ANIMAL ATROCITIES-ARCHIVE

[Harvard Crimson - opinion - comments at full story link]

I could hear the howls from three blocks away. But I still gasped as I
walked into the sprawling Dong Xuan live-animal market in Hanoi,
Vietnam. Dogs, many with open wounds, cowed in the corners of tiny
wire cages stacked five high, as restaurateurs and butchers haggled
over slaughter prices. Monkeys, chickens, and lizards huddled in cages
scarcely larger than their bodies. In one cage, two young rabbits
silently shook in fear as a python was placed in alongside them.

For the last three semesters I’ve written a Crimson column on animal
protection, and for many years I’ve been a strict vegetarian. During
that time, many friends and readers have voiced their surprise that I
care so much about such an unlikely cause. Many, I think, have simply
assumed I’ve always been this way—as if I were born with a PETA
membership card and an inexplicably visceral distaste for KFC.

Yet, for the first 15 years of my life, the opposite was true: I ate
meat, attended rodeos, and even occasionally went hunting in our
family’s forest. A longtime vegetarian friend recently remembered that
I teased her in middle school for her “rabbit diet” of fruit and
vegetables. So what changed? In this, my last Crimson column, I would
like to tell the story of how I became an animal advocate and explain
why I believe history will judge our generation harshly based on our
treatment of animals.

Looking back, I would love to pretend that my life changed after my
chance encounter with the Vietnamese live-animal market. But it
didn’t. In my mind, vegetarianism remained the preserve of
health-obsessed teenage girls and animal rights the territory of
self-righteous former hippies. Being neither, I returned to New
Zealand and continued attending meat-filled barbeques at weekend rugby
games.
...
We are all complicit in a great moral crisis. But there is also hope:
By informing ourselves, supporting political change, and even going
vegetarian, we can end factory farming. I hope that I have persuaded
you over the past year and a half that we must.

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full story:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=527969