Vegetarianism and veganism. What gives?

A vegetarian ingests an animal’s personal effects by consuming merely eggs, milk and/or cheese — highly addictive substances that keep addicts coming back for more. It takes commitment and some patience while your body excretes toxins, but it’s also enormously rewarding. Immeasurably if you have genuine compassion for animals and remember that we ain’t nothing but mammals.

Learning to Think in the Anthropocene

Calfs get separated from their mothers at birth. Her breast milk is diverted to a marketplace. Oddly enough, a cow’s milk is designed for her offspring. Imagine if you can. There is no weaning process, just immediate separation of mother and calf.

Sir, would you please direct me to the supermarket’s breast-milk cooler?

Unfortunately, a vegetarian ends up causing more cruelty than a “meat” eater who eats only meat. When chickens and cows can no longer produce the goods for the dairy industry they are shipped to a slaughter houses for marginal return on investment.

As a veganist, I advocate formal legal recognition of the inalienable rights of all sentient animals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Animals are not a necessary “resource” for a becoming life. We become inured our entire lives to the unspeakable violence that attends denial of these rights — multiple times per day for most non-vegan humans.

Look at a chart of “cuts” in a butcher shop. Connect the dots to Grey’s Anatomy. We share virtually the same vital organs, virtually the same body systems: from head to toe and wrapped in the largest organ of all, the skin. Skin keeps the organs protected from the elements. You are what you eat.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals.

Humans once lived in harmony with this planet — some time after the fifth extinction event ended reptilian species that evolved over 200,000,000 years. By comparison, human have evolved for only 200,000 years. That should humble us, but I don’t think we are terribly modest in our self-estimation. Having an extinction event named after ourselves — The Anthropocene — is not a cause for celebration.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals. Who knows what might follow an Anthropocene?

Thanks for reading.


Author: Bill Ziegler

I am a former resident of Delhi Township. These are memories of my life and times in that community during the 1950s and 1960s. A time capsule.

17 thoughts on “Vegetarianism and veganism. What gives?”

  1. On a side note, calves naturally nurse 6-10 months and gain 2.5 pounds per day just drinking baby cow growth hormone (milk). From an average birth weight of 68 pounds to 550 at wean weight, milk is also extremely effective in making people fat.

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  2. What gives with that partial illumination of the vegetarian? Straddling both camps like that. I don’t know. With all the vegan milk, cheese, butter, mayo, sour cream, and ice cream, perhaps it’s just a matter of time. Maybe they need a little knock on the noggin. That aside, as a fellow veganist, I’ll second your advocation to legal recognition of the inalienable rights of all sentients.

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    1. Thanks for the ponderings, Peter. I don’t see many vegans deciding to become vegetarians unless they are force-fed. Alternative foodstuffs continue to improve in quality, availability, and acceptance by non-vegans. It’s what I encounter when doing research at for my big thinktank, BillZiegler1947 dot com, at a local Kroger that is only a few miles away from their international headquarters on the other side of our shared river 🙂
      Proud as a peach punch to join with you on advocating “legal recognition of the inalienable rights of all sentients.” I second the devotion!

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  3. I am extremely ashamed to admit that I was vegetarian for 10 years before finally becoming vegan. I was delusional with the lie that cows and chickens aren’t harmed in the making of dairy and eggs. What a fool I was! Veganism is a tiny and lonely drop in a powerful and EVIL ocean of brainwashing, propaganda, lies, and acts of epic atrocities. Why are some of us are able to climb out of the mess, while most happily stay and perpetuate the EVIL?

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    1. Hey, I’m a member of the same club, Spunky. We have each grown up in a culture that religiously separates the bucolic bouncing and beautiful barnyard animals in children’s first books from the X-rated photographs and depictions of enormous factory farms — then go on to condemn the photographer and the artist for the snapshots and sketches taken at the crime scene/death camp. Those factories and camps are located in impoverished areas never seen on a scenic tour of the countryside with the kids. But, they are there just as certainly as a McDonalds, Wendy’s, KFC, Taco Bell at the exit ramps where you stop to buy fun and happy meals for the kids who counted the cows off the highway.
      May our “tiny and lonely drops” join into a tsunami.

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  4. Hi Bill!

    I am just now trying to get caught up on great blogs I’ve missed out on. I was away and, surprisingly enough, I don’t have a smartphone as I figure my brain should do the trick. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. But needless to say, I’m here now and one thing that comes to mind is that from birth, those of us who were not nursed by our mothers were given milk. It was touted as building strong bones and promoting healthy teeth. Then came formula which they claim contained many more nutrients and people just go for whatever comes down the pike. Individualism is not something that people do very well. It seems that a ‘herd’ mentality or group mentality seems to be the rule of yesterday, today and tomorrow and for the few informed souls who somehow, become enlightened, it’s going to be a long process in waking the ‘dead’ to the reality of why they are ‘the walking dead’. It’s been drummed into us what’s good for us. We simply continue with what we are used to, for better or mostly worse.

    I was lactose intolerant and therefore knew that milk could not be good for the ‘human’ body, many years ago and I find that many people descended from slaves are actually lactose intolerant. Now, I cannot imagine what ‘milk’ was doing to our bodies when we were trying not to accept it and yet it was forced on us. And people wonder why babies continuously spit up milk. I don’t, but most of us never learn.

    This was an excellent post and I hope that it gets widely read! Thank you for posting it.

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    1. Thank you for the kind mention and worthy comments, Shelby. The living-dead make great customers, critical thought is UnAmerican, vegans threaten world order, milk does a body good, and Coke is the real thing 🙂
      Nestles, based in Switzerland, set an early footprint for discouraging mothers from breastfeeding planetwide — just another face of the colonialism that demands its imperial presence everywhere. Capitalism is a mindless bot that doesn’t even recognize a late stage when running full speed into an abyss of their own creation, and they are not about to listen to the perspectives of anyone who is not a living-dead. 🙂

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  5. Reblogged this on shelbycourtland and commented:
    “Humans once lived in harmony with this planet — some time after the fifth extinction event ended reptilian species that evolved over 200,000,000 years.”

    I’d think on the above sentence if I were you. And this bears repeating, “Humans once lived in harmony with this planet.” No longer is THAT true!

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      1. It is ALWAYS my pleasure to reblog your content because vegans are trying to do this world much good. We are certainly not out to cause more needless harm and another fact is that the so-called ‘animals’ are more ‘human’ in nature than so-called ‘humans’ are. We could certainly learn from them especially if we could stop killing them so that we can consume them. Yeah! That’s real ‘human’ and ‘humane’ of us.

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    1. I have indeed visited your blog and recommend it to my readers without reservation. It is my privilege to find fellow travelers from all over this shared planet 🙂
      Most kind regards to you and to everyone you know! Namaste.

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    1. Thank you for the reblog, kind Sir! Veganism is my alternative to organised religions, providing me answers that contain truth, beauty, and deep understanding. Any person who claims to be an enlightened soul, yet does not recognise that all fellow animals possessing eyes are highly developed sentient beings that do not wish to be tortured and killed, do not wish to be sacrificed upon my palate for the sake of tastiness and mere edibility, needs to examine his presumptions more closely.

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