Mittens

Vanderleun quotes and links a slice-of-life-today saga from Reddit.

My (22M) vegan girlfriend (21F) wants me to get rid of my cat : However, after a lot of talking and planning, my GF sat me down and dropped a bombshell on me. She said that with this next phase of the relationship, she did not see a future with me unless I was willing to give away Mittens. She said that she believed owning a cat is unconscionable for vegans, because they hunt mice and eat meat, and because the very act of owning a pet is a violation of vegan principles… [Reddit upvotes for this announcement, 27,000]

My (22M) vegan girlfriend (21F) wants me to get rid of my cat. UPDATE : So, we broke up, obviously. I would never, ever give up my cat Mittens. Many users said that this situation was about control, not veganism, and looking back, I do see a pattern of control on my GFs part. I was blind to it I guess. [Reddit Upvotes for this decision, 75,000]

Daily Mail:

A left-wing Dutch vegan who campaigned against cowbells in the Swiss village where she lives has had a request for a Swiss passport thrown out after annoying the locals.

Nancy Holten, who was born in the Netherlands but moved to Switzerland at the age of eight, is a fluent speaker of Swiss German and has children who are Swiss nationals.

And she wanted a Swiss passport herself, but was refused after locals who were consulted about her request said they were ‘fed up’ of her challenging Swiss traditions by campaigning against the use of cow bells.

The campaign against cow bells by the 42-year-old vegan and animal-rights activist has made her unpopular in the Alpine confederation.

And now the majority of residents from Gipf-Oberfrick in the canton of Aargau have successfully blocked her second attempt to get a Swiss passport.

The resident’s committee argued that if she does not accept Swiss traditions and the Swiss way of life, she should not be able to become an official national.

She said of her situation: ‘The sound that cow bells make is a hundred decibel. It is comparable with a pneumatic drill. We also would not want such a thing hanging close to our ears?’

She also railed against the weight of the famous cow bells.

Nancy complained: ‘The bells, which the cows have to wear when they walk to and from the pasture, are especially heavy.

‘The animals carry around five kilograms around their neck. It causes friction and burns to their skin.’

The Dutchwoman, who describes herself as a freelance journalist, model and drama student, has also campaigned against a number of other Swiss traditions like hunting, pig races and the noisy church bells in town.
It’s a tradition for cows to wear bells in her Switzerland town. The bell is standard for alpine cattle when left to graze in alpine meadows.

In 2015 the villagers successfully stopped her application for naturalisation in a referendum.

While the town authorities wanted to give her the Swiss nationality, 144 out of 206 citizens voted against the plan.

This time her application was denied again, with locals especially angry about the increasing media coverage Holten seeks for railing against Swiss traditions.

Holten said she does not have anything against Swiss traditions but in the end only cares about animal welfare.

Local politician Tanja Suter agreed with the majority of the town’s citizens and said Holten had a ‘big mouth’, saying she did not deserve to get a Swiss passport ‘if she irritates us and does not respect our traditions’. …

The case has now been transferred to the Cantonal government in Aargau, which can overrule the decision and can still grant her a Swiss passport despite the objections of the locals.

Local residents in Switzerland often have a say in citizenship applications, which are decided by the cantons and towns where the applicants live rather than federal government.

About 20 per cent of the Swiss population is estimated to be foreign.

(click on image for larger version)

First they came for your morphine and cocaine. You don’t remember that because they banned those over a hundred years ago. Then they came for alcohol, but they were forced to give it back. They outlawed marijuana, “the killer weed” which produced “reefer madness” allegedly turning its smokers into violent maniacs just a bit before my generation came along. Then, they went after tobacco. Try lighting a cigarette today in public buildings anywhere in an American city.

Has anybody stopped to wonder what’s next on Puritanism’s hit list? Kelly Freston can tell you.

When I think about the effect of animal products on human health, I’m reminded of how quickly we’ve done a national about face on tobacco, and I look forward to the day when the Times magazine has a similar apology from someone who promoted animal products — because the evidence is in and it continues to grow: Animal products kill a lot more Americans than tobacco does.

The West’s three biggest killers — heart disease, cancer, and stroke — are linked to excessive animal product consumption, and vegetarians have much lower risks of all three. Vegetarians also have a fraction of the obesity and diabetes rates of the general population — of course, both diseases are at epidemic levels and are only getting worse.

But much more important than the vegetarian community’s general statistics are what can be done with the right vegetarian diet: For some years now, doctors have been not just preventing, but even reversing, heart disease using a low-fat vegetarian diet.

That’s right — the disease that kills almost as many Americans as everything else combined can be not just prevented, but reversed, with a low fat plant-based diet, as documented by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn in Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
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They’ve evidently converted that confirmed sensualist Bill Clinton. His video impressed me actually. He has lost a lot of weight, and it isn’t difficult to believe that a vegan diet would return most of us to our weight levels in high school (if not in Auschwitz). Trying that diet to lose weight does make a certain amount of sense, and losing weight is undoubtedly good for reducing the progression of heart disease. I’m not sure that I believe that eating like a vegan idiot will actually reverse heart disease though. I did buy Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s book and may give that diet a bit of a try.