My Vegan Journey - Jason King - From Hunter to Animal-People Rights Champion, Part 2 of 2

Jason describes a time when he worked in the animal-people industry and faced a moment of truth. Jason shares another story that led him to quit hunting forever. Although Jason cherishes his altered vegan lifestyle, he bears a profound guilt for his ignorant past and is determined to redeem himself by devoting the rest of his life as a warrior for animal-people.“So, it’s really important to me that everything that I do in my life has to serve some goal towards helping non-human people get liberated from being commodities.”

As a vegan warrior, Jason has taken part in many animal-people rights groups. Jason never misses an opportunity to promote plant-based eating and non-violence towards animal-people. “And so, during several weekends, I was able to facilitate entire vegan menus for the cadets while they were out on training exercises, which is great because I helped to expose a young generation to what it is to eat a plant-based diet. And not only that, they also saw, and they knew I was vegan. I was a visible vegan to them, who was in a position of authority, so I was looked upon as somebody that was important, and so they saw a vegan in an important position.”

He pondered on what it was about humanity that didn’t allow them to recognize their kinship with non-human beings. After several years, he found an answer. “And the thing that it is, is speciesism.” Whether we are aware of it or not, there are many forms of oppression, and society’s traditional treatment of animal-people is a huge injustice. It has often not been spoken of because our view of animal-people as commodities has been ingrained in our language, cultures, and foods for a long time. Jason believes that the key to deconstructing the bias is to change our values and the way we speak and think about animal-people.

“You might have heard me referring to them as persons. In my doing so, I’m changing the dialect and the way we talk about them. And when we talk about them repetitively like that and we insist that they are persons, well, that just becomes the accepted norm. If we do it enough, people will start using that language and then we’ve won. We’ve changed the dynamic of how we refer to them.”