Just Love…

Back in college, first day in school as a freshman, instructors would always ask, “Why did you choose this course?” Before Psychology, there was another course lingering in my mind since third grade – Veterinary Medicine. I took Psychology for several reasons, but there was one reason I didn’t openly express at that time. In senior high school, I asked the question, “Do laboratory subjects require you to kill an animal for study and experiments?” And with the answer I got back then, I decided to take Psychology instead. Yet, even in my chosen course, I didn’t expect to deal with Zoology and Anatomy & Physiology subjects that obliged us to skin & pin a frog alive. I just stayed at the background with my heart bleeding while my group mates did the dismantling of the helpless frog.

I loved animals and there was a period during our childhood when our home was like a zoo. I had hamsters, cats, a rescued bird from Diplomat Hotel, and a bat that fell from Marby’s rain gutter. My brother and I also had dogs, mice, and creek turtles found along the road as pets. Even for house rats, back then my brother and I attempted to rescue newborn mice from our grandmother who found their nest inside our closet as she was about to dispose them. At that time, they weren’t pests to us, but we looked at them as fragile hairless innocent creatures. Since we had the concept that babies fed on milk as their food, for the baby rats we managed to hide, we tried to feed them with small cotton columns dipped in milk. But of course, the newborn mice were too tiny and were designed to suckle from their mother who sadly was already dead. Thus, my brother and I were unsuccessful in saving these mice. Each child indeed, is naturally an animal lover and children could naturally sense their connection to an animal.

When I was four years old, I witnessed how a pig was slaughtered, and even when his head was severed, his head still struggled to move & jump in an attempt to escape. In elementary I saw how a duck fought to free itself from being strangled. In fourth grade, I secretly cried in my room from witnessing a pregnant doe die from exhaustion from birth and for being in a cage for so long. She was still able to push her fawn out, but unfortunately her baby also didn’t make it. I’ve also seen how a mother pig escaped from her pen just to nuzzle her six offspring in a separate confinement when she felt they’re going to be killed the next day. At ten, I read a book from our shelf about the impact of meat-eating and after that I decided not to eat meat.  There were a lot of reasons to become vegetarian, but of which one was cows, pigs, and chickens are friends and not food. This was further reinforced when I started reading M. Gandhi’s autobiography in sixth grade. That was my first encounter with ahimsa or the principle of non-violence. All the more this decision was strengthened when I saw how a slaughter house looked like inside during our immersion camp in high school (and take note this slaughter house is one of those so called “high tech, ISO-certified type”). I struggled on giving up fish because I thought then that ‘they’re small… maybe they don’t feel pain’. But after high school, reading again the taxonomy of animals, seeing that fishes belong to the phylum chordata, I finally understood that their sensory system is as complex as any human & non-human animal; hence, the pain they feel is the same pain that we feel when pricked by a needle. Plus, since they breathe through gills, lifting them out of the water is tantamount to drowning.

Last year, after witnessing what happens in dairy & poultry farms, organic or not, free range or not, I’ve decided to become vegan. In my heart, if in every cheese, milk, cream, and yoghurt, there are calves taken away from their moms and cows dying from mastitis & their lives shortened from 25 years to 3 years then it’s not worth eating these. Plus, if for eggs consumed, there are chickens distressed in battery cages, male chicks ground alive, chickens de-beaked (which is equal to your fingers being cut), and hens dying from non-stop mounting, then that egg was produced from cruelty, as well.

Not eating meat allowed me to see that we are all connected with each creature, and if we human beings are the stewards of the planet, this does not mean superiority over other animals. Rather, we are meant to protect them and all of creation. In a society where vegetarians and vegans are the minority, it’s not uncommon for people to ask “Why are you vegetarian or why don’t you eat meat?”… When asked several years ago, I had difficulty answering this question ‘coz of so many reasons why I became one. But now, with my journey of becoming vegan, there’s only one answer to explain it all, and that is Love & Compassion…

--- Kunay / May 7, 2013