Becoming the person I am today has taught me many things, not only about animal-related issues and myself, but also about other people, namely friends.  I’ve come to realize that when you become as entrenched in a belief or way of life as I am, your true friends are the ones who have enough of an open mind to accept you for who you have become, and are willing to let you be.  I can say I’ve lost some friends over the past few years, one or two of which can probably be attributed to my vegan lifestyle and their disagreement with it.  I can also say that on my music magazine’s Facebook page, we’ve lost “friends” because we would post about an animal issue and someone felt the need to debate us on it as opposed to simply letting us promote what we feel.  Everyone, from strangers on the internet to friends and family, feels the need to start up an argument about my eating habits or my feelings toward other species.  I don’t incite these arguments; people just seem to feel they need to defend their lifestyles and so they’ll often ask why I am the way I am and proceed to give reasons that I’m wrong.  If I don’t push my opinions on them, why do they feel the need to debate me in the first place?  I really think that it’s because they feel the need to defend themselves around me because I live a radically different life from theirs. 

            People are really interesting.  They’ll say a delicate ecosystem of small mammals and plants is at risk because of, for instance, a deer overpopulation that eats all of the vegetation.  As a response to the problem, brought about by urban sprawl and predation, they decide to cull the deer.  What I see here is a species that needs to look in the mirror.  We are the ultimate invasive species.  We are killing this planet wherever we go, from the cutting down of forests to the breaking apart of mountains to the dumping of waste in the oceans.  It must be something to be another animal, to see Homo-sapiens encroach and destroy everything in their path, to see their population grow out of control to the point that they may not be able to sustain themselves any longer. 

            I have to laugh when I hear people talk about a fragile ecosystem in distress or being threatened by an overpopulation of another species, all the while dumping trash into landfills and polluting the oceans with plastic that kills, and destroying the atmosphere with smokestacks and taking up valuable land to house cages upon cages of animals that will be destroyed inhumanely for their fur, and covering everything in concrete.  Any chance humans get to plow over a forest for farmland or for a shopping center or for more homes, in an effort to sustain the ever-growing population, they take it.  Yet they don’t seem to see the destruction left in the wake of these actions.  But the deer you must fear, they will eat away the delicate balance and so they must be hunted and controlled – yet another thing humans never learn: try to control one species with your mathematical equations and graphs, but it never works, and another species is always thrown off balance.  You can’t do what Nature can do, and it’s not your job.