It is easy to live your life following societal norms, but harder to entertain the idea that perhaps our entire ideology is skewed. I can think back to the time when I was blissfully ignorant; blindly following what my parents, teachers, books, television told me about our relationship to other animals. Note how I used the word other. We often forget that we are animals ourselves, and go through life with an anthropocentric view where we see ourselves as an entity that transcends beyond the average animal, creating an image in our minds that we have intrinsic rights to this planet that trump those of our roommates, (all life that is not human). When I was in grade school, my class took a trip to the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, the air was crisp because it was mid November, and many of the animals were taking shelter in their metal and concrete abodes, which meant that they were difficult to capture on my disposable camera that held the capacity of twenty-seven pictures that I desperately wished was two hundred, but the one animal that I wanted to see the most was out, pacing the modest length of its enclosure. The Red Panda. The animal that took up the majority of my film, and the animal which I shed tears for years later when I returned to Franklin Park Zoo. At the time upon my return to the Zoo, I had no explanation as to why I was moved to tears, because walking through the iron gates that day I thought I would feel the same warmth and excitement that I had years before standing in front of the Red Panda’s cage, but now I felt quite the opposite; Coldness and immense sadness that felt all-consuming. What began as just an unexplained negative feeling turned into a painstaking journey of the realization that everything I took at face value; the enormous divide between humans and the rest of the natural world, was a delusion that was slowly breaking down the longer I looked at it in the eyes.
Of course the idea of societal norms is not a nuanced one, for they have been around since the beginning of human civilization, for I am talking about the way our society views life outside of our own species’ world of living. The idea that all life has an equal right to live on and inhabit this earth. The realization started off slow; A teary eyed visit to the zoo, a video we watched in High School about meat production (my eyes were closed the whole time), getting angry whenever I saw a dog being choked by a choke collar, or asking mom and dad where the burger came from (I forgot about it the next meal). It was always something that I could turn a blind eye to, and accept the line we are fed, “this is just the way the world works.” During the month of May freshman year of college is when that phrase lost all meaning to me. I was working at the smoothie bar at whole foods blending together bananas, pineapple, almond butter, hemp seeds, chia seeds, papaya, protein powder, maca powder, cacao, flax seeds, spirulina... You name it, we got it. One of my regular customers who always ordered the same thing, an Urban Jungle with a pinch of salt and vegan vanilla protein powder, (Why he put salt in a smoothie is beyond me... Something about enhancing the effects of the potassium from the banana, but that doesn’t really check out), had been trying to convert me to a vegan diet for a while, always teasing me about my meat-eating diet as I put salt in his fruit smoothie. One night he handed me a list of documentaries to watch about veganism, and that night, maybe it was the fact that I had no plans and was bored out of my mind or it was because I just wanted him to stop bugging me- I watched all the films. The next day I threw out my last pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream lurking in my freezer, and that spot was since then replaced by the best vegan ice cream brand of all time, “So Delicious.”
Looking back, it seems to me that the days before I cried over spilt milk (quite literally in my case), were happier than the days that followed, as we move along you might see that. A piece of what I want to tell you is how once I changed the way I viewed the world, and life for that matter, I could never go back to living the same way I lived, nor could I enjoy the same things I once did, but in these losses I discovered new indulgences I had never entertained before. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and maybe even myself, why I can never return to the way I once lived. There are certain turning points that one hits that they cannot return from.
I remember the humid April evening that I spent hunkered down in my cramped triple dorm room, my eyes glazed over from staring at the harsh light of my laptop, while images of pigs,
chickens, and cows being brutally slaughtered flashed on my screen. “You won’t ever look at food the same way,” my customer had said. And he was right. The first documentary was easier to watch because it was more about human health and the impact on our bodies, but the second and third were about the animals and how we abuse their bodies in the most sickening ways possible. At the time I could not fully put into words exactly what I felt when I saw these images, I just knew it was the worst feeling I had ever felt in my entire life. I was disappointed in the human race. I also felt an inexplicable numbing feeling of rage- Rage towards our people for being so ambivalent towards the suffering of life apart from our own species. The rage would quickly turn into an ignorant hopefulness that had a duration of about six months. However, to be ignorant is not always a greatly negative quality, if a pplied correctly.
Which is precisely why this ignorant hopefulness prevailed were some of the most motivational times of my life; I finally felt like I had a purpose. I do not mean a purpose in a way that a writer discovers they are a writer and puts pen to paper and feels their calling. I mean a purpose that has no residue of self-indulgence; Rather a purpose to the world that extends beyond oneself. I remember sharing posts online regarding animal rights, and I began the tiresome endeavor of trying to convert my loved ones to become vegans as well (with little to no success). My friends and family generally supported me, and I say generally because grandmother would try and fail to trick me into eating not so vegan friendly mashed potatoes with turkey hidden inside. (“You need your protein!” She would say). This was around the time that I realized that people will never see things from my perspective, no matter how hard I tried, and this idea frustrated me to no end.
I remember the most difficult and tempting times was when I was studying abroad in the Netherlands, which was at the beginning of my vegan life. To start, the dining hall was mainly comprised of fried cheese and meat with a side of mushy steamed broccoli, so broccoli was the main component of my diet, which one could imagine what a toll that took on me physically after three months, (sometimes if I was lucky there would be chickpeas.) On the weekends we would travel to other countries such as France, and I walked into bakery after bakery, trying to ignore the freshly baked buttery croissants, colorful pastel macarons, decadent tartes, and smooth and creamy chocolate chaud ,(Hot chocolate of course). I watched as my friends devoured the wonders of the world, until I discovered that there were options for me as well, such as gelato made of coconut milk in Rome, unexpected vegan bakeries in Berlin, and one of the most famous (and cheap!) food items in France that I could always rely on; la baguette. B aguettes became my steady lover, and I found myself averaging nearly one a day during my week in Paris. Cruelty-free food is always available, I learned, you just have to have the want to seek it out and be able to wait until those gems show up. That is the real key; having the want to prioritize life over your taste buds.
I began to view life in a different way, beyond the concept of food. I was in the park when I found myself staring at a squirrel who was very invested in building a pile of nuts under an oak tree as if his life depended on it, which it essentially did. I stared at this squirrel for nearly twelve minutes, watching him run back and forth, back and forth, all while I sat still with my book in my lap; the two of us involved in completely different tasks yet sharing the same space. As I watched this creature exist in my world, I realized that it was also in his own world, where I was just a mere character to his narrative like he was to mine, and that we both have completely different experiences but what makes one experience of more importance than the other. Us humans put the human experience above all other experiences of our fellow creatures, just because we come to the conclusion that we are experiencing life at a higher level and have a stronger purpose, but isn’t all creature’s core purpose to survive? I look around and I see this grand city that we have build unto this Earth, and it is like we have built over the Earth and made our own space, yet the Earth and our fellow creatures are everywhere from the trees emerging from the paved sidewalks to the squirrels that we so easily disregard as repulsive city creatures, yet we are the city creatures who have built over the universal home that is the natural Earth. How narcissistic does one have to be to value their experience over another’s just because they don’t have the ability to understand their experience? The moment I realized the equality of the experiences of all life, is the moment I realized that I could not go on acting like mine was of higher value.
This brings me to the last stage that I never mentioned, the current stage in which I reside in for the time being, the worst stage I have experienced so far; Worse than heartbreak, worse than loss – It was the all-consuming, persevering feeling of hopelessness. When people grocery shop, they buy their eggs, meat, vegetables, butter, fruit, bread, and cookies; They see food. As a cashier when I ring them out, I see lives and lives lost. The veal tossed on the conveyor belt, pink flesh beneath thin plastic wrap, my fingers can feel the soft young flesh that no longer holds the warmth of life but rather the coldness of death, and I can hear the cries of the calf being separated from its mother after birth which happens even if the calf is not destined for slaughter, because you can’t have the calf suckling up its own mother’s milk which is already predestined for the cardboard milk carton that I ring up just after the child’s body. Sometimes some of the liquid from the carcass drips out of the rotisserie chicken bag, and the customer usually says something along the lines of, “oops some juice leaked out!”, as if it’s merely some orange juice, as if it’s completely normal that liquids from what once breathed life is now covering the countertop that I will wipe down to further erase its presence from this earth until the mouth that ingests it will complete this process of obsoleteness.
You now see what I mean when I say that I am now in a state of hopelessness? When I think about a cow that will never taste its mother’s milk, screaming mothers of all species losing their children, fish enslaved inside small glass tanks that will never taste fresh water, chickens with their breaks cut off, chicks that hatch from their eggs that never get to see their mothers, or turkeys bred for the Thanksgiving table that are slaughtered after 5 short months and never get to feel the sunlight on their bodies (in the wild they live an average of 10 years). I want to stop all the suffering now. But I can’t. All I can do is do my part; try to show others the way myself and so many other see, and in the meantime try not to scream every time I hear someone use calcium and milk in the same sentence. I could not tell you how many times I ask myself why do I even bother because people won't change, but the stakes are too high to quit since these animals are voiceless to the human race who refuses to hear sounds that aren’t words, refuses to hear their cries as distress and fear that is equal to ours.
I suppose that some people have not yet reached this point of realization, and that all has to do with their own life experiences. I remember hiking in the Grand Canyon one blistering hot afternoon. My parents and I made our way along the narrow trail that traversed the side of the canyon, and on the side of the path off in the dry brush stood a beautiful tall and proud elk whose tan body camouflaged almost perfectly in with the deep earthy tones of the canyon. We stood stone still because we did not want to scare away the beautiful creature; I recall being able to hear his hot breath press through his nostrils, the way you might imagine a horse to breathe. I liked the way his ears twitched at the slightest detection of a new noise, liked his soft brown eyes that saw me as I saw him. I liked how his body started to relax as the presence of my family and I became less and less threatening, liked how he bowed his head to munch on some shrubbery which solidified his trust in us observers who only wished to take in his beauty, until the stillness was abruptly broken when a tourist with a camera pressed to his face came barreling through the woods towards the elk, and the elk’s entire composure immediately shifted to one of fear and defense, and he rose on his hind legs and thrusted them towards the sky, feet from the man. Yet the man did not move, his mouth just dropped as his continual artificial sounding clicks pierced the air with distinction. And then the elk barreled off into the brush, and the man followed with his camera pressed to his face, stumbling over the spots where the elk had gracefully leaped over. You see, many never learned to respect nature and instead are conditioned to capture it because they are taught that it is merely a spectacle and they are entitled spectators. Well I refuse to spectate.
Instead I will live with this earth and with the creatures that walk upon it for as long as I live. I still cannot fully walk this earth impact free because humans are undoubtedly the most impactful species to roam this earth (and by now you must know that I don’t mean this in a good way), but I can still do my absolute best. There are no quick and easy solutions to the issue of disconnection from life, and so we must continue to talk about it, in every form of communication we can. I talk about it through writing, others maybe through song or photographs. I talk about humans as if we are the poison that sickens this earth, and we certainly can be, but we don’t have to be if we change our society-groomed ideology that our experience is somehow above all others, a mindset that I adopted by default. All I mean is that I was very ignorant before I started to entertain the idea that maybe we don’t have a greater right to this earth than others, and idea that society has stifled with its pressing ideas of progress and innovation (both of which hold zero value if they counterproductively destroy our living space). And I am still ignorant now of many things which I have not even begun to tackle, but I did wake up to the reality of this issue.
There is a mouse in our apartment. The landlord laid down traps stuffed with peanut butter to draw in the tiny creature, but the mouse has never touched the traps. Sometimes in the late hours of the night when I am sitting on our couch and the bright artificial lights from the TV are flashing across the floor, I see the creature run and does a beautiful arabesque jump over the shiny metal trap, and I quietly cheer him on and applaud his agility, grace, and cunningness. I will continue to cheer for the little ones, big ones, tall ones, short ones, furry ones, slimy ones, and winged ones; Until the day I am not able to cheer anymore. Perhaps someone, or a great amount of ones, will take my place.
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