Animal Exploitation and the Journey to Veganism

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Animal Exploitation and the Journey to Veganism
By Amanda Fife - 7 Dec 2005

In Reference to: Animal Exploitation Photo Journal and Gallery

Oh... oh my God...

I stumbled across your website and the animal exploitation pictures on it while looking for images of rabbits online - just hunting for some nice pictures for an icon I wanted to make for my online journal.

And then I run across this and oh God I feel ill. Those pictures are terrible! I can't imagine what the photographer felt trying to document that sheer amount of pain and suffering. I've never owned a rabbit, but I have had two dogs, one still with me and one not, and I keep a tank of tropical fish and three guinea pigs as well.

I love my animals, I can't imagine hurting them or keeping them in a place unfit for them. My dogs and gunieas are indoor animals mostly but they get to roam in the back yard whenever the weather allows and they never go unfed or uncared for. When my first two guinea pigs came into my home as Christmas presents I told a woman that I was reading to each week about them. Mary, who had lived in Bolivia most of her young life and repeatedly again as she grew older, told me that guineas were very tasty. I think my mouth dropped open, I was stunned. She told me that growing up where she did she had seen guinea pigs farmed regularly for their meat.

I had never heard of such a thing as eating an animal smaller than a pig at that time in my life. It was a sickening thought - to imagine one of my pets roasting before my eyes, and it made me begin to think very seriously about the animals that I was eating at dinner with my family. Because weren't they just as valuable and worthy of living as my pets. They lived on farms and were raised for their meat, but they were still living creatures the same as my pets and likely died in a horrible manner so that I could marinate their flesh for my supper? BIG wake up call...

The idea of taking such a docile sweet animal as a rabbit and sticking it with syringes, never mind letting flesh viruses eat off their ears and ravage their bodies... The thought makes me sick. It makes me want to pick up every single little creature in those photographs and rush them to a veterinarian, lay them down on a bed of soft blankets and woodchips and stroke their backs and feed them sweet vegetables and good clean water until they feel well.

Animal experimentation has always gotten my goat more than most animal welfare issues because there's just no NEED for it!

Training a rat to run a maze to learn about the psychology of conditioning is one thing - that animal is not being mistreated. Aside from a few hours a day where they get to hunt for a prize of food they are living the life of a well treated house pet. At least, this is what I have seen of the rats that were kept at my university. The psychology students who experimented with them (and I say 'with' because I don't feel that observing an animal learning something is the same as experimenting 'on' a creature) were very kind and treated them like cherished pets, letting them roam and making sure they were cared for if they got sick or anything.

Tying an animal down, letting bugs attack it, burning it, dissecting it alive? I thought we were past this sort of cruelty to any creatures! It's no wonder the world is still full of war when we can't even be kind to something so truly innocent and unprovocative as an animal.

I think I need to go and hug my pets now. I'm rattled. I wish you all the best in furthering your cause, I've e-mailed this site link to many of my friends and I hope they take it to heart as I will.

Amanda