The very best of luck with you going cruelty-free, and please don't beat yourself up if you find that something you have done or eaten wasn't as cruelty-free as you first thought, after all, intentions to live a kind life go a long way and it is a journey where things change as new information come in for you.
Please please please can I ask you kindly to look into where your soya products come from if you purchase soya, because so many vegans rely on soya in the belief that they are doing the right thing by animals (and of course often they ARE doing the right thing), yet SOME soya is produced from plantations grown from knocking down huge swathes of valuable rainforest, and seriously I personally would rather a calf be killed in order for milk than to kill by displacement orangutans and other valuable rainforest animals and plants. Once the rainforest has gone it takes a long time to recover (if allowed).
Some soya is grown ethically but please please please check, as it breaks my heart to see vegans who genuinely care so much about doing the right thing happily (unknowingly) drinking their soya from one of the most cruelty intense sources you can imagine! I do wish vegan sites would mention about the possible cruelty pit-fall of (some) sources of soya on thier sites.
Can I also mention that cruelty-free is not always about killing farm animals, it is about killing animals through intensive agricultural farming and that also includes veggies and grain - farms that have cleared huge swathes of land - sometimes miles - no hedges, no room for wildlife, pesticides and artificial fertilisers, they are like deserts, poison in the water table going into the streams and eventually the sea. Awful, and eventually the soil itself becomes devoid of nutrients. Cruelty free is a journey of trying to find ethical farming methods that do not involve killing wildlife (it's not just about killing cows, sheep, chickens and pigs).
Cruelty-free is about weighing up the environmental impact of the purchases we make too. Some vegan substitutes, such as PVC, are very environmentally unfriendly. Anything produced from plastics made from oil has the potential to come from a very unethical source, again I think many of us here, simply by the fact that we are very caring people, have heard the sad and tragic tales of the tribes-people of South American rainforests being killed and maimed by unscrupulous oil companies, and about those oil companies who want to drill in the precious Arctic.
Dear mods please, if I am pushing things too far or upsetting people please let me know. It is not my intention. Please @
spudsthepiget my intention is not to make you feel guilty about any choices you make or to put you off your path, but it is a journey you are making, and it really is very hard in our modern world to live our lives without harming animals. It can be excedingly difficult to know the impact of our purchases on the animals and the environement and all we can do is learn along the way and be prepared to adjust our thinking and purchases as best as we can.
Please don't call me a hyporcite, I am not vegan as my health really won't allow for a vegan diet. There are many protein substitutes that my body literally cannot tolerate and I do become ill if I try. It's just that I am very into saving rainforests and environmental matters and I know that our purchases of every kind, including meat-free food, can in some cases have an impact on animals as bad as or worse than a livestock farm. The best thing that we can all do is be as cruelty-free as we can in our own way by educating ourselves on the choices we make and buying accordingly. So again, I hope very much that you manage to give up the dairy and remain healthy, but I do know plenty of people who have tried very hard and couldn't as their bodies would not allow for total veganism, and I know friends of friends who have managed easily. All of our bodies are different. Therefore good luck to you, hope you can do it, and please please don't beat yourself up if you can't.
Sincerely all the best xx