More reasons to go vegan...

If you can make it through this Animal Acres video without getting choked up, you're a stronger person than I am. It shows how animals are meant to live - in freedom, with fresh air and wide pastures and lots of trees - and it shows how so many of them end up living: Short, awful lives in the factory farm system and in other industries that manufacture animal products.

We can only hope the day will come when animals are no longer treated as commodities, as so many "things" that are factored into the bottom line of profit and loss statements of big businesses. Each one of these creatures, whether they're the tiny minority who end up at animal sanctuaries and spared from slaughter, or the ones who have their throats severed and the lifeblood drained out of their terrified, kicking bodies, is a precious creature that deserves to live a long, full life.

I will soon mark the one year anniversary of going vegan. Why did I go vegan? Because of animals like the ones in this video. They are beautiful. Each one is a poem. Each one is a living, breathing example of the sacredness and tenuousness of life. We humans have no right to kill them, perform tests on them, turn them into clothing, separate them from their loved ones, or eat their flesh or secretions or any other part of them.

I am not always convinced that the day will come when human beings wise up. But I am convinced that only the hard-hearted can look at a video like this one and not feel some sorrow, or flutterings of compassion, or perhaps even a sense of empathic rapport with the living, breathing, beautiful beings captured in these scenes.