"What made you become a vegan?"

I get this question all the time. The second someone hears that I don't consume meat or dairy, I'm waiting for it: "What made you decide to do that?"

But what do I say? Through my experience with omnivores, pointing out that I don't wish to contribute to the suffering of animals usually throws them on the defensive. They get all huffy, as if my intention was to attack them personally. Then the conversation goes nowhere because they are too busy muttering to themself about how much of a cunt I am for hitting them with the ugly truth that they, in fact, finance the cruelty business.

But that's not entirely the truth. Well, that is the truth, but not the truthful answer to that question. That answer would fit the question "Why are you a vegan now?" But what made me become a vegan is another story.

This is my YouTube channel. I've been making videos for about a year and a half and have met many interesting people. One of the most interesting of all is someone whom has since become one of my closest internet friends. He goes by the name Dendrophilian, which is the scientific term for "treehumper". His videos and his way of thinking are definitely on the controversial side, which is something people tend to hate about me. But he lives in Norway. I've never been there, but I don't know if Norweigans even view what he says as controversial. They sure as hell do here.

In one of his videos he mentioned that he was a vegan. He didn't go into it, as the video he was making was supposed to be comical and a stab at organized religion, specifically Christianity. If you want to see it, here it is. But the "vegan" word kind of followed me around for a few months. I thought it was just a word, not something people actually did. Eventually I caught up with him in a chat and I asked him about it.

The first thing I learned about it was the inefficient way cows feed us. A cow has to consume ten to sixteen pounds of plant-based food to produce ONE pound of edible flesh. How wasteful is that??? Shit, that means you could feed sixteen times the amount of people if you just cut out the middle man, so to speak. With all the hungry people on the planet, who the fuck am I to be so wasteful? Just learning that made me want to go vegan on the spot. So I did. And as time went on, I learned more. And the more I learned, the more I knew I made the right choice.

I've always adapted well to change. So maybe going vegan was easier for me than it is for other people. But one thing about veganism that makes it amazing (in my opinion) is that there are dozens of reasons to be vegan. I mean it. There are literally dozens. But let's just say for a second that there is only ONE reason. It can be any of the dozens. I can randomly pick one of those reasons out and say "If this reason was the only reason to go vegan, it's still way better than all the reasons not to."