Don’t be fooled by grocery packaging | Letter to the editor

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I don’t know Jill Turnbull, but I was pleased to read that she’s recently returned to a vegan lifestyle (“Vegan lifestyle will help save the earth,” Aug. 19). 

I have done the same, for all the reasons she mentions.

Veganism is not new to me. 

Many years ago I became vegan while I was homesteading and raising my children. I decided I had had enough of eating animals after a particularly gruesome “weekend of killing” wherein my family and I slaughtered, gutted, and wrapped 55 chickens, 48 rabbits, and a kid goat. 

I can assure you that these animals fought hard for their lives. I’ve seen the terror in the eyes of chickens before I chopped their necks, and I’ve heard rabbits scream before I bashed their heads with a club. 

I found it terribly disturbing and I could not understand how anyone could not be traumatized by such an experience — what part of your psyche do you switch off for this to be OK? 

Not only did I not want to do this deed, I didn’t want others to do it in my place. I soon learned it was not necessary to eat animals (including fish) and their secretions (dairy) and ova (eggs). 

Medical research now shows this to be true. Every year more papers are published showing that plant protein is far better for us than animal protein.

It’s easy to slip into a meat-eating habit — even when you know how harmful it is — when most others around you do so.

Certainly, you will do yourself and the planet a favor to eat a diet that is less than 5 to 10 percent animal protein. But don’t be fooled by those chunks of animal bodies so neatly wrapped in plastic and displayed at the grocery. They are little packages of suffering and terror.

Aleta Erickson
PORT TOWNSEND