One of the vets I worked for told me that vets’ kids tend to look at veterinary medicine as somewhat less than exciting compared to other people’s kids. I saw that in action last year – my kid’s class had to write essays on what they wanted to be when they grew up. By far, most kids, especially girls, wrote about wanting to be a vet or an animal health technician. My kid didn’t even mention it as a remote possibility, even though he loves animals.

On another note, I’ve left a newer comment at JJ’s in the discussion that turned into women’s self-defence. It contains a bunch of info that you may want to know about, including a link to a women’s self-defence organization in Montréal. Just in case you haven’t been back to that thread since you last commented there.

And about protecting animals – it’s exhausting to even think about it! So much energy is spent protecting and caring for certain (owned) animals, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, people just don’t know how to address the bigger picture (and I include myself in that…)

I agree, it’s much easier to find good vegetarian (if not vegan) meals in Toronto and Montreal these days; when I was trying to do it I lived in the Toronto of the 1970s. Now, I live in rural Ontario so I still can’t make the shift! Diets out here have been very slow to evolve. In many ways rural Ontario diets are decades behind the refinements in balance we keep seeing in big city diets. With some exceptions on both counts, of course.

I believe that your chickens are quite lucky because you appreciate them. And I love what you say about the potential for excellent human-animal relations based on mutually understood, respectfully negotiated exchanges. I’ve been waiting since I was a child to see the human race start going that way in our relations with our animal kin. What’s taking us so long? How come some of us can see it, and so many others cannot?

Don’t you ever wish that you could throw your arms around them — not restrictively, of course — and protect them all!

My flexitarian-vegetarian diet will also include fish – only because I can’t cook it to make it taste good, so I only eat it when I’m out. My compassion does not extend to individual fish – though I am very concerned about fish populations and the environment they have to live in.

And I have no trouble with eggs for the moment because I have my own chickens, and they appear very happy to give me their eggs. The last thing they want to do is sit on them for any length of time!

There could have been great potential for excellent human-animal relations based on the exchange of milk and eggs for protection, but we have chosen not to go that way.

Over thirty years ago I was eating a delicious pepper steak my mother had made. I had a piece on my fork half-way to my mouth, when suddenly my perception of it changed from a delicious morsel of food to a cut off piece of flesh from an animal I could relate to as a being. I put the morsel down instead of eating it. Essentially, since then I have no longer eaten mammals of any kind.

I tried being vegan for awhile and I believe I was the healthiest then I’ve ever been in my life. I read about it and did it carefully — didn’t make the mistake of simply eliminating animal foods from my diet.

But it was tough to maintain that, for two reasons. One is that to take in adequate protein I had to cook long and carefully and use combinations of ingredients that are not regularly put together in our meat-obsessed part of the world. So once I went out the door to work or anywhere else I could rarely find anything I could really eat, and when I did there were so few choices that I had two repeat the same two or three things all the time and the boredom factor set in and became a real problem. In other words, I couldn’t spend my life just cooking my unusual diet, and I was all alone with what I was doing so the situation became impossible.

The other reason was that I realized in the late 1970s that I am hypoglycemic. When blood sugar drops I have found that the fix is a small dose of good quality protein, followed by unprocessed (whole) carbohydrates to help maintain the balance. Beyond my front door protein was, and is today, mostly offered as animal flesh; and carbs are mostly offered as processed foods that I believe actually aggravate hypoglycemia. So I out in the world I couldn’t maintain my blood sugar level as a vegan. Unfortunately, my hypoglycemia didn’t resolve in spite of my best dietary attempts to shift it and I have had to deal with it ever since.

My compromise, with continual regret: I do not eat mammals, but do eat fish, fowl and seafood and legume+whole grain entrées whenever I can find them. I do my best to get my animal flesh from humane and organic sources — for example, I go to considerable lengths to find free range and organic chicken. If I can find only EITHER free range or organic, I choose free range. The chickens have got to have some kind of a life.

brebis, pulses are another word for legumes.