Swati Prakash

Top Tarot Healing and Wiccan Expert

Tag: vegetarian versus vegan

  • Is Being Vegetarian Good Enough?

    Is Being Vegetarian Good Enough?

    At a recent vegan activism event at London’s Trafalgar square, an anti vegan troll wanted to kill me as he somehow sniffed out that I am a witch (a reputed Indian Wiccan that I have been known to be for years – video embedded below the article). He was of course angry as he was religiously intolerant as well as anti-feminist, apart from anti-animal rights. If you are a feminist and believe in gender and LGBTQ equality, you must be Vegan. Want to know why?

    Some people think that not eating meat on some days or most days, or even being a vegetarian is a great thing to do for their health, for the planet, or for animals. The association they have with graphic violence or murder ends at ‘meat’ of animals. But are they right? What about the other animal products they consume, such as unfertilized eggs and dairy milk items?

    Here are some reasons why not to be vegetarian, and to be strictly vegan instead.

    1. Breeding animals or farming them is essentially the rape of females and sexual abuse of males to collect sperms and inseminate the females artificially. These animals never had the freedom to find a mate they liked, or any sexual pleasure ever throughout their life. They are non consenting sexual and reproductive slaves whose bodies are continually manipulated and abused whenever the farmer wants to use them. This is a gigantic evil in itself.
    2. Unfertilised eggs are still a product of abuse. The farmers want more and more eggs and for them they need more female hens. Therefore they still need to fertilize a large number of eggs to grow their business and continue earning profits by satisfying consumer demand. Therefore male baby chicks are useless to them once born as they segregate male and female chicks and kill the males usually on the first day of their birth, as soon as they hatch from their shells looking for their mother. The method of killing is pure torture, usually live maceration which is similar to being put in a blender, only a hundred times worse and more painful to the little ones, and sometimes gas chambering that is prolonged suffering. They could even be suffocated to death in garbage bags. Many a times macerated chicks are turned into filthy chicken nuggets or dirty pet food.
    3. Free range is horror. Not only are hens forced to suffer in stinking and filthy sheds or barns in free range industry if not caged, the baby chicks are also killed on the day of birth if male. Similarly baby male calves are also shot in the head or slayed to produce veal as male cows are useless to the dairy industry and farmers want to cut costs and focus on the females, in order to reproductively exploit them as sexual slaves. Mothers are always grieving the loss of male babies and the babies are crying for mums and separated that adds to psychological torture and is a huge sin.
    4. Egg laying hens and dairy cows are genetically manipulated with breeding to produce too many eggs and too much milk that leaves their body sore and emaciated. Hens as jungle fowls in the wild produce no more than one egg a month as it is similar to human females having periods on a monthly basis. These eggs consume the energy of the bodies of the females and suck out their nutrition as hens lay more than 300 eggs instead of 12 a year. This is pure cruelty. Similarly cows were originally wild aurochs in nature and now extinct and domesticated into the current version. They are bred to produce excessive milk and their udders are swollen and infected and often they collapse of their weight and become lame. They also have mastitis, a painful breast condition, as they are unable to feed their babies who are kept far away on formula.
    5. All animals that are farmed end up in slaughterhouses and that too after a highly reduced lifespan.
    6. Eggs and dairy items contain toxic germs. Eggs are anally secreted and super filthy, and so is dairy. You would not dream of living in those filthy farms with all the faeces, wounds, and urine around that these animals spend their short lives in.
    7. Eggs and dairy contain cholesterol that clogs your arteries and reduces the longevity of your heart and also blocks your brain blood supply, causing dullness and lack of energy. Vegan food has zero cholesterol and you have never felt better than being vegan.
    8. Eggs, dairy, meat, have antibiotics that cause you even more illnesses and reduce your immunity and ability to get helped by antibiotics due to antibiotic resistance.
    9. Animal products are carncinogenic or cancer causing, including breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and bowel cancer, among others being linked to eggs and dairy. By being vegan you are saving the lives of your children and other family members. Mental health problems such as depression, autism, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease are also linked with dairy consumption and that of other animal products. More in my previous articles with research data, linked here.
    10. Humans do not need to have eggs or dairy milk as we are technically primates who are frugivore apes in the animal kingdom as per our true nature and need dietary fibre which is absent in animal products causing so many illnesses to us. Anything and everything we need can be vegan including eggs and milk substitutes, leather, fur, and all our products and services. Try tofu scramble, or vegan egg replacers in the supermarket, and a variety of plant milks and plant based dairy desserts cheeses, tofu paneers, and ice-creams to go plant based completely and be vegan by boycotting all products of animal exploitation.
    11. By going vegan, you will help in saving the environment by causing less deforestation and prevent the methane, nitrous oxide and CO2 produced by the animals who are bred to the tune of over 80 billion per annum for animal farming by food industry alone, consuming most of the crops on earth, and taking away our land thereby impoverishing humans, taking away all the real estate, causing inflation, taking away al our taxes for their enormous subsidies, and making the economy collapse under their weight.

    Listen to the powerful voices in this video below for more clarity and watch the clips included within for evidence on live chick maceration. Would you press the button and put baby chicks in the blender yourself? Then please boycott these horrifically graphic slaughterhouses and be a Vegan, and not just vegetarian.

  • 7 Crucial Differences Between Veganism and Plant Based Diet

    7 Crucial Differences Between Veganism and Plant Based Diet

    Media, general public, government and welfare institutions usually seem ill informed about Veganism. Media articles mislead readers frequently and celebrities are responsible for sowing seeds of confusion in human society. Here are seven facts about how Veganism is different from Plant Based Diet sometimes confused with Veganism in general.

    Veganism as defined by Vegan Society

    1. Not Just a Diet: Veganism by definition, unlike vegetarianism is not just a diet but a complete moral stand against objectification, abuse or exploitation of animals. The Vegan Society’s current definition is also referred to very often because this charity popularised the term Vegan in Britain in the late 1940s following which several meetings and alterations were drafted to the effect of the term to denote the following: Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.” Plant based diet is one of the important key aspects included within Veganism but if someone is only following a plant based diet and still alright with other forms of animal abuse or exploitation, such as leather, silk, wool, animal testing, animal circuses or zoos they are not vegan by definition in entirity. The right term for them is plant based (ethically neutral) in terms of diet and lifestyle if they are in it primarily for consumption related reasons other than eschewing animal cruelty and exploitation in all forms.

    2. Not Just a Personal Utalitiarian Choice: Veganism is a philosophy and not just a personal lifestyle choice of convenience. It is about not supporting violence or cruelty and also by extension about promoting alternatives for benefit of animals and the planet. Vegans are not only interested in happily living out their own personal life cycles with a plant based life as and when they can, or by reducing meat, avoiding dairy at ‘most’ times or being ‘nearly’ vegan, ’90 percent’ vegan, ‘almost’ vegan or ‘sometimes’ vegan and the false term ‘veganish’. These terms may apply to Plant Based lifestyle, when you can be ‘nearly’ plant based, ‘almost’ plant based, 90 percent Plant based, ‘sometimes’ plant based and so on. Vegans are also usually interested in some form of activism, by promoting alternatives to not only food but also healthcare and medical products, entertainment and cosmetics to the public and society. Veganism seeks to exclude various forms of abuse that are linked with the system that our current world operates through, a system based on humankind’s perpetration of and normalisation of rape, murder and exploitation against all other sentient living beings. Vegans hope that as more and more people go Vegan and wake up, we all will campaign more effectively to the media, government, corporates and other bodies to completely do away with the disgraceful system of violence and abuse altogether in due course of time as a civilisation, which is the abolitionist approach to activism. Until that juncture we need to at least be Vegan at a morally sound personal level and to encourage others to be Vegan if we can find the time and resources to be an activist.

    3. Not Just Welfarism: Veganism is not the same as Animal Welfare. The focus of Veganism is on being against horrendous animal abuse, graphic violence and senseless exploitation, however it does not mean that merely reducing some forms of violence such as cages or non-stun slaughter or promoting so called ‘high welfare’, ‘ethical’ of ‘humane’ farm animal products is legitimate. This is because it is infact practicable and possible to avoid animal products or exploitation in all major aspects of our daily life altogether. For example we can avoid dairy cheese completely and consume either plant based cheese or other plant based nutrients without cheese because cheese is just a flavour, we don’t really need it at all as we can easly obtain Calcium, Protein or Fat through plant based sources. Vegans are not interested in demanding free range or ‘better chicken’ in shops either as Chosen Pechham’s campaign promotes. We do not want zoos to exploit animals in a slightly better way by giving them a bit more space to roam around in their compartments as many conservation based environmentalists would prefer. Vegans would rather that these animal farms and zoos are not proliferated in the first place or are closed down. Compare this stand with domestic abuse, slavery, racism or sexual violence. Would you like to promote ‘high welfare’ slavery or less graphic forms of torture, rape and violence or would you be against violence, racism, rape and abuse in totality?

    4. Not Just Eco-activism: Veganism is a philosophy against cruelty and violence. Being eco friendly and against climate change is also part of it, however saying that you are vegan primarily for ‘environment’ is incorrect. Vegans may also at times be involved in environment and health based awareness in intermediate basis but that is not usually their prime motivation unlike that of eco-activists. If you are depressed because of climate change realizing that your future or that of other human descendants is threatened, complain about plastic pollution and greenhouse emissions, but not really as depressed about what happens to animals in slaughterhouses or hell holes of animal farms, zoos or testing industry right now that has destroyed trillions of lives each year for centuries already, you are not in truth motivated as a Vegan. Doing away with animal exploitation is infact the primary focus of veganism with plant based environmental activism being an add-on factor. Having said that if the world went Vegan or even Plant Based it will certainly benefit the environment overall by helping the planet recover its ozone layer and keep the tree foliage lush green in the earth as animal agriculture is of course the leading cause of deforestation and ocean dead zones, acidification and greenhouse effect. But if you say you are Vegan, you are necessarily against animal abuse and graphic violence of slaughter, enslavement and control over sentient beings, whether or not it is done in environmentally less damaging or putrid ways.

    5. Not Just Health: If you are Plant Based mainly for physical health or personal psychological gains you may not be really a Vegan. Health is a wonderful benefit of eating plant based food and this is part of your healing if you are Vegan besides the inner one of the satisfaction that you were on the right side of history by being against animal exploitation and violence. Raw plant based or whole foods plant based diet although healthier than plant based junk food such as crisps, fries, plant based cheese or plant based pizzas or plant based sausage rolls would still be called a plant based diet and not Veganism if the chief motivation of your lifestyle is physical or personal wellbeing and you are not interested in animal justice. Veganism is about being in it for the animals, to not add to their misery in any way you can or to avoid contributing to massive injustices. Vegans are still vegan even if they eat vegan junk food and are not in physically top form.

    6. Not Just a Temporary Stint: You are not just Vegan temporarily but for life, because you care about animal suffering and want to not be part of that crime under any circumstances hereinafter. Would you stop causing slavery and domestic violence one day and retract afterwards by saying it was too hard for you to not be domestically violent or racist later on? Would you slogan against Female Genital Mutilation and then suddenly start claiming that it is alright to mutilate babies and young girls. Many plant based celebrities do exactly that when it comes to their so called stint into ‘Veganism’, justifying later on that ‘they are no longer vegan because of xyz reasons’. They were never vegan in the first instance as they were merely plant based and flexible about moral values, and may regard human as superior to other animals overall. Some of these celebrities such as Miley Cyrus and Ellen GeGeneres are spreading misconceptions that they went ‘vegan’ for planet, animals or health but resorted to eating animal products for Omega, B12, energy or other nutrition because they are lying. A plant based diet is nutritionally sufficient if well planned just like any other diet can be.

    7. Not Just Spirituality: Veganism is not the same as a spiritual or religious philosophy although you can say it is at par with or akin to any other spiritual philosophy or religious belief. You cannot be discriminated against as a Vegan at the workplace, college, school, family simply for your philosophical belief and lifestyle, which is why Jordan Casmitjana campaigned for Veganism to be recognised at par with religion as a philosophical or ethical belief in work culture. Yet, Veganism is not a religion or spirituality in itself. Non harming or ‘ahimsa’ as a philosophical core value of Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Wiccan religion can be compared to the philosophy of Veganism but does not match it exactly. This is because the definition of non harming or ‘ahimsa’ (non -violence) is not limited to veganism. Veganism limits itself as it is not always practically possible to not unintentionally cause harm to insects, snails, worms, microbes or by pulling out weeds or roots that leads to killing plants while gardening. It is also not always morally wrong to defend ourselves from other animals from attack, to control household pest infestation or protect oneself from injury caused by wild animals or insects. Vegans may also unintentionally or accidentally be harming living beings by way of housing, crop farming, walking, consuming animal tested essential medical products or driving on the road, simply because we are born in a system where we as individuals do not always seem to have our say or be able to break free from the system instantly. Veganism is primarily about not intentionally exploiting or causing cruelty towards animals as sentient beings by the way of avoidence of using animal products, animal entertainment or animal testing as far as practically possible.

    In short while Vegans are always Plant Based too in their diet and lifestyle, not all Plant Based people are Vegan. You cannot be Vegan if you are not against animal exploitation in your moral philosophy and lifestyle overall. In addition to being Vegan you can also be into health, environmentalism, eco-conscious sustainable lifestyle or spirituality. Veganism does not mean you cannot go over and above that basic definition. However if you say you are ‘vegan’ or ‘semi-vegan’ for health, for environment and for spiritual reasons and not primarily for standing against animal torture, enslavement, exploitation and cruelty, then you are likely to be Plant Based instead of Vegan. Moreover being ethically neutral, morally flexible, reductitarian, sustainable, semi-vegan, welfarism oriented or temporarily vegan and then falling out of the lifestyle was not really Veganism in the first place. You may however at times transition into Veganism through a Plant Based Lifestyle as you gain awareness and educate yourself.