I’m still doing the vegan thing. It has not been easy. Another resident had a birthday party and everyone was eating chicken wings and it was so hard to pass. My saving grace was previously the Impossible Whopper at Burger King (vegan when you order it with no mayo), but it’s a lot of money, especially for delivery, so it’s been a few weeks since I bought one. One thing I’ve noticed with cravings is that if I desperately want to eat a specific animal-based food, usually I’m just hungry and the craving will go away when I eat some unrelated vegan food.
Anyway, I’ve been reading and watching vegan resources. One resource was this book:
The version of the book that I got was the “second edition,” but I think it really was more like a sequel because it referred to the first edition as though it were a totally different book. I got it because I was curious about vegan pet foods, but the book turned out to have two parts: the first half was general vegan musings, and the second half was about pets. The book read as though the author was drunk and manic at the same time when he sat down to write, but somehow it actually was both informative and hilarious. Unfortunately, it seems that you really can’t have a vegan cat since literally the guy who wrote the book on vegan cats eventually had to give up and feed one of his cats meat. However it turns out that there are a lot of horrifying things that go into pet food, including Styrofoam and other cats that have been euthanized. This is a predicament because I want a cat really badly. My turtle eats fish pellets but he only eats about two tablespoons of them a week so I don’t worry so much. Fortunately, I have time to figure out what I’m going to do when I get a cat. Even when I move out of the group home I will probably be with roommates so the cat will be a few years down the road.
I also watched this documentary:
Honestly, it was very cheesy. I found the trailer on YouTube about a month before the actual premiere, and it had way, way too many corny staged scenes in which the protagonist showed her horror at one thing or another, or was filmed dramatically looking off into the distance. But again, if you can get past the ridiculous theatrics, the information was excellent. It focused especially on India and I was afraid that it would be racist but it was just the opposite: it was very positive toward India and its large vegetarian population, and said that they were ahead of the rest of the world and just needed to cut out dairy. It also had a lot of general vegan information that was useful for me. I had a vague pipe dream of moving to Rajasthan and veganing over there, because I found this picture on Twitter:
Unfortunately, it seems that there is no vegan paradise on earth except maybe a Buddhist monastery in China or somewhere where cheese is uncommon. And even then, it’s a fine line between paradise and just joining another cult, as this video sadly shows:
But, getting back to the documentary (which did not mention east Asia or cults), you should watch it because it’s good.
In other news, I’ve watched a ton of other YouTube videos that show horrible scenes of animal abuse, but I haven’t put them on here. For one thing, there are just too many of them. For another, anyone who wants to see horrifying scenes of cruelty can easily find it, and I want my blog just to have resources that are diamonds in the rough, or that are really good but not well-known, and which I’m vaguely proud of having found. It takes a lot of sifting through content to find good material and that is what I put on here.
Okay, that’s all for today!
References
Friendly Atheist. (10 May 2022). This child of Jain parents had her hair plucked out in a religious ritual [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/s40yLoiRDug
Gillen, J. (2008). Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs & What it Really Means to be Vegan. Booksurge Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-4392-1120-5
India in Pixels by Ashris [@indiainpixels]. (2020, July 25). Percentage of population that is vegetarian in Indian States (2014) Source: Union Government Sample Registration System Baseline Survey 2014 [large… [Image attached] [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/indiainpixels/status/1286982097400283136?lang=en
PLANT BASED NEWS (17 November 2022). INDIA: The Land Of Ahimsa Official Documentary [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/oYmZISwJI7k
