Tour of Chicken Run Rescue

This is how time has been going for me lately. In August I wrote a review of the book City Chickens. At the end of that review, I said,

Coming soon: Photos and a re-cap of the VegKins tour of Chicken Run Rescue on July 21st. SPOILER ALERT: It will contain photos of adorable chickens and humans.

Well here we are in mid-November and I have yet to post that re-cap. Better late than never, I guess! Here are some photos (I didn't get as many as I would have liked because I was too busy managing my kids and petting chickens):

First up, our gracious host, Mary. Chicken Run Rescue is literally her and her husband's basement and back yard. The amount of good that they do with that square footage is awe inspiring and humbling.

Anna wondering if this chicken would let her pick her up.

She was unsure at first (they both were).

Anna and Liam with a couple VegKins friends. VegKins (our vegan family group that meets up monthly) has blown up in the last year or so, largely because of events like this and our annual Halloween party and Spring (plastic) Egg Hunt.

Your's truly. What a rare thing it is for me to post a photo of myself on this blog.

Holy crap, here's another one of me! That's a six or seven year old Herbivore shirt that I'm wearing, by the way.

Anna eventually grew more comfortable with the chickens.

 

Liam never really warmed up though. Maybe next time...

All in all, it was a nourishing day. All four of us met and held chickens for the first time in our lives (Liam held one briefly, but I didn't get a photo).

I know on an intellectual level why I'm vegan. My kids know why we're raising them vegan. Meeting these birds though, really drove home a different aspect of veganism. It's one thing to say that the principle of equal consideration dictates that all sentient beings should have the right to live free from unnecessary harm and death, but it's quite another to hold a living, breathing, thinking, feeling being in your arms, stroke her feathers and scratch her head, apologize on behalf of your species, recommit yourself to never participating in the exploitation of beings like (and not like) her ... and to know that as long as you breathe you will be vegan because it matters as much as something can matter.

Minnesota Parent Article

Greetings to anyone coming here after reading the story in Minnesota Parent about raising vegan kids and the vegan parenting group, VegKins! Welcome to my sporadically updated blog. Feel free to have a look around. A few of my favorite posts are here:

Stats: a post about the health of my children.

Cat on the Playground: on Anna's reaction to kids chasing a cat on the playground.

Flabbergasted: about Anna's reaction upon hearing that a lot of people care about dogs and cats, but not other animals.

My Daughter the Monkey Eater: on pretending to eat animals.

We're All Made of Meat: on explaining what "meat" is to Anna.

Happy Feet: a review of the movie.

This is Not a Post About Milo & Otis: on Anna trying to understand others who aren't vegan.

The Life I Did Save: about a squirrel I brought into a rehabilitation center.

Anna's First Correction of "It"

And just for the hell of it, here's Anna singing a medley of tunes from Annie at a talent show. And here's Liam doing the same ... but not at a talent show. 

Please feel free to post a comment here or send me an email if you have any questions at all about being vegan or transitioning to being vegan. I'm more than willing to answer any and all questions you have. Even the stupid ones (kidding!). 

Now that I think of it, I should tell you that if you think you want to go vegan, you should check out Vegan University, which helps people transition to being vegan. We do mentorship (I'm a mentor), vegan shopping tours and workshops. And we're on Facebook, if you want to like us so you can get tips, tricks and reasons to be vegan dumped straight into your news feed. 

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.