Please try to be a nicer, kinder person PART 1

Hi everyone,

This is Hugh.
For those of you who don’t know me long, “Hello, and apologies for this. Please bear with me”.
For those of you who I really need to get back to, “Sorry for not keeping in touch more. I can be a bit of a disaster. Please write if you would like.”
And for those of you who know me best, the relationship I have with you is still right where it’s always been - good, bad or so-so. Hopefully though, it’s good and intact.
I’m just sending this out now, because it’s far better than keeping a private rebellion.

I’m actually sending this here email to all my friends and family. I, for one, have been opting out of moral responsibilities long enough, and I think it‘s high time to make some stand. I may fall out with one or more, or all of you over what I’m writing here. If I do, then so be it. I do not intend to cause offense, or seem expectant or judgemental to anybody in any way, so if I do insult or offend you, it’s TOTALLY UNINTENDED.

For everyone, hope you’re all well.


I met a good friend of mine called Shirley in a restaurant in Dublin a month ago. She was ordering vegetarian, I was my usual carnivorous, blood-lusting self. I still possibly had an all too jaundiced view of vegetarians, ironically, seeing them as lacking in real ‘strength’ and being silly. I asked her why she was vegetarian. The one line which stuck with me was when, referring to the incredibly cruel treatment of animals raised for food, “….even in Ireland…”, she said she “…won’t be a part of any of it…”
Her selfless stance just really amazed me, something I wasn’t prepared to do, and I respected her greatly for it. I couldn’t just drift off into apathy this time, the way most human beings do, and it really left a mark on me.
Since that day I actually stopped eating any pig derived products, going on her solitary stance against it, and my own innate feeling that they are such intelligent, social & gentle animals. Something inside was telling me that they were meant for anything other than food.
I had come across pig-loving websites in the last year, before this conversation with Shirley, and pigs struck me as really intelligent, inquisitive, clean & caring souls. One site told the story of ‘Banjo’, a huge boar, who was both gentle as he was defensive of his owners. He was just some ‘ordinary’ breed of pig, big whitish / pink fellow, who could pick any lock supposedly (!), and was a tremendous source of comedy and affection and love to his owners.
Another one of hundreds of stories, shows the pig’s surprising intelligence. A young boy who lived in the country happened to make a pet out of a pig. In the summer when the weather was warm enough, he was able to swim in a local pond. But the family dog used to get very hyper with excitement, and jump on the boy in the water, clawing his back, making it impossible for him to enjoy or even continue swimming. Then one day seeing another repeat of the same dumb situation, his pet sow plopped into the water, and started swimming around between him and the fool of a dog, preventing him from happily jumping all over the boy. She kept a steady vigil of this, until she passed on. She became his life-guard, or life-pig!
And then last night, something again, made me google “Stop eating pigs”, and what I found was absolutely so stunningly horrific & heart-wrenching, that it’s just left me in tears again half the morning.
Due to the nobility of undercover animal rights activists, who no doubt endanger their own personal and social safety, there is a plethora of unbelievably shocking video evidence, of cruelty in factory farms and slaughter houses. They are, in the year 2007, modern day Auschwitz’s. The words ‘cruel‘, ‘sadistic’ and abominable just have no meaning until you actually see , with your own two peepers, the horror for yourself on video footage.

(contd. in Part 2)