Saturday, January 28, 2012

Links and a Deleted Scene

Hello! How are you?

Us? Oh, we're fine. Just living life. Anna's doing pretty darn good in Kindergarten. No problems to report on the vegan front.

Liam's coming along. He just turned three, still plays guitar a lot and loves drawing and playing with toys.

I should really post some videos and photos. But today I'm going to just throw up a few links.

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Here, read this piece about raising kids vegan over at Our Hen House.

That's a guest post written by Robyn Moore. Robyn is the author of the blog, Raising Veg Kids.

And over on Raising Veg Kids, my friend Celeste has written a guest post about our VegKins group: The Power of Getting Together With Other Vegetarian/Vegan Families.

"Frankly I can't tell you how much it means to our kids to interact with vegan peers. The supportive nature of the group has been amazing. We share advice on handling difficult situations, school activities, as well as recommend books and movies to each other."

I've been meaning to write about VegKins for a few years now. But Celeste sums it up nicely in this piece, so just go read that!

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Finally, I'm going to post something I cut from the essay on vegan parenting that I wrote for an animal rights anthology due out later this year. I cut quite a bit of passages just because they hindered the flow of the essay, not because I didn't like the ideas expressed within them. So I saved them in a different document because I have a hard time throwing away ideas. I'm calling them deleted scenes. Here's one:


Zoo apologists contend that zoos are instrumental in teaching our children about animals from around the globe. This contention comes into serious question in light of books referring to those animals as “zoo animals,” and when books intending to teach our young about animals tell them what those animals eat in a zoo instead of in their natural habitat.

I'll add that the problem, linguistically, is that those captive animals aren't referred to as "animals in a zoo," but are instead viewed as "zoo animals." As a result, books say things like, "Pandas come from China and Tibet," as opposed to, "Pandas live in China and Tibet."

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Well that's it for now. I'll occasionally put up more deletes scenes in between now and when the book is published. And once it's published I'll probably pull some paragraphs out of my essay to give you more of an idea of what I wrote about. And don't worry, I will totally let you know how you can get your hands on a copy of the book once it's released.