Donald Watson
18 August 2005

This post over at vegblog reminded me that I wanted to write an entry about an interview I read with Donald Watson in the latest Veg News.

For those of you who don't know, Donald Watson was the first to coin the term vegan back in 1944, and he started the Vegan Society in the UK. He's turning 95 next month, is still active in the vegan community, and still goes hiking (if that alone isn't a good advertisement for a vegan diet I don't know what is).

In the interview he comes across as being very sensible about veganism, yet of course compassionate. His six reasons for veganism are "it's humane, it's healthy, it's esthetic, it's pleasant, it's economical, and it's sustainable." He says other great things during the interview:

I thought yesterday ... the biggest industry in the world ... is animal exploitation, which is the one thing that veganism is opposing. Not just farming, but ... making [clothing] and everything else: medicines, vivisection, everything that comes from animals. And ... probably the second biggest industry in the world ... is the healing industry.

To a large extent man's illness comes from his trying to turn himself into something he never was intended to be, a carnivore or a parasite. If they are directly connected we are really on to something big. Aren't we? I should think mainly to my conviction that man is biologically not a carnivore or a parasite. I'm thinking particularly of milk drinking. We've got over 500 different mammals throughout the world and man is the only one who takes milk throughout life. All the others drink it as infants, then they're weaned and it's not available. It's only man who is capable of exploiting the reproductive nipple system of cows and goats and other animals. As a general system it wouldn't work. And although Nature gives us lots of examples of carnivores and vegetarians, it gives us no examples of lacto-carnivores or lacto-vegetarians. These are freak groups that never could have been intended as part of the natural scene.

I love how he makes dairy milk drinkers look like the freaks! It's great. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this interview with a vegan pioneer, even though some of the questions that he was asked were a little strange. Even so, the interview is interesting because it gives us a little perspective on the development of veganism throughout the 20th century.

  Posted by Jenna Torres    Permalink    Filed under: Opinion
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