On June 19th 2021 it will be exactly one year since peace-loving animal rights activist Regan Russell was crushed to death by an angry lorry driver as she protested the cruel abuse of pigs outside Fearman's Pork slaughterhouse in Burlington, Ontario.
Vegan since 1985 and a passionate campaigner for animal rights, Regan was an active member of Toronto Pig Save and frequently attended vigils at the slaughterhouse, during which activists would give drinks of water to the pigs being taken into the abattoir to be murdered. Regan and her fellow Save Movement activists knew it was vitally important that someone be there to witness these daily shipments which are part of the ongoing holocaust against non-humans. They also knew the value of acts of compassion and mercy, trying to show these terrified, abused and soon-to-be-murdered victims that not all humans are monsters. Regan strove to make their last moments on earth a little more comfortable, a little less traumatic and to give the victims an experience of tenderness and care, however brief, that they had been denied their entire lives in the factory farms where they were reared. They also filmed their interactions with these shipments of death in an effort to make the world aware of what was going on here and in thousands of other slaughterhouses across the globe. With awareness comes choice - the choice whether to be a part of this holocaust against defenceless, innocent animals, or to be part of the solution. Regan showed people an alternative to the violence that is the meat industry and invited people to give up their addictions to animal flesh in favour of a more gentle, more compassionate, vegan lifestyle. On the morning of her death, like many times before, Regan was stood in full view of the lorry driver, who had stopped at the request of activists to give water to the pigs. There was a long-standing agreement between the Save Movement and the slaughterhouse that lorries would only be held up for two minutes. However, on this occasion it seems that even this was too long for the impatient driver. As soon as the two minutes was up, he accelerated across the junction and straight into Regan, dragging her body along the road under the wheels of his truck. She was dead long before the emergency services arrived. The shock and horror experienced by her companions on that terrible day quickly reverberated around the world. This was not the first time animal activists had been mown down and killed by animal abusers but, surely, this time there had to be some justice. Sadly, this has so far proved not to be the case. Despite multiple testimonies that Regan was in full view of the driver, he was merely charged with a traffic offence involving 'careless driving' as the courts refused to accept there was any ill intent on his part. To mark the first anniversary of the killing of Regan Russell, there will be three local events held this coming Friday and Saturday as well as memorial vigils around the world. Click here to find your nearest vigil. You can also watch the full documentary made about Regan's tragic death, 'There Was A Killing' on YouTube. We all know that tweets with images tend to get more engagement than plain text - tweets with videos even more so, but finding a continuous supply of high quality images and videos to engage your existing followers and grab the attention of new ones can be a challenge. To help provide a solution to this problem, I've shared three of my favourite sources of free images below. Each one provides a different type of content and you will probably have your favourite, depending on what kind of tweets you prefer, but they are all very valuable resources and I would recommend you use a mix of all three... Pexels Pexels contains thousands and thousands of photographs and videos which you are free to use for your social media posts, YouTube content, websites or pretty much anywhere else. I wrote about Pexels previously here and it's still one of my favourite resources. Many of the images really are of world class quality, from professional photographers seeking to showcase their work and gain more clients or commissions. Although most of them don't require you to credit them in any way, this is always a nice thing to do and is a great way to repay their kindness. Check out Pexels here. Canva Canva is a fantastic resource if you are wanting to post something more than just a photo or video because it allows you to add text and clip art, create infographics, marketing materials, physical print products, etc. There are tons of ready-made templates to choose from to give your creations a professional look and which you can also use to create your own branded style. Not all of the images are free, but plenty of them are and you can also upload your own images to the templates. Check out Canva here. The Vegan Truth Because most of the readers of this blog post will probably be my own Twitter followers, who are mostly vegans, I wanted to include this excellent resource. The Vegan Truth is a blog by M. 'Butterflies' Katz which includes 100 Vegan and Animal Rights Memes specifically sized for Twitter. 'Butterflies' happily shares these memes she creates in order to spread the vegan message and further the cause of animal liberation. She invites you to share them too and demands no credit or acknowledgement in return (but you can follow her on Twitter at @VeganPoet). Check out TheVeganTruth here. When I was sixteen years old I went vegan. That's the age when many of us start to break away from the beliefs and habits indoctrinated into us by our parents since birth, when we start to question these beliefs and assumptions we have blindly accepted thus far and to start trying out our own way of relating to the world.
In order to fully become an adult we have to leave childhood behind us. Many traditional cultures include rites of passage to mark and facilitate the transition from childhood to adulthood when old ways of relating to family, society and the world at large are symbolically and psychologically set aside and the individual suddenly transforms from a position of reliance on those around them to one of responsible caretaker, care-giver and defender of the weak and vulnerable. In modern western society we have lost many of these rites of passage. As a result, men (and I suspect women, too) often remain stuck, psychologically, in childhood. So we see 30 year olds playing video games, drunken executives acting like gangs of 14 year olds and grown men refusing to wean themselves off infant food. Human beings are the only species who regularly continue to drink milk beyond infancy. They are also the only species who regularly drink the milk of other species. Milk is the perfect natural food... for rapidly growing baby mammals! However, it is not formulated for fully-grown humans - it has way too much cholesterol, saturated fat and even concentrated protein to be part of a healthy, sustainable diet. This is why so many common diseases - obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis and more - can be linked to the consumption of milk and other dairy products. Try to put aside for one moment the grotesque absurdity and the downright perversion of suckling on a cow's udder and imagine how utterly bizarre it would be even to regularly suckle on your own mother's breast milk every day as an adult. It's neither natural nor normal. As adult men we are supposed to be protectors, guardians of the weak and the vulnerable but instead we have become dominators, oppressors, slavers and abusers of those over whom we have power. Abusers of the most vulnerable and innocent, even of tiny newborn babies - day-old male calves who are shot in the head or bludgeoned to death with hammers or pick axes because they will never become the milk machines we wish to produce - milk machines like their mothers and their sisters. Instead they would merely 'steal' the milk which is their birthright but which we wish to drink instead. Babies who are seen as little more than an industrial waste product to be destroyed and disposed of as quickly as possible in the name of profit and greed. Those who do survive those first few days are likely to be sold on to be reared on an unnatural and inadequate diet, alone in dark, cramped crates to be killed and turned into 'veal' within a few short, miserable months. Men have become monstrous 'man-babies' too weak to stand up for what's right, aberrations, unnatural perversions of what we once were and what we have the potential to be, abusing defenceless animals for their own self-aggrandizement. We think everything revolves around us, that everything and everyone is only there to satisfy our selfish desires. We think only of what we can get from life rather than what we can give. Those who have grown up and matured, those who have taken steps towards putting others' needs before their own, who have become more fully balance, caring adult males are ridiculed, scorned and ostracised rather than looked up to as role models with admirable qualities we should all be striving for. I turned vegan when I was sixteen and with that decision I took my first steps on the road of manhood. I'm still walking that road - many of us are. The road is wide and well-trodden and there is plenty of room for many more. Brothers, we are here waiting for you to turn your your back on childhood, wean yourselves... come join us and walk with us towards a vegan future. Because real men are carers, protectors... real men are vegan. I recently asked my vegan followers on Twitter, "Would you eat in McDonalds?" The results were overwhelmingly a huge "NO" with some of the answers including: "Never have, never will" "Not even at gun point" "I'd rather stick pins in my eyes" Now, before I go any further, let me clear up a point of confusion. I live in the UK where there are a handful of fully plant-based options at McDonalds, including the fries, apple pie slice, veggie wrap - the veggie goujons are even certified by the Vegan Society - but I understand that in the U.S. there are no vegan options to choose from. Even the fries there aren't vegan so the question evoked some puzzled responses from my North American followers.
One or two people from outside the U.S. said they did eat there because, although it wasn't ideal, they didn't see it as any different from eating at a pub or shopping at a supermarket that also sells meat and animal products. Since many vegans cannot afford to shop at fully vegan stores (or don't have access to one) we have to make compromises all the time by supporting businesses that are involved in animal abuse. Interestingly, only one person indicated they would actively buy the vegan options at McDonalds as a political gesture or form of economic activism in order to encourage the sale of more vegan options. This is an argument put forward by Joey Carbstrong who has stated his belief that buying vegan options from McDonalds is the right thing to do for the animals in order to change the company 'from within' by encouraging a move towards more vegan options rather than just attacking them for their malpractices. My own views are that, whilst I can see the logic behind this stance and I can understand the economics of supply-and-demand, I do nevertheless feel that McDonalds are different to, say your local supermarket, for example, because they are not just a company which 'also sells meat' but their entire empire is built primarily on the murder of billions upon billions of sentient beings. This is a world of animal abuse on a whole other level. Whilst a supermarket stocks everything from bacon to bread, pastrami to pasta, eggs to egg-plant and chicken to chips, McDonalds has built up their entire brand around glorifying the consumption of dead animals. As far as I can see, their choice to sell vegan options is merely an attempt to capitalise on a corner of the market which was previously untapped and, perhaps even more importantly, to silence many of their active critics who have campaigned against their evil empire for many decades. Back in the nineties, McDonalds famously sued two unemployed activists, Dave Morris and Helen Steel, in what became England's longest-running libel case. The corporation didn't win. Judges ruled that many of the points made by the activists were completely true and irrefutable. Not only that, but the whole thing kept McDonalds' abuses of animals, the environment and human rights in the public spotlight for years and cost them an estimated £10million. The company has also had countless activists intimidated and arrested by police simply for carrying out legal protests but this has still failed to silence opposition. It seems to me that where legal action and intimidation have failed, the company hope to 'buy' the silence of their critics by throwing them a few vegan scraps from the metaphorical blood-stained table. Personally, I am pleased that so many of my fellow vegans have refused to be won over in this way. I am pleased that groups like Animal Rebellion are still campaigning against them, including recent blockades that disrupted the supply chain to every single UK store and I look forward to the day when the rusted carcass of the big, happy clown collapses among the carcasses of all his victims because we are not only campaigning for the right to buy vegan food - we are campaigning for the right of non-human Earthlings to be free from abuse and to be treated as individuals rather than commodities. Roll on that glorious day. Perhaps it could be said that there are two types of people in the world - there are those who are driven by a concern for the welfare, the wellbeing and the suffering of others... then there are those who are concerned primarily with their own selfish desires.
You came to this blog post because you saw the title: "WARNING: Eating This Food Means Certain Death!" and, understandably, you wanted to find out how to avoid certain death. Death, after all, is generally thought of as the ultimate disaster, the worst thing that can happen to us or our loved ones. Sure, there are times when someone is in extreme, inescapable suffering and death seems like a blessed release, but generally speaking, death is the worst case scenario. So everyone came to this post because they wanted to find out how to avoid death... now there are those who will leave as soon as they realise that the death I'm helping them avoid is not their own death but someone else's. There are those who, once they realise what I'm talking about, will say, "Wow. That is so obvious but I never thought about it that way before... what can I do to avoid this terrible food?" and there are those who will shrug and close the page immediately. Because the food I'm talking about, of course, is meat... animal flesh, the bloody muscle tissue of once-living, breathing, sentient beings who wanted to live as much as you do. But before you close the page, please give me a moment more of your precious time. Please, put aside briefly the force of habit that compels you to go on day after day unthinkingly eating a food which has caused untold suffering in order to be on your plate and reflect for a moment that taking someone's life is a terrible thing. Inflicting terror and agony on that individual before taking their life, especially when that individual is innocent of any crime, has never harmed or threatened anyone, is inexcusable and yet, time and time again, when challenged on it, people churn out the same tired old lines in a feeble attempt to justify paying for these atrocities. They say things like, "It's always happened... it's nature... animals eat other animals" as if these excuses have anything at all to do with morality. I mean, the fact that something has always happened or the fact that animals do something doesn't make it moral. We don't consider rape to be a moral act because it's always happened or infanticide to be ethical simply because other animals do it! People even try to argue that they need to eat meat for health and nutrition but in this day and age - it's 2021 for God's sake - I find it hard to believe that anyone can still churn out such nonsense when so many of the world's top athletes and bodybuilders all over the world are vegan. Not only does science prove we don't need animal products to survive, but there are so many living examples that prove this to be the case - myself included. So there is only one inescapable fact - continuing to eat meat is perhaps the ultimate act of selfishness. Please put your preferences, your habits, aside - at least temporarily - and try living for just a few weeks without eating any animal products and see how you feel. A fantastic place to start is Challenge22.com where you'll get tons of support and guidance, recipes, tips, videos, motivation - even a personal nutritionist if you require one - and it's 100% free! |