First of all, I should probably say that I am not a full vegan (yet) and the following story is only intended to show how this is slowly but surely changing - and of course why.
A few years ago, shortly after I finished my studies, I was out and about looking for jobs as a tour guide here in Stuttgart and of all the museums to land a gig in I more or less washed up in the world's largest pig museum. Yep, you heard right, a museum dedicated to pigs. This however is not the point of this blog post here, if you would like to learn more about it, feel free to drop me a line in the comments below and I'll make sure to write about it in the future. What I would like to talk about, is how this job changed my own attitude towards pigs and animal products in general.
The first order of action for me was of course to learn more about pigs. The only thing I knew so far was, that they are kind of cute and I also already suspected them to be underappreciated. Let me tell you I had to learn and relearn a lot. For example I was kind of surprised to find out that pigs are among our closest relatives genetically speaking and also highly intelligent and empathetic. This alone made me start to question my own anthropocentric thinking and in the end led to my interest in posthumanist theory, but I digress.
What is more important at this point, is that I myself started to feel more empathy for pigs (and lifestock in general) and got me interested into finding out more about what I myself was consuming. The more I learned about how lifestock was treated, the more I lost my own appetite for meat and animal products. I slowly but surely became almost disgusted with our own species, who on the one hand pays lip service to the sanctity of life while on the other making a clear cut distinction between human and non-human life. The longer I had to think about this, the clearer it became that I did not think along these lines and that I myself needed to change accordingly. Slowly but surely animal products vanished out of my diet to the point where I am now only sparingly eat any at all. And if I do so, I make well damn sure to not put any money towards industrial lifestock keeping. Due to this approach I get more and more used to a mostly (I would guess 95%) vegan diet and probably in the long run this will come to be a complete vegan diet. Aside from that I have also become aware of how animal products are used in thousands of products one would not even suspect to find any and I stopped using those in general.
Along the way I realised how important knowledge can be in order to make sustainable and informed decisions. Therefore over time I also started to talk about these topics during my tours of the museum. On the one hand this of course is a tough subject and not always easy to talk about, on the other it is exactly what is needed to be done to breach the divide we modern humans draw between us and all those others we consider to be less important life forms and thus less deserving of a dignified life.
Last but not least I thought I add this picture of a ridiculously cute pig I recently saw on a flea market here in Stuttgart. That's another thing that changed in the last years: I know find pigs everywhere I go. I guess they were always there, I just never saw them.