I remember being at my maternal Grandma’s house once as a child, maybe I was 8 years old.  I was asked what kind of pizza I wanted for dinner, and I selected my usual Hawaiian.  I hated the ham, but it never occurred to me to order it without the ham; so I would order Hawaiian and pick off the ham, leaving me with a pineapple pizza.  I’m so disgusted by this wastefulness.  A pig endured her whole miserable life to end up on my plate only to be discarded as garbage.  Unreal. 

Please stay with me for this as I reflect on my own mindset and share about industry standard practices. My blog will not always be this stark. From my heart to yours, please stay and read until the end.

Pigs, like all factory farmed animals, are bred to get fat fast so we can kill them quicker and sell their larger bodies at a profit.  Essentially, we are eating obese babies as pigs are slaughtered at 6 months old. They go through nothing short of a living hell to make it to our plates.

Mama pigs are kept in gestation crates almost their entire pregnancy, unable to turn around, only able to shift forward or back a few inches.  Just before they give birth they are moved to a farrowing crate, which is much the same except one side is grated so that the piglets can access their mom.  Pigs make wonderful moms and they do not get a proper chance to be a mom on a factory farm. 

There’s an old book called Diet for a New America where author John Robbins addresses the fact that industry would prefer to take piglets away from their mothers faster than they currently do, but in fact piglets would die without their mother’s love.  Literally would die and a dead piglet is not profitable so farmers have ingenuously figured out the absolute minimum amount of time a piglet needs to be with mom before they can take her away to be fattened up and killed for slaughter. So, the piglets get to spend a minimum of 3 weeks with mom in this cold, baron environment, but by no means can the mom raise her piglets as she naturally would. 

Factory farming creates such unnatural conditions that the pigs lose their minds and start biting each other and a dead pig isn’t profitable, so the very smart industry came up with cutting off body parts of piglets to solve this problem. 

I mean the root of the problem is too many pigs in close quarters without any sort of quality of life.  There is nothing natural about factory farming.  This is not the ‘circle of life.’ Forced to defacate in the space they live is something a pig would never choose to do.  Never getting to see the light of day, the grass or roll around in the mud to cool themselves off.  Well, they do get to see the light of day I suppose when they are loaded onto a truck to take the gruelling trek to the slaughterhouse without food, water or heating and cooling systems. The first time smelling the outdoor air and they are squashed in a truck for up to 36 hours without food, water or rest legally per Canada’s Animal Transport Regulations. Some freeze to death in the truck. Some overheat and die.

Anyways, humans solve problems in factory farms by cutting off body parts.  The pig still feels the psychological pain – that part has not changed.  The only thing that has changed is farmers can keep raising in tight, confined unnatural conditions because it’s cheaper that way and that means more profit for them.

When we purchase these products we are directly supporting animal cruelty. If there wasn’t a consumer, these animals would not be bred into existence to be killed. We have so much power as individuals to take a stand, to make a difference for every single animal. Just because the majority are doing it and it’s legal, doesn’t make it right.

Sometimes the piglets cannot make it back to mom and are left to suffer and die steps away from their imprisoned mom who cannot do anything to help. The piglets are so disoriented from all the trauma endure from birth – such as tails being cut off without anesthetic.  Farmers will tell you they hate doing this to piglets, even removing their testicles without anesthetic as the piglets will scream.  Industry also hates to lose profits so have deemed it acceptable to kill a runt with blunt trauma because there’s not enough profit in a small pig. The Canadian Code of practice for handling pigs is publicly posted and you can see blunt trauma in this table listed as an acceptable form of death. The fine print says :

‘Blunt trauma can be administered by grasping the hind legs of the piglet and striking the top of the cranium firmly and deliberately against a
flat, hard surface. Alternatively, a sharp, firm blow with a heavy blunt instrument to the top of the head over the brain can be used.’

This is often done in front of her siblings and imprisoned mother. How are we ok with this?!

As an elementary school student, I had a lot of Muslim friends who didn’t eat pork.  I decided that I, too, would not eat pork in solidarity with them.  We used to have hot dog days at school and there was a box you could tick – all beef or pork hotdog. I don’t recall seeing a veggie dog option.  I would always proudly tick the all beef box and stand in the beef line, in solidarity with my Muslim friends.  All while continuing to eat pepperoni on my pizza, not thinking that pepperoni comes from a pig.  Nor did I consider the fact that eating a cow is equally as awful as eating a pig. Just like we in the west condemn those other countries for eating dogs while we eat a multitude of species here. Just as most wouldn’t eat a dog, I wouldn’t eat any other species. It’s not acceptable to eat any living being when we have another food source. We can go to the grocery store and eat something else. What we do is not necessity. It is habit and taste pleasure and convenience.

During a street activism cube this summer, I had a great conversation with a Muslim fellow, and he shared with me that he found it interesting that some religions tell you not to eat certain animals, but no religions tell you to stay away from plants.  I thought that was a profound reflection. 

Anyways, I never did get to wastefully pick the ham off my pizza at my grandma’s house that night.  My food addiction was strong even at that age.  When my food of choice was on the way, I imagined eating it, what it would taste like and feel like in my mouth, something I continued to do as an adult. 

I could hardly wait for the food to arrive; I was so excited.  Turns out the adults started dinner without me and by the time they called me up, all the Hawaiian pizza was gone.  I cried.  They laughed at me.  I went to the spare room and continued to cry.  I refused to sleep at my grandma’s house again after that incident unless my Mexican cousin was in town.

Had I known as a child what these pigs and dairy cows had to endure, I would have been crying for another reason, begging for mercy for the animals’ lives.  If I had witnessed a baby piglet have their testicles or tails cut off I would be haunted by their screams of pain and terror in their eyes.  Their first experience in this cold world no better than their last. If I personally witnessed the baron, filthy, cold, unnatural conditions pigs are raised in, I would have never ordered ham on a pizza again or pepperoni for that matter. 

If I had watched a baby calf be taken away from mom in a wheelbarrow shortly after birth and had to listen to the mother cow bellow out for days for her calf, I would be heartbroken and would certainly beg for mercy.  I never would have consciously partaken in such cruelty.  Like most people, I didn’t know. 

Like all other children, I too was conditioned from birth that some animals are pets and deserve certain comforts in life and other animals are food and are therefore, not entitled to the same comforts.  I was complicit in treating members of one species as morally more important than members of another species and I have since learnt there is a term for this, and it is called speciesism.   

I believe all human and non-human animals should have a right to their own body.  I’m not asking for animals to have voting rights, but basic rights over whether they have sex, to raise their children as they naturally would, to have their baby drink the milk that is meant for them, to have freedom to move and choose where they shit for fuck’s sakes.  We have denied animals of all of their rights.  We have bred them into existence only to kill them. We say we love animals and yet we raise and slaughter over 80 billion land animals each and every year, this number bumps into the trillions when we consider marine life. It’s a ludicrous concept to eat the flesh of someone we love but we don’t see these animals as individuals anymore so it’s easy to gloss over and ignore their suffering.

An animal activist named Ryuji Chua really is phenomenal at helping us understand the individual perspective. He was on the Trevor Noah show last year and he tells the story of an individual fish stuck in a trawler net. He invites us to focus in on this one fish and their experience in the net. You can watch the footage here from about 31:12 to 33:16 to see the heartbreaking footage of this one fish trying desperately to escape the trawler net. It’s really heartbreaking. I would invite you to watch his entire video entitled “How Conscious Can a Fish Be?” Break it up into small 5 minute increments if you have to until you finish the entire video.

The good news is, we don’t have to do this to animals. There is another way. A passive option that is available in grocery stores right now. This is no extra effort on my part. There is no extra time involved in cooking with different ingredients. I have to go to the grocery store anyways, my grocery cart just looks different now.

If I can change, anyone can change. You don’t have to go all in overnight but can start trying new recipes now and building up a new library of vegan meals you enjoy. Let me know below what is stopping you from adding vegan meals to weekly meal plan. Feel free to DM me on Instagram if you have a specific questions or are looking for a resource. My linktree also lists a ton of my favourite resources. There are also lots of free vegan challenges available such as Challenge 22 and Veganuary.

Thank you for staying until the end. I appreciate you.

Peace, love & plants,

Michelle 🙂

p.s. It hasn’t been an easy journey to awaken after decades of cultural conditioning, but this awakening has been the greatest joy of my entire life. Please check out these two exposes by Animal Justice: Cows Beaten at Organic Dairy Farm in BC and Pigs Beaten Kicked and Suffering at Ontario Farm. The reality is you do not know and can never know how the food, the someONE who lies on your plate was treated.