Have Gone Vegan

a vegan's daily companion

It's nice to see a vegan's daily companion (in this case my friend Krissa's beloved Spike) heartily support and endorse Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's Vegan's Daily Companion. ;)

p.s. speaking of support, please consider making a small donation (but only if you can) to my Team Vegan fundraising effort -- I'm $50 away from reaching the $500 goal! :)

Update: Thanks to gentle Harry and a lovely donor couple who wishes to remain anonymous (thank you all so much!), the fundraising amount now stands at $525 -- so $1050 will go towards raising awareness that ALL sentient beings matter. Because the goal has now been reached I won't badger folk in every upcoming post (although I may issue a reminder of the campaign towards the middle and end of June), but feel free to contribute more to this worthwhile cause anytime you like. :) 

please support me as a member of Team Vegan!

Yep, I'm helping Vegan Outreach raise funds this year, and need your support. As you know, information is key in getting folk to open their minds (and hopefully hearts) in the battle against animal use/abuse, and this organization does a terrific job in getting the word out. Since 2003 their leafleters have handed out booklets to over 7 million students through their Adopt A College program. You can help reach even more young people, and every dollar you donate will be MATCHED by other supporters. 

My goal is to raise at least $500 and to jumpstart the process I put in $100 of my own. Two anonymous donors who wanted to help each Team Vegan member reach a minimum level put in an additional $250 (how awesome!), so I'm already at $350 -- woot! I'm hoping though that blog readers will help raise the final $150, so if any of my blog posts have ever inspired, amused or enlightened, please consider showing me some love and support this great cause. I can easily be found on the Team Vegan page (recognize the familiar name and logo?) or you can skip to Have Gone Vegan directly.

Want to donate but not have your complete name visible for everyone to see? I hear ya, and valuing a bit of privacy as well, got around that obstacle by providing the first letter of my surname only. So whether you don't mind if the whole world knows how terrific you are, or if you'd rather be a bit more anonymous, please donate either way. Thirty readers donating $5, or fifteen donating $10, or ten donating $15, or five donating $30 -- any scenario would get us there! And, $500 would morph into $1000 through the matching program! :)

Thank you in advance for ANY and all help you're able to give. It's highly appreciated. 

Update: A very generous donation has been made by my pal Debbie, so the total raised so far has gone up to $450, which means that through the doubling process $900 will go towards the battle. Awesome! Therefore dear readers, I now humbly ask that ten of you donate $5, or five of you donate $10, or two donate $25 so that our sentient co-beings can count on $1000 being raised from this collective pool. I know we can do it! :)

Update #2: We have reached and even surpassed the goal! Thanks to gentle Harry and a lovely donor couple who wishes to remain anonymous (thank you all very much!), the fundraising amount now stands at $525 -- so $1050 will go towards raising awareness that ALL sentient beings matter. I'm really pleased, and because the goal has been reached I won't badger folk in every upcoming post (although I may issue a reminder of the campaign towards the middle and end of June), but feel free to contribute more to this worthwhile cause anytime you like. :) 

I'm not a mother

(This was supposed to be a Mother's Day post. Guess I'm neither parental nor punctual, snort.)

Rather, I'm an unMother if you will, although I certainly have done my share of mothering (as in "look after kindly and protectively") over the years and in classic role reversal am trying to help both my parents (who themselves were actually not that particularly brilliant at mothering or fathering) in the final chapters of their lives.

But it seems to me that both mothering AND fathering should be defined as looking after kindly and protectively (in other words, nurturing), and that this quality (shared by all sentient beings who try to look after their young) gets no respect. Consider how almost everything in our lives is regulated or licensed to some degree (whether you want to drive a car, own a business, or apply for a passport to name just a few examples), except when it comes to nurturing living beings. Wanna have a baby? Go right ahead. There's no course to follow, no exam to take, no one to judge whether you'll be a fit parent, and virtually no follow-up unless you're really beating the crap out of your kid and someone reports you. Wanna "own" a kitty, puppy or bunny? Again, go right ahead. You can do as you like and treat your "property" as you see fit. No wonder that as a society we're not too overly concerned about the maternal bonds/relationships between other sentient beings and their offspring given that we're pretty damn lackadaisical about our own.

So maybe we need to get our nurturing acts and asses together and treat all living beings with as much respect (or more) than we currently give to our cell phones, ipods, Kindles and laptops (again, just to name a few examples.) If nurturing (whether provided by mothers, fathers or any caregiver regardless of species) were taken seriously, then perhaps we would make more headway. Or am I off base here?

nifty new meat-eater beater ;)

Think this is just an old vintage rug beater that I gleefully picked up at a garage sale? Think again. 

Guests crossing my threshold will now get a friendly yet firm whack on their backside with my nifty new meat-eater beater if they're not repentant of their carnist ways, snort.

be kind to animals week

Celebrated this year during May 6 - 12, this week (apparently the oldest of its kind in the United States) was first observed in 1915 and was established by Dr. William O. Stillman, leader of the American Humane Association at the time.

Admittedly, my first thought upon seeing this on my calendar was, "what, only one lousy week?", but I suppose that even just officially recognizing the notion of kindness towards other sentient beings can't hurt. But as vegans know, we should extend compassion to all others all the time, and one very simple but powerful way to do that is by not eating them. This one act of kindness alone, if practiced by enough people, could do wonders.

“We know we cannot be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them -- exploiting animals in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food.” ―  César Chávez