EATING FEAR AND WHY I BECAME A VEGETARIAN

This is my rabbit, Vernon Z Shedmeister. Vernon has lived with me for a little over two years, and during that time I've gone from being a meat eater to being a vegetarian and animal advocate, largely because of Vernon. When I brought Vernon home and got to know his incredible and unique personality, I became very aware of the fact that he's a prey animal, eaten by many other animals, including human beings. This bothered me intensely, especially when several people I met made jokes about how they wanted to "cook up" my rabbit. Vernon got me thinking about the individual personalities of all of the animals people eat, and the hell the animals go through both before and during their deaths.

That's why this blog is called "Eating Fear". I have read that animals at factory farms are traumatized and tortured far beyond what most people realize. By the time they are lined up to be slaughtered, a large percentage of them have mangled feet, chopped off beaks, ears, and testicles, and many additional problems from being given excessive antibiotics, hormones and pesticides. As animals witness other animals being slaughtered right in front of them, terror builds up in them, creating high levels of adrenalin in their bodies. When people eat meat, they are literally eating that adrenalin, or eating fear. One of my friends became a vegetarian because she "didn't want to eat fear."

I've always loved animals.
As a child, I used to save bugs when other kids were cruel to them.
When I was about 10, my summer camp took the kids on a fishing trip. I caught a small fish, and as I pulled that fish out of the water and noticed its terrified eyes and mangled mouth from the fishing hook, I burst into tears, threw the fish back into the water, and ran to the school bus, where I cried all afternoon.
In 9th grade, I refused to dissect a frog in my biology class and wrote an impassioned letter to the teacher about how unecessary and cruel it was to use live animals.
When I was 16, my father, a neurobiologist, took me to a lecture called "The Mites in Moths' Ears". The lecturer used a live moth on a clip under a microscope to make some points. All I noticed during the lecture was that poor struggling moth. As soon as the lecture was over, I asked the lecturer if I could free the moth and he let me take the moth outside. He told my Dad later that I showed a rare respect for life.
When I applied for college and had to write the essay about myself, I chose to write about animal cruelty instead, focusing on cattle branding and laboratory experiments.

So... why didn't I become a vegetarian until 2 years ago? I never ate a lot of meat. In fact, I used to joke around that I was a "hypocritical vegetarian" because I only ate meat that didn't look like part of an animal. I could never eat chicken legs or ribs.
I knew inside that something was wrong with this, and that if I ever visited a meat factory, I would never be able to eat meat again, but I always lived in cities and didn't see what went on behind the scenes. I saw meat only on plates in restaurants or homes and in styrofoam trays in supermarkets.

Then two years ago I visited a friend who was working at The Catskill Animal Sanctuary. I met cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, rabbits, goats, horses, and a ram, and got to know the unique personality of each animal. I stared into the beautiful, huge sweet eyes of cows, the playful eyes of pigs, and the intelligent, alert eyes of chickens. I met a pig who loved to have people lie right on him, and he would snort the whole time, which sounded like laughing. I learned about how each animal had been rescued from unimaginably horrific situations, but had learned to trust again once they were surrounded by loving people, and how only in those loving circumstances were their true personalities able to emerge.

A week after that visit, I volunteered at a Manhattan benefit for the sanctuary. Incredible vegetarian food was served, and they showed a documentary called "Peacable Kingdom" about what goes on in factory farms. It contrasted the happy animals at an animal sanctuary with the miserably treated animals at various factory farms. I was so traumatized by the cruelty shown in this movie that I couldn't speak at all and could barely breath.

As I lay in bed later that night trying to fall asleep, I realized that there had been a terrible disconnection inside myself about animals. I sobbed all night, thinking about all of the animals who had suffered because of my meat eating over the years. The next morning I woke up knowing I would never eat meat again.

This was the beginning of a huge transformation inside myself. Once I stopped eating meat, the wall inside me that had allowed me to love animals while at the same time eating them dissolved. As soon as I stopped eating meat, I could look at any animal and feel complete love and compassion in a way that was blocked before. My heart opened.

Since then I've read countless books about health, the environment and animal welfare. I'm convinced that it would profoundly benefit both human beings' and the planet's health if every person either reduced or eliminated completely animals as food.