Welcome to veganica.org

27 May 2007 by nancy

Let’s start with a few beautiful quotations:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

~Henry Beston, The Outermost House

Never counted in the costs of war are the dead birds, the charred animals, the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race toward other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideology. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.

~Arundhati Roy, War Talk

As you can see, this is a website that focuses on the way we think about animals. I’ve been a vegan for 11 years and an animal lover all my life. Only since becoming vegan have I really felt completely content and comfortable with my views about animals. Only after I stopped separating the animals that were my companions from the animals that were once my food did I truly come to respect animals. Truly, animals are animals. Regardless of the favored status we may place on one species or another, all animals are the same in their capacity to experience their lives, feel pain, suffer, and carry on as their instincts and interests lead them. It is not in their interest to be our food. In many cases, it’s not in their interest to be domesticated. Our current environmental and political turmoil seems to indicate that it is not in their interest to be manipulated or controlled by humans either.

So where does this leave us? How can we coexist with the animal species on this earth in a way that respects them and makes them part of the moral community? How can we relate to animals in a way that protects their interests and balances them with our own? How should we treat animals, and what kind of a world do we want for animals to live in? What kind of world do we want for ourselves?

I hope that this website can be part of the discussion that answers some of those questions.

The rights of animals are firmly intertwined with the rights of humans (who are also animals) and the necessity that we protect the environment and use its resources conservatively (or not at all). It is the simple life that best balances all of these interests: consuming less; finding joy in friendships, intimacy, and the living world rather than in material possessions; living sustainably and simply; and eating low on the food chain. It may at first seem to take more time and more personal energy, but if we use our time and energy wisely now, we help guarantee that both will be available for generations of the future, and we can find for ourselves the kind of deeply satisfying life that fits best with the kind of world we need and desire.

Life is a beautiful thing. When we respect it and try to understand it, it’s easy to become awed by it: its boundless mysteries unfold before our eyes in the most inconspicuous of places and in the vast universe beyond. Most people think of a vegan lifestyle as being mostly about food, but it is about so much more than that.

In life there is love, in death dismay. If we can encourage and protect what lives, we will find ourselves living more fully as well.

Thanks for reading at my website.