At age 14, I was sitting in my high school freshman French class, learning to say the names of farmed animals (e.g. “truie”), their noises (“groin groin!”), and their cuts of meat (“jambon”). And suddenly, as if I were a much younger child, it really hit me for the first time: pigs, who say “oink oink!” are killed to make ham. Of course I intellectually knew that, but I had never really considered it. I awkwardly joked aloud that we should learn how to say euphemisms for human meat, got sent to the counselor’s office, and when I was told to “think about what I’d said,” I really did.
That night, I vowed to no longer eat meat. I didn’t know any vegetarians that I was aware of, and I’d never heard of factory farming. I simply no longer felt comfortable with the idea of bringing animals into the world and killing them for my food preferences. I didn’t want chickens or cows treated any worse than my beloved family dog and cats.
Over the coming years I became an advocate for several environmental and social justice causes, and learned more about the many harms stemming from animal production: be it fishing, aquaculture, or raising land animals for meat, dairy, or eggs. I stopped consuming animal products of all kinds, and took a job in the animal advocacy movement a few years later. It was meant to be a short-term job as I sought my “full-time career,” but the cause that began for me as an instinctive, emotional, unexamined passion (“I just feel bad eating animals”) became my biggest passion in life: working to save literally billions of beings from horrible suffering and death, while seeking to prevent untold environmental damage, threats to public health, and farmworker abuse.
I always strive in my personal, professional, and activist life to balance the emotional and intellectual. Fighting for animals is about both to me: my belief and feeling that harming animals is wrong, and the knowledge and data that these animals suffer and that their exploitation damages people and the planet.
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