Having been a long-time vegetarian, and now making the transition into raw vegan, it’s been a while since I’ve felt comfortable eating animals. For me, it really started to click in around my teens in the 80’s, when I started to question the “common” beliefs and eating habits of the typical Standard American Diet (SAD). In Canada, where I grew up, our eating habits at the time (and still for the majority of the population, sadly), were pretty much the same as our neighbours to the south: lots of meat and potatoes. But, somehow the light started to creep into my consciousness, and I learned about factory farming and the suffering it caused. I knew I did want to be part of that, so I stopped eating meat. But, it went beyond factory farming, and concern for animals actual started for me even earlier.
Even from a young age, I didn’t like seeing animals suffer. As a child, I recoiled from impaling the worm on the fishing hook, and then later hauling a fish into the boat by a hook in it’s mouth. Then, I’d have to see the fish suffer for a while before we got it back to the shore, where its head would be cut off while it was still alive. Seeing the beheaded fish move its mouth for a few minutes while the blood gushed all around was not something I wanted to have to continue to experience into adulthood. So, I’ve never fished since I was a child.
Every time the holidays would roll around, there would be a turkey in our house for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. Many people would be glad to have such a feast, and we were lucky that we never had go hungry. But, I began to question this “ritual” of always having a turkey on these occasions. Why was that? I wondered. So, I would protest this tradition, and either not eat the turkey, or go for an alternative. I would usually just eat the veggies and skip the meat. One year I had a “vegetarian turkey” product for Thanksgiving. While I wasn’t crazy about that product, it did at least show me that there were alternatives to a dead bird out there.
I’ve since come to realize that more natural, raw and vegan foods are the way of eating that works best for me, so I’ve given up a lot of the packaged vegetarian and vegan foods I used to eat when I first started on my journey. Also, while animals are not killed directly to produce milk, cheese and eggs, they still suffer in tortuous conditions to enable these products to be made, and many die terrible, premature deaths as a result. Actually, to be more accurate, animals ARE killed to make these types of products, as male chicks are not worth anything to a factory farm as they lay no eggs, so they are killed, or left to die, right after they are born. Also, cows have their calves taken away from them at birth most of them time – this goes for other animals as well in factory farms. Plus, commercial cheese is made from Rennett, which is produced from the stomach of slaughtered cows and calves.
My short story comes out of my experiences as a vegetarian in a meat-eating world at holiday time. I got to thinking, what would happen if all the turkeys destined for dinner plates were somehow able to fight back? The result is a somewhat whimsical and somewhat gory story that I hope is enjoyable to read.
You can read a free sample of the ebook here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/57989
