On Spearfishing, Swimming with a School of Orange Stripe Surgeonfish & Veganism

August 18, 2010 @ 10:27 pm

orange striped surgeonfish

I’ll never forget the recent privilege of scuba diving about 85 feet underwater in Kauai and coming across a large school of beautiful orange stripe surgeonfish. They were cautious but not frightened as I approached and followed from close behind, and for a few wondrous moments they allowed me to swim amongst them before I had to return to my dive team. I also saw a few octopi, eels, starfish, crabs, dozens of sea turtles and whitetip reef sharks sleeping and cruising near the bottom.

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An animal rights activist’s guide to staying sane: Words of wisdom from PETA’s Alex B.

June 20, 2010 @ 6:20 pm

Any number of terrible things happen to all kinds of animals every day. 10 billion a year are eaten for food a year, for one thing. But the recent Mercy for Animals undercover footage of cows and calves being brutally abused at the Conklin dairy farm was hard for me to watch, and hard to recover from. Sadly, animal abuse is not an isolated case in the dairy industry, or the factory farm industry, for that matter; it’s the norm. The best way to prevent this sort of atrocity is to give up dairy altogether and go vegan.

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Reaching people about veganism: experiences of a 6-month vegan

April 13, 2010 @ 12:37 am

Although I was a vegetarian for three years after college, I went vegan about six months ago. So much has happened since then and I’ve learned so much that it’s impossible to recap it all in a single blog post. In fact, it’s hard to even keep these posts short since I have so much to say. So my strategy is to blog about veganism more in “chunks,” then eventually collate it all into a website.

One of the coolest things about going vegan for me is meeting other like-minded people and having a positive ripple effect on others on the curious. I recently got an email from a vegan that reads my posts and, with her permission, I’ve reprinted her questions here. My responses and thoughts on this follow.

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Will Tuttle lecture (author of "The World Peace Diet")

March 21, 2010 @ 9:30 pm

A few days ago I read a blog entry by one of my favorite animal rights/vegan blog writers, Angel Flinn, enthusing about author/musician and vegan activist Will Tuttle and his new book, The World Peace Diet, which recently hit #1 on Amazon.

I checked out his website, worldpeacediet.com, and lo and behold, he was scheduled to speak a 10-minute drive from my home here in San Francisco at the First Unitarian Universalist Society. It was one of those coincidences I couldn’t ignore.

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Does PETA-bashing help animals?

January 22, 2010 @ 6:42 pm

To set context, PETA recently released a racy 2010 “State of the Union Undress,” raising an outcry from various abolitionist vegan quarters. One of my heroes, PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk, responded.

I myself ask if PETA relies too much on sexism, shock and B-list celebrities, and whether or not these aspects of their work detract from the cause. I’m a PETA member, I’ve demonstrated with PETA members, and I’ve attended seminars on why they take the approach that they do.

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A Response to "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" by Robert and Brenda Vale

December 22, 2009 @ 9:25 pm

So by now, a few of you may have seen media stories about this book declaring how bad pet ownership is for the environment.

Let’s get right to it: Citing domestic dogs and cats as a significant contributor to our current environmental woes is, in short, patently ridiculous.

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Giving Thanks by Saying “No Thanks” to Turkey

November 25, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

“All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?” — Buddha

A good friend who knows I recently went vegan tweeted me a good-natured ribbing about what I’d planned to eat tomorrow. I know I’ve been talking a lot about the mercury in our tap water, swine flu and Darfur lately—a lot—but I’m not completely humorless. I just would have appreciated his tweet more had I not just recently seen a video of turkey farmers abusing turkeys with such sadistic cruelty that it made Saw IV look like Disney fare.

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