The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Deborah Taylor-Hollis

Angry vegans picked the wrong target

Things constantly turn into screaming matches over "who's the murderer." I can remember a time when people didn't take umbrage at what others chose to eat--and they certainly didn't shout them into oblivion.

Unfortunately, all public arguments end up in a face-off these days between the two parties involved, with one climbing the sacred towers and going for the opposition's throat. I've never seen anyone win this way.

The way things are going in the world, we will eventually get down to fisticuffs over the proper way to hang the toilet paper, and one side will invariably call the other "butchers" akin to Nazis and have Sinead O'Connor shave her head again to protest the fate of all those poor cotton plants and pulp woods, their vestigial eyes forever turned the wrong direction in the bathroom.

However, as usual, I digress. The vegans have come after me with a vengeance in their letters. Apparently, I must hate animals and have no right to open my opinionated mouth.

These folks picked the wrong target, for while most have spent their days yelling and writing letters to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, I am a card-carrying animal-rights activist with the educational bona fides and physical scars to prove it.

While some are screamers with nothing but their personal choices to show for whatever efforts they've made, I've got a degree from the HSUS (Humane Society of the U.S.) and am responsible for a decade of change in an entire city.

I was a full-time animal-control officer, using the power of citation and arrest to get some truly sick people away from animals they injured and into jails and rehab programs. I have put my life on the line to save the injured, abused and starving. I've had weapons trained on me by cruel deviants. I doubt that any vegan out there can top my records for hands-on animal saving.

I have scars from falling off roofs capturing opossums and down wells helping wild herds of horses, and getting stuck in pipes rescuing drowning cats. I have had to face my biggest fear (heights) to go up an open six-story warehouse for a barn owl. No safety nets for me, either.

I saved a malnourished heron that had fallen to earth in a parking lot--while he tried to peck my eyes out with that long bill in what he viewed as self-defense. He lived because I not only brought him in all right but was the only one who would go buy the food and feed him while he continued going for my face for the next three weeks.

I have debased myself among laughing fellow police to drive goslings to safe refuge--I held the goslings while sitting on the back of a truck as their mother followed along behind me in the street. I've had bulls charge me after they'd made their way out into traffic through rotten pasture fences. They lived, and their owner got the worst fines ever levied in our county for bad fencing. I gave up my free time and safety to help rescue animals during the mid-1980s Tuolomne fire that turned Sonora into Dante's Inferno, when no one else wanted to do it.

I've done my time on the front lines. And I have made my personal choices about what I will and won't eat after having toured every type of food farm in California.

I've marched with Bob Barker against animal abuse. I even supported the early-'80s break-in at the Menlo Park Veterans Affairs Administration when activists, unable to get support via legal avenues, brought out "stolen" proof of dogs being starved, mutilated and left without care.

I've had to care for many of those kinds of pets myself and had to cry over more than a few who I couldn't save--and I still have nightmares that are nobody's business. So I don't think hearing from some safe, moral rationalists about my eating habits will change my mind about how I feel or how others should view their dining habits.

I could tell you about puppy mills that would make you cry. I could tell you about cock fights I've broken up, rabies investigations I've tracked down, irresponsible people and scum. I could also tell you about moral animal breeders with loving, clean homes, ranchers who spend more on vets for their stock than on themselves and a meat industry that has some shining points of light.

But it's easier to say that as someone who was part of the solution for years, I have more than enough justification for my choices. I can discuss the issues without getting upset anymore, and I know that in a perfect universe, we wouldn't have these canine teeth that rip and tear meat so well. However, nothing can be changed by throwing insults or spraying furs with paint.

And I'm still eating turkey with a vengeance. It's Willy's free range--I've seen the ranch where the turkeys roam free and wouldn't mind that reincarnation myself. It would fulfill the '60s mantra to "live fast, die young and leave a good-lookin' corpse."

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