Voices for Animal Liberation by Brittany Michelson

Author:Brittany Michelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510751286
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2020-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

©Jo-Anne McArthur

IV

Campaigns & Outreach: Anchors of Change

How to Speak about Animal Rights: What I Learned from Working in Corporate Sales

Alex Bez, founder and director of Amazing Vegan Outreach

I am the founder of Amazing Vegan Outreach (AVO), a nonprofit organization that began offering professional learning and development services to animal rights activists in early 2018. The events that led me to this point in my life began back in 2012. At the time, I was working as a corporate sales manager when one day I found out that a colleague of mine was vegan. Curiosity got the best of me and so I walked into her office to find out why. She recommended I watch the documentary Forks Over Knives. After watching it, I began to understand the health benefits of eating plant-based foods, and more importantly, the repercussions of eating animal-based products. This sparked even more curiosity within me, and I spent the next few months doing a lot of research. Eventually, I came across the documentary Earthlings.

Watching Earthlings was a pivotal moment in my life. Learning how we treat the most vulnerable beings on the planet broke my heart. I wept when I witnessed what we, as humans, are capable of doing to other living and feeling beings. As the credits rolled at the end of the documentary, I made the easiest decision of my life. I would no longer participate in the exploitation, torture, and death of other animals. To be honest, I wouldn’t have considered myself a huge animal lover at that time. However, the concepts of justice, equality, and freedom had been instilled in me from a very young age. It had never dawned on me that we were discriminating against other living beings just because they happen to look different than us. I felt extremely guilty that I had participated in the unimaginable suffering of others for over thirty years.

Although I would never have imagined it before being vegan, finding delicious food to eat was actually one of the easiest aspects of veganism. The hardest part was coming to grips with the reality that I lived in a society responsible for, and seemingly apathetic to, the suffering of nonhuman animals. The amount of judgment and mockery I received for caring deeply about this issue was much more difficult to stomach than a burrito packed with beans instead of meat.

Reflecting on my pre-vegan life, I recognize that I didn’t always have the strongest drive to help others. In fact, for the majority of my adult life, my strongest motivation was to further my career and make as much money as possible. Working in sales, I was accustomed to generous paychecks, and at the age of thirty-five, I was earning triple what I would have considered a respectable salary. I had enough money to buy almost anything I wanted: a new BMW, a large downtown apartment, expensive clothes, lengthy vacations—basically everything I had envisioned up until that point. I was on pace for an early and comfortable retirement.

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