What made you decide to go vegan?

Hey everyone! I just wanted to know… what made some of you go vegan? Was it something sad or traumatic, was it for health reasons, or maybe you just felt like you could make a difference for our animal friends?

For me, it was a very sad experience. I visited a farm on a field trip as a kid and we went to see the cows. These were milk producing cows. We got to meet and pet one of them and I just remember how happy she looked when I was petting her out in the field she was living in. Then, I watched as they took that same cow to the milking machine. I’ll never forget the way she looked, how sad it was, and how creepily the men running the machine were grinning at her… as if they enjoyed her suffering in more ways than one. It bothered me so deeply that i went home and cried. I decided on that day that I’d never want to hurt an animal again, and I’ve dedicated myself to being vegan since.

What are your stories?

EDIT: Just loving all of the stories here. Reading everyone’s reasons just makes me even more passionate about my own. We might all have our different reasons for going vegan, but we all have a united purpose. Tell someone today to GO VEGAN!! We’re all in this together.

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Upon turning fifteen, I was unable to locate any ethical justification for infringing upon the bodily autonomy of a conscious individual, regardless of whether or not they experience pain. I have to accept that it is always wrong to use someone else for one’s own gain.

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My story must seem so minor to others, but in class one day the boy sat next to me was talking about meat feast pizza and I had an epiphany and thought why the hell are we killing 3 different animals for pizza toppings?!..1 year later I’m fully veggie attempting to go vegan

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Warning: graphic content. This is extremely sad, but I was a school leaver when I attended farming college in 1988. We visited one of those dreadful chicken farms as part of our training; thousands of ugly bald chicks were jammed into heated sheds. You have undoubtedly seen them. A worker casually walked by and booted a chicken to death. This happened as we were going through. Absurd. To fully comprehend the procedure, we also had to slaughter, pluck, and prepare a chicken before eating it. Following that, we visited a slaughterhouse where we witnessed horrific sights that I won’t describe here but you can imagine. Even though I didn’t truly go vegan until a few years later, what I witnessed changed me forever

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I gave a presentation in university about the morality behind vegetarianism in Hinduism. I ended up becoming quite passionate about the project and made more than a few people feel bad about themselves despite being a carnist myself, and I couldn’t live with the hypocrisy.

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My elderly adoptive cat needed (lactose-free) milk, so I figured I might as well keep eating dairy. That was my last justification. Although I was already vegetarian, I had veganism as my ultimate goal. She passed away so unexpectedly, and I was unable to cry for her while knowing that she was inflicting pain to other creatures. If it weren’t for this event, hopefully I would have turned vegan, but I like to think that by being a great friend to me, she helped save other animals.

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Drinking someone’s milk is just gross to me and I love killing plants

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It made sense to me. The only vegan buddy I have is someone who made it seem doable, even though I never had a meaningful conversation with him about his ideas. This protest felt more and more inevitable the more I studied about industrial food production.

It feels like you are in the 1700s and all your buddies are saying, “Whatever, that’s miles away and out of our square of experience, let’s wear comfy shirts and get drunk!” when you tell them about cotton, rum, and the slave trade in the West Indies. and you’re thinking, “No, I can’t; this is the product of a bad industry.”

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I watched earthlings and dominion. Can’t unsee it. Started a plant based journey for health and came across those documentaries. Broke my heart and changed my view on eating everything from animals.

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Someone with a reputation as a “annoying vegan” in Facebook groups He did irritate me at first, but after witnessing the negative feedback he received, I gave it some serious thinking and realized that he had a lot of good points. It was simply unpopular because society is so ingrained with the consumption of animals. It made me think of the hate that feminists face. I will always support loud veganism because of this.

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For lunch, since I was a vegetarian, I cracked two eggs. Each had two yolks. Strange. The entire carton turned out to be double yolks—though they weren’t advertised as such. Customers mentioned that all of the cartons in the grocery store where I worked as a cashier had two yolks. This prompted me to research the reasons behind hens laying two yolks, which in turn led to living arrangements, etc. I stopped researching the dairy sector and became a strict vegan after that.