Becoming Vegan

Eight years ago, at the mid-century point of my life, I stopped eating animals and started holding signs protesting fast food, rodeos, fur and circuses.

What were the chances that someone like me would do something so rad? Practically nil. I had never picketed anything for any reason. I was not a joiner. Although I lived in one of the most politically active areas of the country for decades—the Bay Area—I kept to myself and minded my own business. Never a Birkenstocked flower child, I led a self-indulgent, self-absorbed life, with many jobs punctuated by periods of generally aimless travel.

But I’d always been an animal lover. At various periods in my life I’ve had cats, dogs, guinea pigs, lizards, parakeets, antelopes, a tortoise, a retired lab rat, a horse, even a baby baboon. At the same time, I adored meat, the bloodier the better. The transition to vegan animal rights activist happened because I realized that these two sides of me had been at war with each other for a long time, and one of them had to surrender.

My parents, city slickers and small-time entrepreneurs, owned and operated a chicken farm on Long Island in the years before I was born. I grew up among eerily deserted chicken coops in the backyard. A solitary bachelor uncle of mine eventually bought that part of the property and moved in, building himself a tiny house by the homes of formerly living chickens.

When I was a child, my now widowed mother used to buy live chickens from a local farmer and bring them home to kill them. I still remember the doomed, headless, bloodied birds running around the yard, and her reassurances that it was just a reflex action, that they really didn’t feel anything. She believed that. And I believed her. Sort of.

In the 70s, my husband and I joined the Peace Corps to see some of the world and were assigned to a small town in Ethiopia. We would bargain for chickens at the local market. Usually our cook or my husband killed them. Once, when I volunteered for killing duty and got ready to slaughter a chicken for dinner, I discovered too late that the knife was dull. I succeeded in partially hacking through the suffering bird’s neck before I started screaming. My husband finished the job. That was the last chicken I directly victimized, but far from the last one that I ate.

On another occasion we bought a young goat for its meat. Rambunctious, cute and curious, it butted through our screen door and ran through the house. My husband was really angry since he had painstakingly constructed that door himself, but I fell in love with the little goat and refused to let him kill it. Soon after, we gave it to a teacher friend, who had no such qualms. I guess I thought at the time that out of sight was out of mind, but I still remember the joie de vivre of that little goat.

I bought a broken-down work horse with saddle sores for a bargain price at the market one day because I felt sorry for him. Never having taken a riding lesson, I only rode him once, bareback, barely managing to hang on when he started galloping. Boolay had an easy life with me, grazing and taking it easy, in stark contrast to what his former life must have been like.

I had five tapeworms while in Ethiopia. The cows were infected with them. I loved to eat raw beef with hot pepper, a national specialty. I became quite accustomed to, and even proud of, having to go through the distasteful tapeworm “cure”: chewing four tablets of the prophylaxis along with a chaser of Epsom salts, a treatment which precipitously ejected the now dead tapeworm in its entirety. I even pickled one in alcohol, named it Teklee (from “grow”, in Amharic), and displayed it prominently for guests to see.

Back then, I was sensitive about appearing to be a cultural imperialist, and I tried to suppress what I considered my over-sentimentality about animals. In the years we were in Ethiopia we raised two orphaned antelopes sold to us by local hunters who had killed their mothers. I became very attached to them.

Meedako, the male bush duiker, who developed very sharp horns at maturity, began to attack my husband and our student helper. I finally decided (after drinking a lot of wine) that we couldn’t keep him safely anymore and he had to be slaughtered, with his meat going to our impoverished student helper to sell at the market. But I was so upset that I made our student bury the body, not sell it.

When we left Ethiopia, we gave Dookoolal, our beautiful female bushbuck, to the same friend we had given the young goat to. He and his wife and kids considered animals just something to eat, not companions, so I believe that he slaughtered and ate her after we left, even though he had promised us he wouldn’t. I’ve thought about those antelopes often in the ensuing decades.

When I returned to the States, I ate the Great American Diet, arguably the unhealthiest on the planet. I became a sushi addict, along with too frequent indulgences in enormous plates of barbecue from a neighborhood dive by the beach in San Francisco and quarts of Baskin-Robbins bittersweet chocolate ice cream. What? Me worry about mercury, cholesterol, antibiotics, and all the other toxins in animals and fish, besides the cruelty of raising them for food in the first place? ‘Course not. I was young and intended to enjoy myself. I was still disconnected from the real world around me.

In the ensuing years I got interested in health foods. Periodically I’d go ovo-lacto vegetarian, feeling virtuous, but it would never last long. But as I learned more about the horrors of factory farming, my resolve to eliminate all animal products from my life for compassionate reasons became stronger. I discovered that millions of genetically engineered animals each year were being raised for food with little regard for their welfare, out of sight of consumers, many of whom didn’t know where those plastic-wrapped slabs of meat, cartons of neatly arranged eggs and innocent-looking containers of milk from the supermarket came from. There came a point when I could no longer enjoy the food I was consuming because I was fully aware of the immense, unnecessary suffering of imprisoned animals that went into producing it.

Still, I’m not proud to admit that it took me five decades to commit to being a vegan. Old habits die hard, even when one is armed with a lot of knowledge and the best of intentions. My inner war came to an end in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my husband and I moved ten years ago to a wonderful house on many acres of land, which allowed me to care for a number of rescued cats and dogs. This really opened my heart, and so I got involved with the local animal advocacy community and joined PETA. I started protesting activities that involved animal exploitation. I volunteered at the animal shelter and worked for a humane education magazine. I’ve made a habit of writing frequent letters to the editor about animal issues.

I am more at peace with myself now. My goal in life is to encourage other people, particularly my fellow progressives—who care so much about human rights but often ridicule animal rights—to make a strong political and moral statement by doing what I’ve done. You shouldn’t have to be the kind of person who gets emotional about animals to recognize that treating them like our slaves is simply wrong. Becoming vegan has been the single most politically subversive and spiritually satisfying decision I’ve ever made.