Tried to reblog this post but the button won’t load and time is running out on the library computer! So please go over to Maud Earnshaw’s site and read this post – it’s so important! If we have any chance of making a better world it starts with well-respected animal welfare organisations recognising the suffering of farm animals and promoting veganism.
Sign the petition to MAKE RAYSTEDE’S ANIMAL SANCTUARY CAFE VEGAN! NOW!!!!
Chapter 7 continues (For the first 6 chapters click here 🙂 )
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“…. She belongs to ‘erself. I think she should be allowed to keep belongin’ to ‘erself, don’t you?” He looked at Joe earnestly.
Joe looked back, wide eyed.
“Yeah, I do.”
Luke smiled, Joe was with him. But now he really had to think. Where would the sheep be safe? If they just left her to wander, someone else was bound to discover her and return her to the farm. No, he couldn’t let that happen. He had to get her to a place of safety where the farmer wouldn’t find her. Joe gently stroked the sheep’s forehead. Luke was thinking hard. There had to be a way. There was always a way if you thought hard enough. And then it came to him.
“I’ve got it!” said Luke, “I know how we can save her!”
“What? What will we do?” asked Joe eagerly.
“You wait here with her,” Luke instructed, “keep ‘er here, out of sight. I’ve got to go somewhere and I’ll be back quick as I can.”
“Where are you going?” asked Joe, a little nervous about having sole custody of the refugee.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be quick,” Luke assured him as he turned to run back along the lane towards the village.
Joe continued to stroke the sheep, telling her softly that it would be ok, that Luke had thought of something and he wouldn’t let her down. Obviously comforted by this, she resumed munching the grass.
It started to rain. Just a few drops at first and then it settled in to a steady drizzle.
“Hurry up,” thought Joe as he became gradually wetter.
The sheep didn’t seem to mind. Eventually, after almost an hour by Joe’s reckoning (seventeen and a half minutes), Luke returned. He was smiling and had with him a piece of rope.
“Where ‘ave you been? What are we gonna do?” Joe asked as Luke tied the rope carefully around the sheep’s neck so that he could lead her.
“I’ve got a place where we can take ‘er,” Luke told him, “come on.”
The rain ensured their independence by keeping other people indoors. They walked back half way along the lane until they came to the back entrance of the allotments. Luke opened the gate with a key and they went in. He led his old friend and his new friend past many well-kept plots full of rows of cabbages and turnips and carrots and leeks and all sorts of plants that Luke didn’t recognise. The sheep was keen to try a few.
“No! Stop ‘er!” Luke half-shouted as she bent her head to some turnip tops.
Joe stopped her just in time and the boys quickened their pace. After a while the plots began to look a little untidy and, the further they walked, the more unkempt they became. They stopped alongside Luke’s dad’s plot which was one of the unkempt because he hadn’t had it very long.
“Here we are!” said Luke happily to the sheep, “welcome to your new home Curly.”
“Really?” said Joe.
“Yeah!” said Luke, “I think it suits her.” Joe shook his head.
“Not the name, the place! Won’t your dad go mad?”
“Why would he?” Luke asked, a little irritated that Joe was being so negative.
Then Luke realised that from where he was standing, Joe couldn’t see what he and Curly could see.
“No, not here,” he said, “there!”
And he pointed to something behind his dad’s ramshackle shed.
Joe stepped forward to look. The plot behind Luke’s dad’s plot had been abandoned some time ago and was quite overgrown. The former tenant had erected post and rail fencing all around it so that she could keep her Shetland pony there. And there was a big shed that she’d used as a stable. Luke beamed.
“This is my plot!”
Joe’s jaw dropped.
“But how? …. When?”
“That’s where I went. To the ‘lotment committee man’s house. To rent this ‘lotment.”
“But how … I mean, don’t that cost loadsa money?”
Joe knew the answer to his question almost before he’d finished asking it. Luke was so happy as he led Curly to her new home.
“Won’t ‘ave time for bike rides now anyway,” he said.
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The first eight chapters of Luke’s adventures sticking up for animals – only £4! Click the pic!
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vegan children’s story, children’s book, books, children, animals, sheep
Chapter 7 continues (For the first 6 chapters click here 🙂 )
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The lane was quiet, the boys were quieter, until Luke noticed something. As they approached the stile that led to the meadow that was crossed by the stream that was bridged by the bridge on which the boys had planned to play Pooh sticks, Luke saw a sheep.
The sheep was munching the long grass in front of the field gate next to the stile. There were no sheep in the meadow at that time but Luke knew that sometimes there were. He could only assume that this sheep had got separated from the rest when they were being moved to another field.
“A lost sheep!” said Joe when he looked up.
“Yeah,” said Luke, their discord forgotten. They approached her slowly so as not to startle her.
“What should we do?” whispered Joe.
“I don’t know,” said Luke.
“I bet it belongs to Manor Farm,” Joe guessed, “I know they’ve got sheep.”
Luke was deep in thought.
“Maybe,” he said after a while, “but we can’t really be sure.”
“We should prob’ly go and tell the farmer at Manor Farm, then he could come and see it. I think he’d know if it was one of his.”
Luke took his water bottle out of his lunch box.
“Maybe,” he said again as he tipped what was left in the bottle onto the mud, “but then again, he’s prob’ly got hundreds of sheep and they prob’ly all look the same to ‘im.”
He rubbed his hand in the wet mud and then wiped it gently over the red dye mark on the sheep’s back.
“And it would be wrong to hand ‘er over to the wrong person.”
“Why are you doin’ that?” asked Joe.
“Jus’ coolin’ ‘er down. Wet mud really cools ’em down,” Luke explained, “don’t want ‘er to be hot an’ bothered.”
Since it was March, Joe was unconvinced by this explanation. His friend was clearly up to something and he had a good idea what it might be.
“You can’t keep it Luke,” he said firmly, “it don’t belong to you.”
“An’ who does she belong to? We don’t ezzactly know do we?”
“That mark you just covered …”
“What mark? I can’t see no mark! Can you?”
“Not now, no.”
“No. There’s on’y one thing we do know.”
“What’s that?”
“That whoever she does belong to wants to kill ‘er! Do you want to give ‘er to someone who will kill ‘er? Would you do that Joe? Would you?”
Luke was trying to keep it to a whisper so as not to frighten the sheep, but his hushed tones were still fierce.
“Well, you don’t actually know that,” Joe said cautiously.
“Don’t I? Why do farmers keep animals? Is it ’cause they love ’em? Is it ’cause they want to play with ’em and cuddle ’em?”
Joe shook his head.
“No,” Luke agreed, “they keep ’em to make money out of ’em, and they make money out of ’em by sellin’ ’em for meat.”
Joe couldn’t argue with that. He nodded.
“So what can we do?” he asked.
Luke continued.
“Here is a brave sheep who has prob’ly bin hidin’ from the farmer for days or weeks. And he prob’ly hasn’t even noticed she’s missin’; or he has noticed but he’s given up lookin’ for ‘er. So she’s free. She belongs to ‘erself. I think she should be allowed to keep belongin’ to ‘erself, don’t you?” He looked at Joe earnestly.
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continues tomorrow 🙂
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vegan children’s story, children’s book, books, children
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Oh dear, it’s not looking good for planet Earth and all its inhabitants. If you’d like to try to help the bewitched break the spell you could do as Maud suggests and share this story far and wide. The children of non-vegan parents who are caught up in the spell could be helped to snap out of it if they found this book in their library – it’s worth a try, isn’t it?
The colour version, with Beatrice Wilberforce’s illustrations, is only £3.90
and Maud’s original Wicked Wicked Witch and the Ruinous Manipulation, being entirely black and white, is only £2.80.
And, by the way, it’s surprisingly fun how easy it is to make a book look like a real bona fide library book with simple, easily edited, or not, photocopies stuck on the first page.
and maybe even one of those removable plastic book jackets they often have, which come in different sizes and are often on discarded library books 🙂
It’s just harmless fun 😉
Have a good weekend 😀
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vegan fairy tale, vegan story, vegan children’s story, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
Story concludes tomorrow but, if you don’t want to wait,
find it now on the Fairy Tales page 🙂
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vegan fairy tale, vegan story, vegan children’s story, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
continues tomorrow, or find it on the fairy tales page now 😀
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vegan fairy tale, vegan story, vegan children’s story, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
continues tomorrow, but if you want to read the whole fairy tale now, just pop over to the Fairy Tales page 😀
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vegan fairy tale, vegan story, vegan children’s story, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
continues tomorrow but if you want to go to the Fairy Tales page and read the whole story now, you can 🙂
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vegan fairy tale, vegan story, vegan children’s story, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
continues Monday but if you don’t want to wait, you know what to do 😉
What? Oh, it’s on the Fairy Tales page 😮
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vegan fairy tale, vegan story, vegan children’s story, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
continues tomorrow
but if you don’t want to wait you can find the whole story on the fairy tales page 🙂
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vegan fairy tale, vegan story, vegan children’s story, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
continues tomorrow but if you don’t want to wait,
go to the Fairy Tales page for the whole story 😀
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vegan fairy tale, vegan children’s story, vegan children’s book, wicked witch, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
continues tomorrow 🙂
but if you can’t wait and want to read the whole story now,
go to the Fairy Tales page 😀
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vegan fairy tale, vegan story, vegan children’s story, vegan, vegetarian, environment, wicked witch, global warming, animals, animal rights
Watch it on YouTube, give it a thumbs up and, most importantly, SHARE IT! 😀
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vegan, vegan video, animals, animal farming, global warming, environment
For the story so far click here
to be continued …
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#vegan comic, #vegan comic for children, #children’s comic, #vegan children’s story, #juvenile fiction, #vegan superhero
For the story so far, click here
to be continued ….
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#vegan kids’ story, #vegan comic, #vegan comic for kids, #vegan fiction, #vegan superhero
Story continues from yesterday:
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And so the morning continued. Dad read the paper; Dudley sniffed, peed and eventually laid down; and Luke resentfully picked up other people’s rubbish.
He spotted a set of six-pack rings in the long grass and reached for it. It moved. He reached for it again and it moved again. Luke parted the long grass and found, with one of the rings caught tight around his body, a little hedgehog.
“Oh dear oh dear,” said the vet, “come on fella, let’s get this horrible thing off you.”
She cut it off and then gently cleaned the hedgehog’s wounds.
“I would say, going by the severity of the cuts around his neck and behind his forelimb …”
“His armpit,” Luke clarified in case anyone was unsure to which wound she was referring.
“er, yes, if you like,” the vet went on, “and the fact that he is quite undernourished, that this unfortunate animal …”
“Spiker,” said Luke.
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s his name.”
“Oh, I see. I would say that Spiker has been struggling with this horrible appendage for over a week. It’s very lucky you found him when you did.”
Luke suddenly saw the job of picking up litter in a very different light. It was a very important job and, in conjunction with punishing droppers, was outlaw work.
The vet said that she would take care of Spiker until he was better and then she would call them to pick him up and they could release him where they found him.
“That means,” thought Luke, “I need to make sure the park is safe for him to come back to.”
On the way home, Luke formulated a plan:
➔ First he would clean up all the rubbish;
➔ then he would keep watch and record the names of all the droppers and what they dropped;
➔ then he would teach them a lesson.
All afternoon Luke and Dad picked up litter. They filled three and a half large dustbin bags with bottles and cans, crisp packets and sweet wrappers, fast food containers and carrier bags. Luke also found a £2 coin which Dad said he could keep for being such a good worker.
“Nice to be ‘preciated for a change,” thought Luke and spent 99p of his hard-earned cash, on the way home, on a giant gobstopper.
Part one of his plan was complete. Now, on Sunday, he was carrying out part two.
It was slow going. His eyes glazed as he stared across the empty park.
“There’d be no shame in bringing more than one comic in future,” he decided.
Then, at 10.06, on one side of the park, seven Year 6 boys entered, laughing and pushing and kicking a football between them. At the same time, on the other side of the park, came Simon Butler, Kenny White, Becca Nithercott and Christina Burkiss, all from Class 4 – Luke’s class. Becca and Kenny were carrying large, brightly-coloured kites.
Luke shrank down behind his Beano. The Year 6 boys raced around chasing their ball and shouting insults at each other. The class 4 kids took it in turns to run across the field trying to keep their kites aloft in the windless sky.
Luke kept his eyes on them all as discreetly as he could. No litter was dropped. He was getting awfully tired of sitting still.
Then the football suddenly flew higher and further than intended and landed in one of the back gardens. Luke watched as one of the Year 6 boys vaulted the fence to retrieve it.
“What are you doing here all by yourself?”
Simon Butler! Where did he come from? Luke tried to look nonchalant. With slow deliberation he took the gobstopper out of his mouth.
“Readin’ me comic. What’s it to you?”
“Reading my foot!” Butler scoffed, “you’ve been sitting here with your comic against your chin for the last ten minutes. Are you waiting for someone?”
This was no good. Butler was drawing attention. And he was distracting. Now there were only five Year 6 boys – where did the other two go? Simon Butler climbed onto the bench next to Luke and sat on the back of it, his feet on the seat.
“Who are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?”
This was infuriating. Flamin’ Butler! Luke had to get rid of him and he could only think of one way to do it.
“Is that yours?” he pointed to a £1 coin on the ground.
“er, oh yeah, I must have dropped it just now,” Simon lied as he stooped to pick it up.
He called to his friends.
“Anyone fancy some crisps?”
And he ran off without giving Luke another thought.
“Expensive,” thought Luke, mourning the loss of the last of his money, “but worth it.”
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Continues tomorrow but if you can’t wait that long you can read the whole chapter here and the first eight chapters are also available in paperback.
Chapter 3: Luke Walker and the Giant Gobstopper
SUNDAY
LITTER: 1 PIZZA BOX AND 1 COKE CAN
DROPPER: UNNOWNE
Luke tutted and looked across the park. At 8.27 there was no one else there but he knew they would come. And when they did, he would be ready.
On one side of the park was the school, on the other, the pony paddock. The top and bottom edges skirted the ends of back gardens. With his binoculars Luke could see it all clearly. He waited.
At 8.49 a dog walker entered the recreation field and walked around twice. Luke pretended to read his comic while secretly watching the person’s every move. No litter was dropped.
At 9.12 and 9.18 two more dog walkers arrived at opposite sides of the park. One threw a ball for his dog, the other kept her dog on a lead. No litter was dropped.
For Luke time was passing extremely slowly. He had read his comic three times and it was losing its appeal. At least his enjoyment of the gobstopper was not waning.
“The solitude of the outlaw life might be too much for some people,” Luke mused, “but I’m used to it now, I can handle it.”
Twenty four hours earlier he had been less philosophical:
“I don’t see why I should have to clean up other people’s mess!” Luke complained to Rusty who was sitting on a cabbage leaf, watching him.
Mrs Tebbut had followed through on her threat to send home a letter after the zoo trip and Luke’s dad had sentenced him to a month of weekends cleaning up litter. Luke was bitterly resentful at the injustice of it all.
“I mean, I could see the logic if I was a litter dropper myself. Makin’ me pick up litter would serve me right. But I’m not a dropper. I’ve never been a dropper. I won’t ever be a dropper – so what kind of lesson is this s’posed to teach me? A lesson I already know, that’s what!”
Rusty, Ash and Scratcher, the only witnesses to this tirade, did not attempt to answer him. They were used to his rhetorical rants and knew it was best to just let him get it off his chest. Sitting with his friends in ‘the damson patch’, as it was now known, letting off steam with the only ones who really understood him, was a kind of therapy for Luke. He always felt better afterwards.
But at the park Luke felt humiliated. It was Saturday morning; scouts were having football practice; skateboarders were zooming up and down their ramps and slopes; little girls were skipping rope and playing hopscotch. Luke felt like everyone was smirking at him picking up litter. It was disgusting. Disgusting people had dropped their disgusting rubbish and he was forced to clean up after them. It made him so cross.
Then he noticed his dad trying to get his attention. Maybe he was going to let him off. Maybe he’d done enough now.
“Luke, look, behind you. Dudley’s done his business. Make sure you pick that up as well.”
Dad went back to reading the paper and Luke seethed. It wasn’t fair!
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Continues tomorrow, but if you can’t wait you can read the whole chapter here now
and the first eight chapters are also available in paperback
We’re so glad you’ve been enjoying the adventures of Luke Walker, animal stick up for-er, and thought you might be interested to know that he has made a notebook. It’s not the prettiest of notebooks as it’s just an exercise book, originally intended by Mrs Tebbut to be his maths book, which Luke felt would be much better put to another purpose.
He’s setting up a secret sersiety of animal stick up for-ers and welcomes others with prince pauls like him to join. All new outlaws should have a copy of this notebook and put their name on the list of proppa members.
All member outlaws must agree to the plej …
… and follow the sersiety rules.
According to Luke, to be an outlaw you must think to question everything you’re told …
… to consider if it’s really true.
Luke has worked hard on this notebook, all by himself. He has included lots of useful information – like people from history who had prince pauls, …
… and how to make your own secret code-maker/breaker which is an essential for every secret sersiety member.
Plus he has left lots of space for new members to write in.
There is even a top secret coded message which new member outlaws will be able to decipher when they’ve made themselves a code breaker. And there’s space for more coded messages to be added by new members.
All in all, Luke is very pleased with his Privut Notebook which is available from Amazon at the very reasonable price of £2.75
You can’t say fairer than that 😉
Here are a couple of Luke’s friends with their copies:
Continues from yesterday:
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But, it was nice weather, and anything was better than being stuck in a classroom. Luke decided he might as well try to make the best of it.
Mrs Tebbut pointed at two big tigers.
“What can you tell me about the tigers in this enclosure?” she asked the group.
Luke was shocked. He put up his hand.
“Are they criminals?” he suggested.
“Don’t be silly Luke, of course they’re not criminals.”
“Well it don’t seem fair to put innocent animals in prison.”
“Can anyone give me a sensible answer?”
Simon Butler read aloud from the board on the fence.
“They’re Bengal tigers; well known for their power and strength; one of the most feared predators in nature. In the wild they scent mark large areas of up to 100 square kilometres to keep their rivals away.”
“Very good Simon,” Mrs Tebbut smiled.
Luke didn’t think there was much to smile about.
“The wild ones live in massive places, prob’ly bigger ‘n Bournemouth, and this cage is smaller ‘n my back garden. No wonder they look fed up,” he thought.
They moved on. Luke lagged behind with diminishing enthusiasm. Mrs Tebbut drew everyone’s attention to another enclosure.
“Can anyone tell me what these guys are?”
“They’re penguins,” said Anna.
“That’s right. Does anyone know what type?”
“They’re bored penguins.” He knew the moment he said it that he’d said it too loud.
“Luke Walker! I am tired of your attitude! If you can’t enter into the spirit of things with a smile on your face and some genuine effort then kindly do not participate at all.”
That was fine by Luke.
“Why do teachers ask you what you think if all they really want you to tell ’em is what they think?” he grumbled to himself.
When Mrs Tebbut was distracted by Katia getting a splinter, Luke decided to take her at her word and ‘not participate at all’. He was better off on his own anyway. He wandered around the zoo, looking at the animals and feeling sorry for them.
“Don’t seem right to lock animals up when they ‘aven’t done nothin’. It’s like the Sheriff of Nottin’am all over again.”
He noticed an empty bench in front of a line of trees, away from the busier zoo paths, and decided to have a sit down.
“It’s a shame about zoos,” he thought, disappointed.
While he sat there he looked around. Over his left shoulder, behind the trees, he saw another enclosure. It was off the beaten track and smaller than the others. It was concrete and contained nothing of beauty or interest except its occupant. There stood the biggest, most breath-taking, awe-inspiring individual Luke had ever encountered. An elephant. All on her own.
“All on your own,” Luke sympathised, as he made his way to her, “another damson in distress.”
He climbed up on the fence so that he could talk to her over the top of it and she walked towards him to get a closer look.
“I’m on me own too,” he continued, “not stayin’ with the group if I’m not wanted!”
Then he had an idea.
“Would you like to come out an’ play with me?”
The elephant seemed interested so he went on.
“Ok, listen, we’ll have to be a bit sneaky. You wait here while I find a key; then I’ll open this gate and you can slip out before anyone sees.”
It was a brilliant plan!
*******
Continues tomorrow, but if you can’t wait you can read the whole story here now 😀
and the first eight chapters are also available in paperback 🙂
Luke Walker: animal stick up for-er is a comic about an eight year old boy who doesn’t let a little thing like following the rules stop him from defending and liberating animals. To put it simply he is a vegan Just William. He means well but those who try to control him (ie parents and teachers) find him rather, well, trying.
Luke’s story begins on this site in comic-book style with episodes 1 and 2, Luke Walker and the damsons, and Luke Walker AWOL, on the ‘stories for ages 5 and up’ page. They are also included in the bumper comic book Reflecto Girl and other stories.
However, there’s more. I have since decided to write his stories in prose, for a change, and a book containing the first eight chapters of his adventures, called simply Luke Walker: animal stick up for-er, is available from Amazon.
Starting tomorrow, Chapter 1 of this book will be published here in instalments. See you then! 😉
A look at his notebook will give you a taste of who he is 😉
Note that Naomi was rescued from a “natural” free range farm. There is no such thing as humane meat.
Zoo noun
Oxford Dictionary definition: zoological garden: public garden or park with collection of animals for exhibition and study.
Our definition: Place where wild animals are kept and/or bred in captivity. Zoos are prisons. Prisons in which innocent individuals are kept incarcerated for their whole lives, though they have committed no crime.
Elephants, for example, in the wild, are used to travelling many miles a day in herds of about ten related adults and their offspring. They are very social animals.
In zoos, elephants are usually kept in pairs or even isolated. Their enclosures are incredibly small, compared to what they are used to in the wild, and as a result they often show many signs of being stressed out or bored, like engaging in repetitive movements. Stress behaviours can include repetitive movements, pacing back and forth, head bobbing, rocking, repeatedly retracing their steps, sitting motionless or biting the bars of their enclosure or themselves.
What makes life so difficult for zoo animals is that they hardly have any privacy and lack mental stimulation and physical exercise. Even though you might think that zoo animals would get used to a life in captivity, they really don’t. Even animals that are bred in zoos still retain their natural instincts after many generations of captive breeding.
Animals like polar bears or felines are used to hunting; this habit is replaced by the zoo with regular feedings. Most animals kept in zoos would naturally roam for tens of miles a day.
Zoos claim to help with conservation. However, hardly any zoo registers their animals on an international species database and most zoo animals are not endangered at all.
Even though there are thousands of endangered species, zoos have only been able to return about 16 species to the wild with varying level of success. Most zoo animals released in the wild don’t survive. This is because zoos don’t provide the right environment for a successful captive breeding project. The animals would need to live in habitats resembling their natural ones, especially in terms of climate and fauna. The animals would also need to be raised with minimal human contact and in populations large enough to provide a natural social balance and a suitable gene pool.
Surplus animals are the unwanted animals for whom there is no more space, when zoos have bred yet another cute little baby to attract visitors. They can even be the cute babies themselves when they’ve stopped being cute at the end of the season. Zoos have a systematic “overproduction” of animals. These surplus animals are either killed – and sometimes fed to their fellow zoo habitants – or sold to other zoos or dealers. Selling animals is a profitable way for zoos to dispose of them. Dealers will sell them to hunting ranches, pet shops, circuses, the exotic meat industry and research facilities. Surplus animals are also found for sale on the internet.
To sum up: DON’T GO TO THE ZOO! If a school trip is being organised, tell your teacher why you don’t like zoos and ask them to take you somewhere better. If they won’t listen, explain what zoos really are to your friends and then get together to petition the school. If they still won’t listen, just ask your parents to let you stay home from school that day. Maybe they could take you on a better trip instead, such as to a museum or art gallery.
That reminds me – see what Luke Walker, ‘animal stick up for-er’, did when he was forced to go on a trip to the zoo – now that’s a boy who acts on his conscience! (Though he is sadly unappreciated by those who know him 😉 )
Turkey noun
Oxford Dictionary definition: 1. large originally American bird bred for food. 2. Its flesh.
Our definition:
For the rest of the T page, click here; for the whole vegan dictionary click here 😀
Rat noun
Oxford Dictionary definition: 1. large mouselike rodent. 2. colloquial unpleasant or treacherous person. verb 1. hunt or kill rats. 2. colloquial inform on.
Our definition:
Click here for the rest of the Rr page, click here, or go to the sidebar on the right, for the whole dictionary 😀
Reflecto Girl episode 4 continues (see yesterday’s post for the start). For episodes 1, 2 and 3 go to the 8 years and up shelf 🙂
To be continued ….
Maddicts (graphic novel for teens and up) …. starts tomorrow 😮
Click on the pic and you may Bbegin reading 😉
So often we realise, and sometimes we don’t realise, that the words we use normalise animal exploitation and degradation. A man might be angrily referred to as a ‘pig’ because he behaves in an obnoxious or sexist manner; a person might be called an ‘animal’ if they are aggressive or bad mannered; some animals are described by the way they taste instead of by characteristics which actually tell us something about them as individuals; people are desensitised to the harsh realities which face captive animals every day because words, like ‘abattoir’ for example, are defined simply as slaughterhouse which doesn’t begin to convey the horror and becomes an accepted and unquestioned fact that doesn’t make people recoil or revolt.
The other side of this coin is that some words are only described in relation to animal farming when in fact there is so much more to them (see alfalfa).
So we thought it would be a good idea to make a vegan dictionary, with words defined from a vegan point of view, and we’ll keep it high up in the sidebar for easy reference. It will take a long time to complete – so far I have just done A! – but it is a very interesting endeavour and I am enjoying it.
I began by referring to my big old Oxford dictionary. I went through the A section, page by page, and every time I came across a word which normalised animal exploitation or degradation, or which was defined in a way which did, I copied it down and defined it honestly and fully to the best of my ability. I also include the Oxford definition in my dictionary for comparison.
You can find the dictionary by clicking on the picture at the top of this post, or on the picture of the dictionary in the sidebar and that will take you to links to the lettered pages – so far, as I said, just A, but I’ll get started on B today!
I believe that most people, whether they be veg*n or not, have compassion for animals and the reason that many of those who feel love for other species still eat some of them is because they have been conditioned from birth not to question it. It is deeply embedded in the language they speak.
When I was 13 I told my dad that I wanted to be vegetarian and he asked me why. I told him that it was because I didn’t want animals to be killed. He explained to me earnestly that it was all done humanely; that they don’t suffer. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know anything about animal farming or slaughter, but he believed it to be true. He had been told that there were regulations in place to make sure the animals didn’t suffer and he believed it. And he told me that it was true. And that’s what most people think: it is normal, it is natural and it is humane.
But it isn’t any of those things so we need a new normal, and it starts with the language.
Sandra has achieved the unprecedented legal status of a “non-human person.” A court has recognized that she has rights and that being kept in a zoo unlawfully deprives her of her freedom.
Woo hoo!!!! 😀 😀 😀
In November, the Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA) filed for habeas corpus, a petition usually used to challenge the imprisonment of a human who has been illegally detained. Instead, this petition sought freedom for Sandra, a Sumatran orangutan. Sandra has spent the last 20 years of her life at the Buenos Aires Zoo. In 1986, she was born into captivity at a German zoo. Nine years later she was sent to Argentina. Sandra is described as very shy, with a marked preference for avoiding the stares of zoo visitors. AFADA’s case asserted “the unjustified confinement of an animal with probable cognitive capability” illegally deprived a “non-human person” of her freedom. AFADA insisted Sandra was a person in a philosophic sense, rather than a biological one. In other words, she’s not human, but she deserves certain equivalent rights. A three-member panel of Argentina’s Second Chamber of the Criminal Appeals Court unanimously granted habeas corpus, deciding that Sandra is a “juridical person” rather than an object.
Congratulations Sandra and well done Argentina!
Let us hope that this decision is upheld and that it will lead to a more enlightened attitude worldwide resulting in person-hood rights being granted to all captive animals.
Happy New Year!!!!!!!
Three brown cows. Three brown cows.
See how they run. See how they run.
They all run after the human ilk,
Who kidnap their calves and then steal their milk,
The cows want their calves back, the humans can’t bilk,
The three brown cows.
For more nursery rhymes and wacky verse for kids click here 😀
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vegan nursery rhymes
What they will tell you:
What they probably won’t tell you is that he was a:
What an awesome man 🙂
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