Thankful for Animal Liberation and Clove

I went meat-free on Thanksgiving 25 years ago. Philosopher Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation (1975) gets the credit, but the timing is on me.

I think about the book every Thanksgiving and, this year, to celebrate, I reread it and wrote a review over at Eco Lit Books — Read Like You Give A Damn! — I certainly do and let books influence me in big ways.

Singer's book changed the way I eat (later another book by Singer would change how I spend the money I earn). I marvel at how a book I picked up by chance (what writer Victoria Nelson calls a "naked encounter") had such an impact and I wonder how Animal Liberation came to be at the little branch of the Yakima Public Library near my house. But I'm not surprised that it attracted me.

The cover art by Daniel Craig, at that time, featured a picture of bucolic animals sure to appeal to animal-lovers and readers of James Herriot and then there was that provocative title. Singer's arguments were airtight. It seemed conclusive that if I agreed with him and I was who I was and my values were as they were, then I had to become vegetarian — or at least try.

"What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have." — Peter Singer

But there's another person that November who pushed me toward the decision in a less logical fashion — a high school janitor. At the end of a school event, my gregarious mother struck up a conversation with him. I was standing beside her probably impatiently eye-rolling, waiting to go home.

Then, he got my attention. "Are you vegetarian?" he asked. Just the question I'd been contemplating.

But I had to say, "No."

He responded by pulling out a picture of a gutted deer. That drove home the information I was absorbing in Animal Liberation. Being vegetarian meant, of course, I wouldn't want to see a dead deer. Not being vegetarian meant I had to be OK with the deer corpse, in its soon to be venison state, which I wasn't.

There were advantages to being vegetarian and separating myself from this horror. Meat-eaters were complicit in suffering. Later, when I served in the Peace Corps, the decision paid off when I got to skip the slaughtering part of learning how to raise chickens. I didn't eat them, so I didn't have to kill them. Elegant logic. Thanks to Peter Singer that meant more time in the vegetable garden for me.

"But pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers in not a member of our species." — Peter Singer

So Animal Liberation is how I ended up in tears at the sight of the turkey on our Thanksgiving table 25 years ago. Shamefaced, I knew that it was wrong for me to eat that bird. I'd finally made the connection between my morals and my plate. Going forward, I embraced Singer's lenient approach. I drew the line where I could. I chose. I would, as I said, "give it a try and see if it's too hard." It wasn't.

Really, the hardest part about being vegetarian is that more people are not. That gets better every year.

I am ever grateful to my mom who took the tears in  stride that Thanksgiving Day and, to this day, makes some of the most fantastic, colorful Thanksgiving dinners centered around vegetables and followed by pie you could ever hope to eat. I'm thankful she insisted I learn to cook vegetarian too — smart lady.

I'm also thankful that these days I've added a turkey back into my Thanksgiving tradition via Farm Sanctuary's Adopt-A-Turkey Project. Now I have a nice answer when people ask how I celebrate Turkey Day without a turkey. I say, "I have a turkey. Her name is Clove. She's sweet and shy and she lives on a sanctuary in California." It's also the perfect way to celebrate my vegetarian anniversary since turkey is the first animal I decided not to eat.

My only regret: That I didn't go vegan sooner!