I come from Slovakia, and pretty much like everywhere else on Earth, it is very common here to use animals - my family on one side were hunters who routinely killed deer and other free-roaming animals, and the other side owned and killed 'farm animals', especially birds, very often...

  Therefore, I grew up eating almost all the possible weird animal parts you can imagine. Even sheep's brains... I'm not going too much into the details. At the same time I was taught that it is not OK to hurt even one little bug, and blah blah blah same old story of this moral doublethink, you know what I mean. So I've been pretty conditioned into thinking this is fine, the normal course of how we humans behave to other species, nothing weird here, keep going...

  I've even visited many dairy farms here in Central Europe, completely legally, as a freelancing photographer for a commercial firm... doing some campaign that actually encouraged people to buy more dairy, and to think they are even somehow "helping" the cows... Holy shit, it's terrible to even write this. I feel horrible, but on the plus side, I guess visiting all these farms, from the ones with the worst conditions to the "happy" ones, planted some seeds.

  Later at the academy, I lived with a person who referred to themselves as a 'vegan' back then (now embracing "post-veganism", whatever that is supposed to mean), but I really didn't think much about the issue. I had other problems, I didn't even care much about social justice in general. Alas, a privileged person speaks...

   Honestly, I thought that 'animal rights activists' are always just some kind of misunderstood warriors (perhaps kinda true lol), or even radical violent extremists, who do undercover investigations on farms, rescue animals, etc. And I thought it would be a neat art project to "infiltrate their ranks" and do a documentary about it.

    One art group here 'infiltrated' the Communist party and stayed with them for one whole year as a means of subversion, I thought this might be an interesting spin-off to that, so to speak.

   Well, needless to say I never really did that, but I did some research on Tumblr (particularly a blogger who goes by the lovely pseudonym vegan-because-fuck-you , and others, who are now inactive, I think).

  And as soon as I was sure I can't justify using animals, I went vegan. First, though, I was plant-based for a while - a period where I didn't use the word vegan, because I thought it would be misleading to people, as I've only applied the principle to the diet.
This is something I see many people NOT doing, unfortunately - they go around annoucing they're vegan and spread the misinformation that it is just a fad diet that you hop on and hop off when it has served its purpose.

   Another thing I think was very important to me was studying the animal rights theory extensively, to actually know what does it mean in the larger context, to be vegan.

  What helped me the most to provide this "theoretical backbone" to my nonviolent vegan advocacy, and ultimately to stay vegan, were the works by abolitionist educators Gary L. Francione and Anna Charlton, but also Tom Regan to some extent. I also have to mention Carol J. Adams' "Sexual Politics of Meat", which was one of the first books on this topic I've ever read and it just struck me how all forms of oppression are so profoundly linked.

  It makes me kind of sad that the work of abolitionists is often so misunderstood and misinterpreted - particularly by the representatives of the 'new welfarist' groups - even to the point of saying that the abolitionists "harmed" the AR movement. Especially since the abolition of animal exploitation is our common goal that was mentioned by the founders of vegan movement all the way back in the 1950's.


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