Vegan_Page

                Growing up I was always facinated with people who chose to be vegetarians or vegans. Their choice was always something I greatly admired but thought was too difficult for me to do. Looking back on it I kind of laugh because it is not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. The biggest problem I have encountered is when I am out with friends and they feel like grabbing some fast food. Usually I just refrain from ordering anything at all because I hate to give *insert some groovy 70's shaft style music here* The Man *music fades out* any of my hard earned cash but when I am too hungery to resist I just get a salad. I highly reccomend Subway's Veggie Delight sub on wheat, sans cheese of course. The next biggest problem is finding clothing and accessories that don't use animal products, especially shoes but luckily we have the internet now of days so it isn't that big of a deal and if you look hard enough you can find plenty of items in your surrounding area. Then follows tooth paste and clean supplies, your local heath store should have some but if not you can get them online at Pangea Vegan Products.
                  I get a lot of, "I can understand not eating meat but why cut out all the rest? Milk doesn't hurt cows and eggs don't hurt chickens.." It kind of makes me sad that people still believe that way. The diary and egg industries are closely linked to the meat industry, when cows and chickens production rates decline they are killed. The same brutal factory farming methods that are used to produce meat are used to produce dairy and eggs. The chickens spend their entire lives in wire cages with floor space the size of a vinyl record. The cows are also resigned to small cramped cages for the most of the duration of their short lives.
Both are drugged, mutilated, and deprived of their most basic freedoms while being used for human profits.
Like most mammals, cows only produce milk when they are pregnant so they are kept in this state as long and often as possible. When a female calf is born it joins her mother in the dairy industry but when a male calf is born it is sold to a veal farm within days of his birth. Here he will be tethered to a stall, deprived of food and exercise until he is slaughtered for meat. Life is only a few years longer for the mother. The average dairy cow lives to be five years old since that is the age at which their milk production begins to decile significantly. Left alone they would live another two decades. Chickens don't have it much better though. They live on wire floors that deform their feet, in cages so small they can't even stretch their wings,
and covered in excrement from the cages above them. These horrific conditions bring on lameness, bone disease, and obsessive pecking, which is cured by searing the beaks off young chicks. Although chickens can live fifteen years in the wild these chickens will only see two off those years because of production numbers. Hatcheries have no need of male chicks at all so they will be killed by suffocation, decapitation, gassing or crushing. Not to mention how unhealthy these products are. Cows milk contains much more fat and protien than is healthy for humans, although it is ideal for baby calves and eggs are higher in cholesteral than any other food which means it contributes to cardiovascular disease. But what about all the vitamines you get from these foods? There are plenty of vegan options for protein and calcium. If you don't believe me see what the ADA says about a vegan or vegetarian diet.

"Humans are granted rights to their lives because most have a strong desire to avoid death and suffer fear when thier lives are threatened. Humans are granted control over their own bodies because they suffer pain when their bodies are mutilated, and boredom and frustration when caged for long periods of time. Since we, as a society, understand how horrible these sufferings are, we try to protect humans from those who would try to kill, mutilate, or cage them, regardless of the benifits to others that such sufferings might bring. Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals."

                           ~Charles Darwin