A little history. My family tree is quite diverse. Every marriage has been a joining of opposites. I've always had the issue of identifying with the extended families of each parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle and even friends in relation to who I was more like. I have since learned that you are who you are and if you identify with someone or no one at all, it will not change who you really are (no matter what or who others think you are), so just go with and work on that - being yourself and true to yourself. One of the closest realisations that I can recount is that all members of my family, despite their backgrounds, believed in compassion for all creatures. And no one realised their compassion towards animals more than my mother. We come from a culture of various cultures, who all were accustomed to eating meat. No one knew anything about PETA, factory farming, vivisection or the enormous monster that the animal industry has evolved into today. We lived in the US and had never seen "The Animal's Film" documentary aired in 1975 on British TV. We never associated the animals on our plate with the animals we adopted, loved, fed, housed, rescued and nursed back to health. That is until one night in 1983/84. My mother, sister, grandmother and I were in Florida visiting my grandmother's family. My grandmother's sister was running a hog farm with a friend at that time. It was rainy and miserable, we were all sitting in the front drawing room. The friend of my grandmother's sister had just left the house to go work with the hogs. My mother teary-eyed, started to grumble. I can't remember her exact words but, I do remember her pleading to spare the baby piglets the pain of tooth extraction without pain killers and a quick rebuttal from my grandmother's sister on how the piglets would not be able to nurse from their mothers with their teeth in their mouths.
My mother studied philosophy and was forever reading books on health, life and spirituality. She was also trying to live the Christian life that she believed in. Nonetheless, she was always searching to find a better way. Not long after our trip to visit the Floridian kinfolk, my mother, my sister and I were all vegetarian. Unfortunately, this only lasted about three years before my mother was convinced by some hardcore Christian meat eaters that the Bible clearly states that man can and is expected to eat animals. I wondered how could it be "okay" to kill animals for food? My mother somehow got the misinformation that animals did not feel pain when they were killed for food. I trusted my mother so, I went with that. Not until I was nineteen and met a friend at school who convinced me otherwise, did I have the capacity to confirm that the exact opposite was true. And on that day I went vegan.
I was not only convinced to change what was on my plate but, what was in my heart and on my mind. How could people who love animals think that it's okay to eat animals? How could people who want to follow a righteous God-fearing path, support the suffering and murder of innocent creatures? Soon I found that The Book of Genesis 1:29 clears up the issue of what God expects and commands humans to eat. And it's quite clear what opinions people would have on the capacity of animals to suffer when they are killed for food if it was good old Fido who was "what's for dinner." I had found it hard to relate to people blinded by a McDonald's influenced mentality. It was a long, hard and quite educational journey. And eventually, I figured it out. I live according to my beliefs and don't look for approval from anyone. I have enough evidence to know the truth and that's all I need. Again - being yourself and true to yourself is an invaluable trait.
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