The Evolution: From Animal-Loving Child to Intersectional Vegan Activist

Gillian Meghan Walters, founder of Animal Voices Vancouver

For as long as I can remember I have had a spiritual connection to animals. In conversation or in silence they would listen to me, and I to them, a reciprocal unconditional love. As a child I dreamed of one day becoming a Jacques Cousteau or a Dian Fossey and living side by side with animals. This innate bond with animals allowed me, at a young age, to see through the cloud of secrecy covering their oppression.

When I was a young person, my body wanted to dance, my mind wanted to dream, and my heart wanted to love unconditionally. However, my creative expression was discouraged by verbal and physical messaging: the rolling of my mother’s eyes and various boundary violations. The institutionalized educational system reinforced the suppression of my unique self by maintaining spaces that were not conducive to self-directed creative thinking or exploration. Accompany this with twelve years of social bullying, and I learned to believe that my whole body and every act of my expression was wrong. The trauma of an extinguished self later led to addiction, where I could soothe my anguish and at times feel a false sense of power. But addiction would bring sexual, physical, and emotional violence that increased my powerlessness and paralleled the objectification that I witnessed with animals.

1970s Vancouver Island, British Columbia

A few years after my birth in Vancouver, British Columbia, my father found an acre of land in a remote area of Vancouver Island. This decision to root our family of four in a rural community paved the way for my deep connection to and love of nature. I remember at the age of four I stood wide-eyed watching our fawn boxer dog Taffy give birth to eight pups in our one-room cabin. We kept Hannibal from the litter and had a steady stream of stray cats, kittens, and rabbits over the years. My dad insisted on keeping all of our animals outside, but I can remember many times pleading for him to bring them inside. Whenever he let me curl up with them in front of the woodstove, all was well in my world. I spent most of my early childhood outside playing hide-and-seek through the bushes and trees, pretending I was swimming with dolphins in the summer sea, naming worms, rescuing birds, and studying salamanders.

I, like most children of the era, was taught to believe that we needed to consume certain species of animals. We gorged ourselves on their flesh and secretions, wore their bodies for fashion, gazed at them behind metal bars, applauded for them as they swam around in tiny pools, cheered as they performed in movies and the circus, and used products that had been tested on them. The myth that humans must consume animal flesh to be healthy was perpetuated by a well-engineered system. The animal agriculture industry lobbied the government, and the educational system preserved the myth through lunch programs and the Canada Food Guide, which told us to consume three to four servings of meat and dairy products daily. What I didn’t learn from family traditions or the school system was reinforced by the media, which manipulated the public into believing that eating and wearing animals was normal, glamorous, and entertaining. Saturday-morning cartoons were punctuated with TV commercials that told us “Milk does a body good” and everywhere that animals were exploited, the public saw images of kid-friendly cartoon animals. Like any young vulnerable mind, I soaked this all up like a sponge, and it became normalized.

I was raised on the typical northwestern diet in which there was a never-ending supply of milk. My sister and I would take turns standing by the open fridge door as we guzzled milk from the container. Running out of milk in our house was like running out of gas—panic ensued, and someone would have to run immediately to the store before it closed. When we occasionally got milk from our neighbor’s cow, I remember watching her being milked one day, staring at the cow’s teats being forcefully and rhythmically pulled and squeezed, the liquid squirting out with such force it hit the metal bucket like a drumbeat. When my neighbor turned to me and asked if I wanted to try, I believe that my hesitancy to answer and the discomfort I felt was the first sign of my consciousness rising. It did not feel or look right, and my young body knew it.

Family dinners spotlighted various animals cooked in various ways. The more expensive meat was reserved for special occasions. On these days my mother would cook all day in her apron, as if the turkey, roast beef, or ham was the reason we were celebrating. I remember never liking the smell of meat permeating the entire house. When I made the connection years later that it represented injustice, betrayal, and horror, that smell became even more unbearable. But I didn’t speak about the anguish I was feeling. Instead I kept silent, shutting off a part of me that wanted to scream.

There were times when I became conflicted because of the messages I was being fed through my parents, school, and the media, and I could intuitively feel that something was not right. There were specific instances when I felt unsettled by my connection with animals and food, like my neighbor’s cow, the teacher who revealed after we ate the spaghetti dinner that the sauce was made with deer meat, and the relatives we visited who made a dinner of rabbit stew. But it was the heart-wrenching screams coming from our neighbor’s yard one day that broke through the surface of my social conditioning around food. I knew the neighbors across the road had a pig farm, but I never emotionally connected this to the hot dogs and pork chops I had been eating and enjoying for years. I will never forget those screams I heard that day that began my declaration to never eat meat again. But as a child I had no safe spaces to express these feelings, which led me to feel isolated in this awakening and confused as to why my friends and family were not as angry as I was. I felt completely alone.

Coming of Age and Questioning Systems

Punk rock was my savior in high school. Anarchy fit perfectly into my rebellion from school, peers, teachers, parents, and the system. For the first time my feelings that were simmering just below the surface had a place to be unleashed in the music, the fashion, and the attitude. When I was seventeen, my parents stood in the driveway, waving goodbye as I left home. With a skateboard and a red electric guitar, I headed to a big city where I met other like-minded people and experienced an array of cuisines for the first time—Japanese, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, African, and Caribbean. It was at that time that I became aware of PETA, and I versed myself in knowing everything I could about animal cruelty. When I saw images of tigers and elephants forced to perform in the circus, gorillas isolated behind bars, lions and bears being hunted, and monkeys in laboratories being tortured, I could resonate with the agony, the loneliness, and the aching for someone to notice. They were innocent and taken advantage of like I was. Like me, they were powerless, and no one was noticing.

The freedom I initially sought from leaving home was bittersweet. At twenty-two years old I hit rock bottom: addicted to heroin, homeless, penniless, and gravely ill. My childhood dreams of becoming a marine biologist, a veterinarian, and a dancer were gone. I entered a sixteen-week addiction-treatment program for women. While many in the house were complaining of the vegetarian menu, I was secretly jumping for joy. I believe that the vegetarian food was an important factor that allowed for my success during treatment (along with the secret access to my Prince CD that I fell asleep to at night). Knowing that I could do the most important emotional work of my life in a home that did not serve dead animals as food was incredibly important for my emotional safety. My spiritual journey in recovery allowed me to delve deep and find my true self again. The treatment program was my first introduction to feminism, self-love, and empowerment. For the first time I was learning the truth about the history and the systems perpetuating racism, sexism, and homophobia. I came to realize through my own curiosity and search for the truth that I had been fed a lie. Government-funded programs had created policies that oppressed humans and other animals, and the media was responsible for reinforcing our dissociation though language and imagery. The cultural narrative denied the horrific truth of the settler colonialism that to this day continues to oppress the indigenous peoples and the earth. The history I had been taught, even at the university level, continued to leave out people of color.

Fresh out of treatment, I came upon the work of Carol J. Adams and read her book The Sexual Politics of Meat like it was my bible. Her words spoke to me in a way similar to what I had experienced when reading Charlotte Kasl’s writing on feminism and addiction. Each passage resonated on a personal level, and I began to see the interconnectedness in all oppressive systems. I wanted to know why some humans were privileged and others oppressed because of gender, skin color, ability, and sexual preference. I was also aching to know why certain species of animal were protected and cherished, while others were ignored and exploited. For years I viewed animal rights and human rights as two separate social justice issues until I began to take a critical look at intersectionality following the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles and became interested in studying race relations. As I prepared myself for a volunteer overseas cross-cultural work experience program, I came face-to-face with defending my veganism at a pretraining camp. I learned overseas that being vegan was easy compared to the challenge of working through layers of white privilege. I felt that educating myself on the suffering of animals and eating a plant-based diet during this time was all that I could do and all that I had time for. The thought of becoming more active in the animal rights movement rose and fell. I basically lived my veganism in isolation, attempting to find community at times, and then being disappointed when it was absent. I yearned for a deeper connection.

Motherhood, Blackfish, and the Liberation Pledge

The birth of my son came unexpectedly early. Nine weeks before his due date, my water broke, but I waited five days in the hospital before labor pains began. He was not breathing when he entered the world and was rushed to the ICU to be given oxygen. I remember feeling alone and powerless, with an emotional pain so great it tore me apart. Even though I was able to see my son hours after his birth, I felt the wound of having him taken from me before I could look into his eyes, feel his skin against mine, and feel his heart beat. That panic and fear the second my baby was taken away stayed with me years after his birth in the form of postpartum PTSD. I think of the baby animals who are repeatedly ripped from their mothers shortly after birth. Mother cows who have carried their babies for nine months and are then separated from them, deprived of any bonding, are often heard bellowing for them and have been known to chase after the farmer who has taken them away.

After I was able to sit up, I made my way to a small room and sat alone trying to figure out how to attach the metal machine and suction cups to my swollen breasts. It felt incredibly unnatural, but I knew my baby would soon have the nourishment designed for him. The mother cow is not so lucky. After birth she is hooked up to machines that stretch and pull her, stealing her baby’s nourishment and packaging it for human consumption.

Giving birth and raising my son as a single mother had me reflecting on my own childhood. I wanted to provide my son with what I never had: the space to learn the truth and the opportunities to question everything. I wanted to empower him to lead by curiosity and to be guided by his inner wisdom. Raising him vegan was natural; living without a vegan community, family acceptance, and resources was difficult. When my son was young, I noticed a lack of vegan children’s books and a further lack of books that reflected his image, that of a little boy with big curly hair and brown skin. The absence of racial representation and veganism in children’s literature drove me to write and illustrate two children’s books. My intent was to document and share Kingston’s compassionate work, to celebrate his voice, and to normalize the words “vegan” and “activist.”

As a white vegan single mother raising a vegan mixed-race child, I was prepared to have ongoing conversations about inclusion and race. Four years in the public-school system amplified the need for safe spaces, and so I made the decision to take my power back through home learning, where I designed a curriculum grounded in peaceful communication, empathy, black history and indigenous history, social justice, veganism, art, spirituality, and movement.

Blackfish aired on CNN in 2013. I watched it over and over and sobbed uncontrollably at the shame I felt as a human being. I knew the story of Tilikum—when I was nine my parents had taken my sister and I to see him at Sealand of the Pacific in British Columbia. I remember watching the thin young woman in her wetsuit joyously directing the whale to splash the crowd. My body felt a combination of excitement and fear. He was so big, and the little pool could barely contain him. But the thoughts passed quickly as I succumbed to the energy of the cheering crowd.

Watching Blackfish, I was subjected to real-life footage of Tilikum being kidnapped from his mother. Her screams as she chased the kidnappers’ boat trying to get her son back was unbearable. A rage inside me grew that I could no longer ignore. I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote with tears falling onto the paper. “Every moment from this day forward I will use my voice and my body to do whatever it takes to stop this injustice.” I felt the anguish in Tilikum’s mother’s screams. Watching humans take her baby away while she tried desperately to get him back was almost too much to bear. I could have sat with this shame and anguish as I had in the past, but for some reason this moment moved me to take action. For the next two years I worked alongside other activists to push for a ban on holding cetaceans in captivity both locally and countrywide. It worked, and history was made on May 16, 2017, when the Vancouver Parks Board voted 6–1 to ban the captivity of cetaceans at the Vancouver Aquarium. Then, in July 2019, Bill S-203 passed, banning cetacean captivity in Canada.

Nothing has propelled me closer to the type of activist I always wanted to be than taking the Liberation Pledge. At an activist potluck, I noticed a silver fork bracelet on a friend’s wrist, and I leaned into a conversation he had already begun with another activist about the pledge. The pledge goes beyond living vegan. It is the refusal to sit where animals are being eaten. Something about what I was hearing propelled me with an urgency to immediately take the pledge. As I headed home, I was consumed with feelings of fear and anxiety. As I prepared a written statement, my body began to shake. I had for decades silenced myself around family dinner tables. Now, years of sitting in spaces where I would have to disassociate to carry on a conversation would come to an end. I took a deep breath and pressed the share button on my Facebook post. Immediately someone wrote me back—an acquaintance from middle school I had not seen or heard from for over thirty years. It became apparent why I was so scared. The pledge would disrupt the narrative that society was fixed to, and family, friends, and strangers would respond with immediate judgment, implying that I was pushing my beliefs on them.

Within the past couple of years, after standing my ground in difficult emotional conversations, I have observed my family coming around. For my fiftieth birthday, my sister made an entire vegan dinner and cake! My niece proudly stated that my birthday gift was vegan and not tested on animals. Each time I have visited they have not eaten animals in the house.

Turning Fifty

When I turned fifty, I started reflecting on my previous years and the overwhelming urge to be everywhere and do everything for the animals, even if it meant that I would suffer physically, emotionally, and financially. I asked myself how I could be the most effective and balanced animal activist. My inquiry led me to think about what gave me the greatest passion as a child—animals and my camera. With my camera fully charged, I headed toward a dairy farm. As I wandered around unnoticed, I witnessed firsthand rows of crates housing individual calves, some bellowing and others reaching their heads out. I observed their mothers one hundred yards away. My eyes connected to one calf in particular, number 3874. I bent down and he suckled on my hand. His eyes conveyed yearning for his mother—for her nourishment, comfort, and protection. His individual life flashed before my eyes. He would be murdered soon unless I took him out of that crate right there. Looking around, I saw at least fifty more crates with fifty more individual lives soon to be taken. I felt like the world was spinning, and I was physically shaking.

I gave 3874 the name “Om” and poured my feelings through my paintbrush onto a large acrylic canvas. My interaction with “Om” haunted me for weeks. I couldn’t sleep, as all I could think about was how he would die if I didn’t stop it. “Om” had given me my answer. I would focus my energy on exposing the truth about the dairy industry through photography, and so my new project, MummyMOO, was created.

There has been a great deal of progress made since I first decided to stop eating animals decades ago. But animals are still being exploited, tortured, and murdered, and the exploiters are fighting hard to keep it that way. Eating and promoting a plant-based diet is not enough. Action is needed on a massive scale to bring about animal liberation. Acknowledging the unbelievable scale of the atrocities committed against sentient beings is a very heavy burden to bear. Bearing this alone can be devastating, and both self-care and balance are required. Finding an inclusive community committed to self-reflection and transparency and trained in nonviolent communication is equally necessary. What drives me to fight for total animal liberation is that I was able to turn my embodiment of powerlessness into powerful action.

In doing research for this essay, I asked my mother if she remembered the name of our neighbor’s cow. She responded, “Oh the one we ate?” I gasped, shocked by this information. She shared that our neighbor had sent us packages of “roast beef” after we had finished buying milk from her. At fifty years old I was as shocked as I probably would have been if she told me at age seven. If she had told me at the time, I wonder if I would have had the courage to stand up and say “I won’t eat this.” Would I have made the connection between nonhuman animals and food sooner?