My Journey from ‘Humane’ Dairy Farmer to Vegan Cheese Maker

Source Free From Harm: Baby goat being disbudded with a hot iron.

Source Free From Harm
By Free From Harm Staff Writers

The following is a first person account of Susana Romatz’s transition from dairy goat farmer to vegan cheesemaker.

My life has been a tapestry of contrasting and at times contradictory threads.

As a youngster, I binge-read books like Little House on the Prairie and My Side of the Mountain. I loved the idea of self-sufficiency and homesteading. I made acorn pancakes with my best friend Krista (we ground up acorns with a brick and added water; they were delicious! Just kidding, they were awful, like eating bitter sand). I once tried to whittle a log into a bust of a famous president with a jackknife knicked from my dad’s wardrobe. I was jealous of my cousins in the country who fished and hunted.

And so, many years later, when I saw the ad requesting help on a “humane dairy” goat farm in Oregon, I jumped at the chance to get my country girl on.

It’s relevant to note that ten years before that, I had tried to go vegan. I was working at PetSmart and it was there that I met Pinkie, a tiny black and white spotted puppy with blue eyes. I fell in love with her and adopted her. But alas, her kidneys weren’t formed correctly and as she grew larger and larger, topping the scales at 80 pounds, her kidneys began to fail. She only lived for two years, but in those two years I learned what it meant to love a dog. I was crushed when she died.

After that time, I couldn’t bring myself to eat animals any more. I just couldn’t see the difference between my beloved dog and the animals on my plate. I began to watch videos on animal welfare, and donated money to animal activism groups. I tried to go vegan altogether, but didn’t pull it off for a myriad of reasons, mainly willpower and lack of education. I was a vegetarian for years.

Then when I moved to Oregon, I began to hear the phrase “humanely raised” used in reference to meat and dairy products, and it piqued my interest. In Michigan, nobody had ever talked about humanely raised animals, because they weren’t much thinking about meat as animals— it was just meat, which is meant for eating. How the meat got that way only a few knew and fewer than that cared. In Oregon it seemed that more people were aware of what happens in commercial meat production, and they knew it was wrong.

Please read rest HERE

Order a FREE vegan kit: http://www.peta.org/living/food/free-vegan-starter-kit/

Take PETA’s Cruelty-Free Shopping Guide along with you next time you head to the store! The handy guide will help you find humane products at a glance. Order a FREE copy HERE

Want to do more than go vegan? Help others to do so! Click on the below for nominal, or no, fees to vegan literature that you can use to convince others that veganism is the only compassionate route to being an animal friend.

PETA: http://www.petacatalog.com/catalog/Literature-39-1.html

Looking for merchandise? Action for Animals has a very good selection : http://store.afa-online.org/home.php?cat=284

Have questions? Click HERE

Our compassionate world
gratefully revolves
Around those who have
Thankfully,
Evolved

Karen Lyons Kalmenson