Inside the children’s book Vegan is Love: Having Heart and Taking Action, a clear agenda underpins cutesy cartoon images of cows and lambs – to teach children why a vegan diet is best. A page filled with illustrations of bloody steaks and roasts in a meat locker reads “… all animals raised for meat and dairy are captured and killed in the end. Their deaths are violent and sad.”
That is true.
The plot thickens to include scenes of wild-game hunters hoisting dead prey aloft, red-eyed animals in a testing facility, and very sad giraffes in a zoo.
Again, these images reflect reality. From where stems the controversy?
Telling your kids about the horrors animals suffer so that we might eat them seems only right. And it certainly seems no more controversial than spreading the baloney idea that we need animal products for our health.
Now, whether you think your child will be too upset by certain images and ideas is up to you -- no one is saying the book should be used in school curriculum.
Just finished this terrific book -- so much that is quotable in it, but I think my favourite line has to be the following, in reference to an afternoon Gellhorn spent chatting witih pot-smoking hippies:
It is impossible to escape a painful amount of dull conversation in this life, but for sheer one-track dullness those kids took the cookie.
July 22, 1941, Anne Frank watches neighbours on their wedding day. Leaning out her window, laughing and smiling, happy for them and very alive. One's stomach churns knowing what the future holds.
Apparently this footage was only discovered in 2009, now made available by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
