVE FOOTBALL – LOSE WEIGHT – TITS – HAVE SEX – FUCK- SCREW – GIVE GOOD HEAD – FEAR THY NEIGHBOUR- SPEND MONEY – GOBBLE GOBBLE – BARGAIN DEALS – WATCH TV – LOOK AT ADVERTS – LOSE WEIGHT – WEAR HIGH HEELS – BE YOURSELF BUT BETTER – FEAR THE MIDDLE EAST – BIG ASSES – SHOP / DROP -WATCH TV – SEEK FAME – LOSE MORE WEIGHT – PORN- IMMIGRANTS BAD – TV TV TV – FEAR FEAR FEAR

People don’t like getting preached at, Sophie, people are free to choose whether they eat meat or not.

I had originally started this piece with scenes of videos I had seen, of tortured animals. I read it to a few people who basically sent back the message of “uhm yeah sure”. As in, effective, kind of, but who gives a shit about the animals. When my friend asked me to write this, she said she was looking for a deeper explanation of someone going vegan than “and then I realised that the little bunny on my plate was super cute and I didn’t want to eat animals anymore”. I thought I understood at the time. I thought I’d do a big piece tying in my vision of quitting white sugar and white flour to help my eating patterns and erratic concentration, try yet another way to fix myself – I quit animal products on the same day as the refined shit, have been wanting to treat myself kind, strive for a purer state of mind. I quit coffee not short after, quit smoking not long before, and have since attained a newfound level of clarity of mind.

Dysmorphia, ADHD, Borderline Personality Disorder, have some pills, depression, anxiety, more pills, go for a walk, label, pill, label, pill.

I thought I’d write about that, you know, my personal path to enlightenment, the notion of “don’t eat the animals, you’re eating their fears”, followed by the classics: “let go of fear”, “let go and let god”, “we are One” and so on and so forth. I’ve gone almost full “Eat, Pray, Love”, avocado-gobbling white girl, yoga centre Facebook check-in, hikes on weekends, believe in yourself, start the day with “om namah shivaya”. Shanti shanti motherfucker.

In a half cynical, jaded by nature sort of way, I believe in what I have written above, but I will also mock its cliché to death. Wear yoga pants, work your glutes, bat your eyelashes, be nice, be vegan, girl power woo yet another market buy organic feel great yay! It is so ridiculously self-serving and has fuck all to do with the distress, the pain, THE TORTURE of animals. Apart from not wanting to take their pain in, I have enough pain of my own, thank you very much. See? Back to me. Fucking humans.

However, it is because of my own pain, because of the near unbearable plight of being human, that I have gotten to a stage where hearing that “being kind to myself” should be actioned. I cannot be kind to myself and to other beings by partaking in torture. I saw another video yesterday, about how they treat sheep in the wool industry.

Fuck you Ugg wearing bastards.

I have to be kind in an unkind world in order to spread more kindness in the hope that it will change the world.

Veganism is activism. It is taking a stand. I stand with kindness. Namaste, motherfuckers.