How I Went Veg

by Josh Balk

VegNews, Nov./Dec. 2004, page 88

Growing up, I cared about one thing: baseball. I played every day I could, and when I wasn't on the field, I was watching games on TV. The highlight of my childhood years was the annual summer trip my father, brother, and I took to Chicago to watch the Cubs play at Wrigley Field. Even my first experience with activism involved baseball, when, as a 12-year-old, I donned a Cubs uniform and successfully gathered enough signatures for our local Philadelphia cable provider to add WGN (the Chicago station that aired Cubs games) to our channel line-up.

One night, after a hard-fought game in the August before my senior year of high school, I joined my teammates for what was to be a relaxing night watching a movie. Little did I know, that evening would change my life.

Like many immature jocks have done before, we rented the sickest, most disturbing documentary we could find: Faces of Death. This gruesome video is a montage of horrific deaths, including suicides, murders, tragic accidents, and, surprising to us all, footage from slaughterhouses.

For the first time, I saw the look of abject fear in the faces of the animals as they were about to have a bolt shot into their heads. I heard them scream as they had their necks slit open while they were fully conscious. I watched as the animals who were next in line fought to save themselves from the fate they witnessed before their own eyes. I turned away from the screen and looked down at my dog Hector as he rested his big head on my foot. In that moment, I realized that I had been making an unfounded distinction between the animals I love and the animals I eat, treating one with compassion and respect, while dousing the other with ketchup. The hot dog I had devoured after the game was the last time I ate meat.

As a junior in college and a retired baseball player still nursing a shoulder injury, I attended the Liberation Now! conference in Washington, D.C. The first speaker I heard was Miyun Park, the president of Compassion Over Killing (COK). She detailed the abuses inherent in the egg industry: chicks having parts of their beaks burned off without painkiller, the forced starvation of hens to manipulate the laying cycle, the discarding of male chicks into trash bags as soon as they're born, and the utter misery of laying hens trapped in battery cages so small they cannot even flap their wings. Her words inspired me to take that final step and give up eating eggs for good.

Today, with the same passion I had for baseball, I try to reduce the amount of suffering farmed animals endure by encouraging people to adopt animal-friendly diets. When I talk with people who aren't yet vegan or meet with restaurant owners to get more vegan options on their menus, I try to remember how I evolved from a meat-eating jock to a vegan activist. I didn't change how I regarded animals because people yelled at me or were self-righteous. Rather, I saw the abuse of animals in footage from slaughterhouses and factory farms, and was touched by an activist who brought the stories of those animals to life. It's a lesson from which we can all learn.

Josh Balk is the outreach coordinator for Compassion Over Killing, www.cok.net.