Home Page
Action Alerts
Articles
Campaigns
Events
How Can I Help?
Letters
Who We Are
Links

We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts.

Animal Defenders of Westchester
P.O. Box 205
Yonkers, NY 10704

Letters

Best Choice

Published in NY Newsday, Feb 2, 2004:

In all the controversy about whether mad cow disease poses a serious threat, one thing has been forgotten: cows are living, breathing, sentient beings.

I became a vegetarian 25 years ago. Not for reasons of disease, or what good it would do me; I realized, while eating a chicken leg, that this was part of an animal who bled like me and cried from pain, just like me. Yes, I did feel better physically as a result. My asthma lessened, gout symptoms and an 'idiopathic rash' (doctor slang for "we don't know what it is") both disappeared.

But more importantly, I was happy that I was getting 'right' with the other beings who share our world. I wasn't being a hypocrite like friends who said, "I'll eat it, but I don't want to think about it." And all these years later, becoming vegetarian is the one decision I've never, ever regretted - noteworthy in a lifetime's worth of choices.

Kiley Blackman
Yonkers