Animal Rights

Greetings!

(For those of you who have meandered here from my corporate pages: don't panic. My personal activities and beliefs do not spill over into my professional life.)

Welcome to my Animal Rights home page. Both Wanda (my wife) and I are avowed vegans and Animal Rightists.

What follows is:

a brief description of myself

a description of my organization Animal Rights Counterculture, which provides a repository of original artistic works pertaining to Animal Rights

an invitation to you to submit your Animal Rights and vegetarian songs and stories to me for inclusion on these pages

my favorite links to other web sites

No Christmas Turkey

I became vegetarian on Christmas, 1984. I guess the idea had been subconsciously turning around in my head for some time. Two events finally caused me to snap. The first was the semester I worked in The Tartan Grill during my Freshman year at Carnegie-Mellon University. At the end of the day, I was covered with hamburger grease from head to toe and the kitchen floor was so greasy and slimy that you could almost skate on it like a skating rink.

The second was the Christmas Turkey on my mother's dinner table. I looked at that bird, looked at the vegetable side dishes that she had prepared, then announced to her that I wouldn't be eating the turkey then or ever again.

I would like to say that I kept my word, but this isn't true. Several days later, I went through "meat withdrawal" at my Father's place and ironically, frozen turkey was the quickest thing he could find to satisfy my craving. Fortunately, my craving for meat subsided after that.

My reasons for turning vegetarian, which still holds true today, is the conviction that:

our bodies don't need meat and therefore,

it is unnecessary to take the life of another animal for food purposes.

A detailed elaboration of these points is beyond the scope of this introduction.

In 1988, I came into contact with the Triangle Vegetarian Society and the North Carolina Network for Animals. These contacts transformed from a passive vegetarian to an activist. To this day, I am thankful for the meaning this cause has given my life and the true friends I've gotten from it.

Animal Rights Counterculture

My main battle in this cause is to help unleash a slew of Animal Rights and vegetarian songs and stories into the world. There is so much nonsense out there, both in the realm of children's and adult literature, that the only way to combat this is to create written and musical works of our own and allow free use and distribution of these works while retaining our copyright privileges to prevent unwanted tampering.

My organization, Animal Rights Counterculture, is devoted to this task.

Songs and Stories for Us

The original songs and stories at the Animal Rights Counteculture site are examples of creative works I'd like to see unleashed into the world. Click here to peruse the contents.