Veganism

**Come to AFA's Vegan/Farmed Animal Advocates meeting Tuesday, November 18 at 7:00 p.m. at Escape Coffee, 916 Williamson Street. For more info click here.

What is a Vegan?
Vegans are people who abstain from eating animals and avoid using products that have animal-produced like milk, eggs, leather or honey or that contain animal-derived ingredients like gelatin. In our modern world, a fully vegan life style is more of an ideal than a possibility since so many products contain ingredients that are animal derived, like car tires.

Veganism is the penultimate philosophy of compassion for all sentient beings. Veganism is a natural and logical result of the idea that animals have feelings that matter just as much as our own. People who embrace this philosophy avoid activities and using or consuming products that involve harming other animals.

The Statistics
Right now, millions of animals are suffering and being killed because we like the way they taste, like their skin, their fur, enjoy seeing them killed or believe that hurting and killing them will help us somehow. Millions. Right now.

This isn't rhetoric. According to USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service, in 2007 there were 9,031,035,000 chickens slaughtered in the U.S. That's almost twenty-five million a day, a million an hour. And that's just the chickens.

• Commercial cattle slaughter during 2007 totaled 34.3 million head, up 2 percent from 2006
• Commercial calf slaughter totaled 758,100 head, up 7 percent
• Commercial hog slaughter totaled 109.2 million head, 4 percent higher than 2006
• Commercial sheep and lamb slaughter, at 2.69 million head, was down slightly from the previous year
• 262,791,000 turkeys were slaughtered in 2007

It is estimated that 30 million animals are killed in research labs every year and that fails to account for the large number of mice produced during the production of exotic mutants.

In 2007, there were 8 billion pounds of fish landed by the US commercial fish industry and 667,443,000 pounds of crustaceans. No one takes the time to count the individual animals.

And then there is recreational hunting and fishing… and on and on it goes. Veganism is an ethical and moral response to the immeasurable suffering these statistics represent.

It's the back-story that gives such great weight to the slogan “Go vegan!”

What you can do
Vegan products are increasingly popular and are readily available in stores everywhere. Many people are deciding to avoid hurting animals and many others are recognizing the health benefits of avoiding meat and dairy.

Many on-line stores cater to vegans and others looking for humane and healthful products. A few of these are listed below. Careful shoppers are able to find a wealth of vegan products – anything without animal-derived ingredients – close to home; it's all about reading labels and ingredient lists.

Here are a few sites that we have found helpful:

Vegan Essentials

VegGuide.Org
Veg Dining