"Why Vegan?"

Veganism, even the ethical side of it, is in no way dependent on spiritualism. Even my husband who is a hard-line sceptic and completely devoid of anything resembling spirituality is seeing the ethical advantages of a vegan diet, which is why he indulges me.

Me? I am not a spiritualist in a classic sense of the word. The aspects of my life that people sometimes attribute to spirituality are backed by science or important to my mental well-being as a part of psychological maintenance.

I grew up in a family situation where my father hunted (moose culling in Sweden that was done as a conservation effort to stabilise the population due to eradication of a healthy predator population.)
We kept our own hens and roosters, only selling the roosters that were hatched to people who were going to take good care of them. We also had two rabbits and a couple of turkeys every once in a while.

My father instilled in me a deep respect of all life, in a sense. Anthills were left untouched, hens roamed freely on the property and the rabbits also jumped freely. The result of the moose hunt each year resulted in the freezer being stocked with meat, and that is where the majority of our meat intake was from, the eggs came from happy and well cared for hens. (My father loved those hens, each one had a name and they were only killed when injury occurred. His favourite rooster was cared for immensely even after he had been ousted by a new rooster and when he fell ill my father cared for him and brought him inside the house, feeding him medication and keeping him warm.)

My father stopped hunting when the culling numbers decreased. He was happy the wolf population was increasing. Around this time I started adopting a more and more vegetarian diet. Commercial meat was being eaten more frequently in my family and it was not agreeing with my body. I stepped towards only eating fish and shellfish only to eventually abandon it and becoming an ovo-lacto vegetarian. Then I became a vegan for a year, and eventually fell off it on my family's insistence. I hanged in between an ovo-lacto vegetarianism and pescarianism for a long while after that, the I cut fish out all together and now I am a vegan again.

To this day my father prefers game meat and fish in his cooking. He respects my decision even though he does not understand it fully. He is, after all, the one who gave me that kind of morality regarding nature. He has always loved animals, and when he came to visit last year he fell in love with my cat, the two were close companions during the whole time my father was here.

And from there comes the basis for the ethics I built up myself. My father has always been of the opinion that you don't take more than you need, and wasting food is horribly unthoughtful. I have expanded that philosophy to include the fact that I do not need to eat meat, milk and eggs, and I can exclude that from my life for the benefit of the animals around me. My husband is following suit, and my mother has embraced more vegetarian food in her life since I started on my ethical journey.

The point of this rant? Well, sometimes what people do have a snowball effect. My father raised me to respect animals, I took that further because that was the only option for me eventually. Despite him not having any sort of inclination to eat vegan or vegetarian food he shaped the basis of my ethics system in a way that led to this. He did it without religion or spirituality. He did it with concern for humans being too intrusive into nature and teaching us to respect our surroundings because growing up, it was the nature around us and it's bounty that mostly fed us. Mushrooms, berries, meat and eggs all came from around us, not from farming. Same thing for a lot of veggies. My mother has always loved having vegetable patches, and during the time we didn't there was always my maternal grandmother (who grew potatoes, sweet peas, lettuce, rhubarb, blackcurrants, raspberries, apples, herbs, plums and more in her garden) and my paternal grandfather (who had a large strawberry field). You don't kill what feeds you (the hens) and the things that feed you with it's meat, you do not maltreat (the moose).

Of coarse I took it further. But the logic remains. And as such, I am a vegan; "I don't need meet, dairy or eggs, and as such there is no reason for me to contribute to the maltreatment of animals through the consumption and use of the products and by products that come from them as far as reasonable, possible and practicable."