3 Reasons to Go Vegan for Mother’s Day
Marji Beach, Education Director
“From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.”
– Julia Ward Howe, Mother’s Day Proclamation
The United States version of Mother’s Day started in the 1850s in response to growing rates of infant mortality. Members of Mothers Day Work Clubs would render aid to sons on both sides of the Civil War. The founder of modern Mother’s Day, Anna Reeves Jarvis, spent her entire life savings trying to stop the commercialization of the holiday.
While Mother’s Day has become a $20 billion dollar commercial enterprise, we channel the anti-war, anti-violence pronouncements of the 1850s and apply it to our nonhuman mothers and sisters. Right now a campaign of violence is being perpetrated against billions. A one-sided war so ingrained in our culture that most of us daily participate in the sanctioned blood-letting of innocents, other animals who have as much desire to breathe, live, love as you or I. We have made these victims invisible, dis-assembling them behind closed doors, and reducing once vibrant beings to packaged parts.
No more.
The Dairy Industry Creates Orphans
Cows on dairies are artificially inseminated every 12-13 months! For nine months, they nurture and grow a calf inside them. Like most mothers, there is a certain expectation that when that calf is born, nurturing, grooming, and nursing will follow. Yet on most dairies, calves are stolen from their mothers immediately after birth. Her calf’s milk is sold for human consumption.
Male calves will be killed. Female calves will replace their mothers, who are killed.
We create orphans for a forgotten meal.
A Mother’s Voice Never Heard
Did you know that hens speak to their chicks throughout incubation? One of the most important social bonds – that between a mother and her offspring – occurs before chicks even hatch. When they are born, day-old chicks know the unique tenor of their mother’s voice and she knows theirs…they too begin to chirp back to her a day or so prior to hatching. Yet virtually all chicks born into the egg industry are hatched in artificial incubators.
Male chicks are ground up alive. Female chicks are mutilated, their beaks partially amputated without pain relief. Hens are slaughtered at a fraction of their lifespan.
We deny chicks their mother’s voice for a forgotten meal.
Cruel Confinement and Separation
Within 72 hours of birth, farmers cut off the tails of piglets, rip out their needle teeth, cut notches out of their ears, and castrate males…all without anesthesia. In the wild, piglets are weaned at 4-6 months old and females stay with their mothers for their whole lives. Yet farmers remove piglets within 2-3 weeks of birth, stolen from their mothers who are crammed into cages so small they cannot turn around.
Male and female pigs will be raised in concrete pens for 6-8 months and killed. Their mothers will spend 3-5 years in crates.
All for flesh no human being requires for survival. We destroy families for a forgotten meal.
Change Your View
When you empathize with other animals, it becomes easier to see them as unique individuals who experience joy, feel pain, and form social bonds with one another. It becomes harder to see them as forgotten meals.
Adopting a vegan lifestyle is embracing joy and rejecting needless suffering and cruelty. It is recognizing the inherent right of other animals to be respected and free from intentional harm by humans. It is about being as kind and just as possible. Veganism causes less harm.
