When I was 18, 19 years old, I didn't have a clue who I was as a person. What was important to me, what wasn't. What I really believed in and what I thought I did, simply because it was what I'd always known. Not knowing who I was made it all the harder of course, to know what kind of person I should strive to become.

With every passing hour spent under star and under sun however, those truths of my soul have been slowly shaped and revealed. Some, over the course of many days and nights of experience and contemplation. Others, in mere heartbeats, where no second thought was ever needed because the moment, in and of itself, brought about change in such a definite and everlasting way, that any return to being the person I was in the lifetime before that one moment, would be simply impossible.

One change happened through a combination of the above. Random and unconnected incidents here and there, at first awakening in me an uncomfortable feeling of doubt that what I was seeing could really be right and something I could live with as an acceptable part of my place in the world. Then, having been brought to a point where I knew that what had at first, and maybe for a long time, just been accepted as the way things were, could no longer be acceptable to me, that change, in the smallest measure of time you can imagine, took place.

That change, the first I'm going to talk about in this section of my site, is the place and the rights I believe animals have in our world. And when I say our world, I mean OUR WORLD, yours, mine AND theirs. I believe that, like us, animals have the right to lives as free and safe from hurt and harm as possible.

That we kill them just to fill our bellies or for the sake of something we think is going to look good to wear, that to me, just doesn't play anymore. The main reason why I'm a vegetarian is because I believe it to be wrong that creatures which can see, hear and feel, should die merely to satisfy our often only selfish, wants and desires. This is the same reason I'm going to become a vegan.

Those are my beliefs and I understand that " we all have the right to believe as we chose ." When we're talking about each other though, we tend to tag on a line like, " as long as our beliefs don't hurt or harm anybody else. " I believe that same principle should be applied to how we treat animals as well.

You may very well disagree with me and throw into the arena all kinds of arguements about livestock and the economy, vermin control and the like. That's all well and good but to be honest with you, I really don't care. I don't care because when I see pictures like those displayed below, I get angry. Angry that we, as a so called civilized species, can be so arrogant and so cruel. So I refuse to accept it as " what has to be ", or even as " the things have always been ". I refuse because I have that choice. You have that choice as well.

All I ask of you for the time being, is just to take a few moments to let these images sink in, see if they rest easy in your soul. See if if they represent who and what you are as a person. See if they don't make you just a little angry too. Just think about it for a little while and see what changes in you.

The Swiss Essayist, Philosophical Critic and Poet, Henri Frederic Amiel, once said, " he who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no real standards..., such a man is a mere article of the world's furniture..., a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being..., an echo, not a voice. "

Let us take time to think a while my friends, and instead of merely being echoes, let us become voices.