Bunny behavior 101....sleeping.....

when a bunny feels relatively safe, sleeping positions can sometimes be so relaxed that they may appear to be alarming. Stella (the bunny) presents an example:



The next video clip shows Bailey being so relaxed that his guardian becomes concerned:



Think of all the bunnies that might be able to sleep more relaxed if human animals didn't want to eat them, use them in laboratories, breed them for profit or wear their skin.

Definition of ethical vegan:

An ethical vegan has a vegan diet and rejects consuming animal products but also does not wear or use any animal products. An ethical vegan rejects the commodification of nonhumans as property. An ethical vegan is committed to the abolition of animal exploitation. Moreover, ethical vegans recognize that an animal-based agriculture harms other humans as well as non-humans and sees the connection between human rights and animal rights. Ethical veganism is the moral baseline of the animal rights movement. Ethical veganism represents a commitment to non-violence in one’s daily living. 

Living as an ethical vegan means a bunny (and other sentient beings) could safely relax around you. If you don't qualify as "relaxed non-human animal safe" yet, get your starter kit now and begin your journey. Once you do, maybe someone like Baily or Stella will drop by for a nap.

When the red, red robin comes........

bringing friends, it can be an interesting event. Over the past few weeks, for the first time in the many years we have lived at this location, robins --- by the hundreds or more -- have been coming near sundown to spend the night in the trees and bushes surrounding our house. It is a noisy and amazing sight. The video is not anything spectacular (my apologies), but if you stay with it all the way through I think you will get a sense of how many of these beautiful animals are gathered into one place.

It is an honor to have their presence and my apologies to all the robins for sometimes disturbing their rest when I arrive home after dark.  Rustling and rather indignant sounding chirps can be heard if anyone moves around in the driveway after dark. Sorry.......

The whole phenomenon is really pretty cool.......thank you robins, one and all, for hanging out around here (not that you care or anything, I am presuming that you are here because this is a good place to sleep right now...enjoy!).

Sometimes, before sleeping......

Many nights before sleeping I think about the animals that are at that moment facing death in a slaughterhouse or about the cows standing in their own feces and breathing ammonia and dust in the feedlots.  I cringe inside at what we humans are doing in pursuit of such trivialities as taste and profit.

I imagine the anguish the mother cow is feeling at the dairy, where her child has been taken from her, after she was forcibly impregnated.  Her baby is taken so all the milk the mother cow produces can go into yogurt, butter, ice cream and profit.  The milk was for her baby not for humans.  I think about how she must feel, about how any parent feels when they cannot care for their child.  The pain and misery make the ice cream not so attractive.

I sometimes think of the chickens trapped in cages, with no room to turn or spread their wings and that have been there all the day long while I was going about my life.  I think about their having been there the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, sometimes for up to 2 years.  This is their whole life, then they are thrown into another cage, trucked to a slaughterhouse and brutally killed.  For an omelet, for an easter egg, for a "nugget", for money.

I do this and sometimes then cannot sleep.  It is not that I couldn't not do it, most of us have developed strategies to avoid thinking uncomfortable thoughts, I do it because I believe it to be respectful to do so.  To be abused, oppressed, tortured and then killed is horrific but for such a thing to occur and no one to think about it and feel bad about it is.....beyond words.

My thoughts are nothing to those beings enduring the obscene treatment being forced upon them by my species but for me to not think those thoughts, for me to push them away and not allow myself to feel pained and sorrowful...........then I too would somehow be a participant in the silent animal holocaust that continues every moment of every day.

It might be that if we humans would allow ourselves to think all the thoughts and feel all the feelings associated with what we do,  some of these horrors might not occur.  In any event what is being done is bad enough, I must not be complicit in it by ignoring my thoughts and avoiding the feelings these disgusting activities elicit.  Even if I sometimes can't sleep.