Vegi-Voices: The Road to becoming a Vegetarian

It has been 49 years since I became a vegetarian and the question I’m asked the most is: Why did you become a vegetarian? This is not a question that can be answered in a few words. For me, it was a long road that began when I was 13 years old. This is my story:

When I was just a boy my grandmother caught me teasing a spider that was trying to build a web, which is, I’m told, what little boys do. My granny would have no part of it. She took me by the ear and marched me into her kitchen, sat me down and gave me a rather long lecture about honouring the gift of life. The one thing she said that I remember to this day was: “I’ve lived a long life, young man, and the one thing I’ve come to believe is that even the lowest form of life has a reason for being, and that we must respect that reasoning, and most explicitly we must remember that even the dreaded flea has a mother that loves it.” I immediately became a champion of animals.

In 1952 while serving in the Royal Canadian Army, a friend and I went on a 72-hour pass and made our way to Chicago, Illinois, in the U.S.A. My friend Stan had grown up on a farm and had always wanted to see how the cows he and his father shipped off to the slaughter were killed.

A clerk in the hotel we were staying in told us there was a very large slaughter factory in Chicago and we, two brave soldiers, made our way there. It only took minutes to realize it wasn’t a slaughterhouse; it was a house of torture. One of the attendants told us that the moaning a groaning of the animals was quite natural as a lot of them were still alive when they were heisted up on hooks to be gutted. We were told that cows for human consumption had to be alive while the blood was drained from them. I became quite ill and had to be escorted out into the fresh air. To this day I still hear those sounds whenever I go into a grocery store and smell the stench of dead flesh. Stan had a stronger stomach than I, but he and I on that day swore we would never eat another piece of meat as long as we lived. I’m not sure how Stan is doing, but I kept my promise and I live as a vegetarian.

I have never regretted becoming someone who never eats meat. I have had a good life, not always happy, mainly because of all the cruelty that is happening around the world to our four-legged friends. Sometimes I feel powerless in not being able to help, but the Big Guy, who watches over us all, always manages to put an idea into my head and I feel the power again. Over the years I have had the honour to rescue in the neighbourhood of 6 to 7 thousand dogs, cats, horses, goats and one mule.

My message to anyone who might read this article is this: Do some research into how the piece of meat on your plate got there; find out how the animal died; and when you do, I promise you, you will never want to eat anything that has had a face.