"I have an announcement everyone, I have an announcement"

Stop the presses, big announcement. JK. I mean, it's big for me, but I don't expect y'all to care. But I've gone from vegetarian to vegan. After 9 years (minus a brief point when my life fell apart and it was a struggle to just feed myself) of being a vegetarian, I can no longer deny the animal cruelty linked to milk, eggs, etc. I've know about the horrible things that happen in the production of dairy and eggs but I've willfilly ignored it and minimized it for long enough.

Why the change?

Momma cows. Oh my god, momma cows. I am so sorry. I was perusing Facebook a week ago and came across this story about a rescued dairy cow who gave birth to her calf in secret and hid the calf for days because she was worried the farmer would take away her baby, like so many of her other babies had been taken away.

And then at the end of the article I read about a momma cow who had twins and had the ultimate Solomon moment and took one of her twins to the farmer and hid the other one so she could at least keep one of her babies.

The tears. The heartache. My god. If there is any clearer indication of animals being sentient beings who are smart and emotional and so much more like humans than we give them credit for...I don't know what could be.

As usual, I will continue to keep this a personal choice. I haven't turned into a food evangelist. I believe food is a deeply personal choice and I'm not going to shame anyone for their choices. MYOB is still my personal mantra. Maybe with close friends and family I'll crack a joke every once in a while :)  but otherwise, you do you. If you want to know more about veganism, I'm happy to chat of course, but no worries -- I won't be patrolling you.I just can't have animal suffering on my conscience anymore. 

Bless Me Father for I have Sinned...

It's been 678 years since my last confession. So sue me.

Anyway, I thought it was an appropriate title given my current lifesyle (e.g. Church maniac) to discuss the current state of my eating affairs in Nigeria. The sad and shocking truth is that I've been eating meat. Not much, and not enjoying it, but eating it nonetheless. It was one of those other things I thought might happen but I neither dwelt on it nor mentioned it because it was too depressing to think about.

Given that I am a guest in some very gracious people's house, I will do anything to be the least bothersome guest possible. Also given that Nigerian social customs lie somewhere stuck in the 1950's, I knew if I said I didn't eat meat I might people falling all over themselves to accommodate me (it's happened before). So I made the decision to eat whatever was served, and if I had a choice, to stick to vegetarian or fish meals. It works some of the time, but definitely not all of the time. One night we had Shepard's Pie for dinner, and that is impossible to eat without ingesting meat. We also had spaghetti with meat sauce another night, so that was out as well. I started out with very, very small portions (like 1 oz. of meat in a serving) because I knew it would likely make me sick otherwise. All in all I still eat less than 3 oz. total in one sitting, but still, it makes my heart hurt. I try not to think about it and instead focus on eating healthy balanced meals so I don't get sick (again). I think of it as protein and nothing more. Because if I start to think about animal welfare in Nigeria is makes my stomach hurt and I get very sad.

I know it's probably hard for some of my readers to understand (namely my sister and mother) but being a non-pain-in-the-butt guest is more important to me than anything, even eating things I generally abhor. It's mind over matter, and it's important enough to me to make it happen. When I get back to the US I will return to my normal veggie/pescatarian eating habits, but for now I will focus on being a gracious guest and a healthy person in physical being (probably not in emotional since I'm conflicted with the meat) which is the most important thing to surviving this trip. I just thought I'd give you an update so you wouldn't be too in shock. Sigh. 3 years down the tube.

**The above picture isn't meant to imply that Nigerians eat Monkeys or Dogs. I just googled "sad animals" and that was the worst decision ever. So I picked the first sad one I could stand and there you have it. Seriously, if you love animals, don't make the same mistake. Horrible.**

All the poor little babies of the world...

And by babies I of course mean animals. My mom and Dale are looking to adopt two new kitties. I was trying to sway them into adopting a special needs kitty but clearly they are cold hearted snakes because they were all "EW! No way! Who wants a defective animal???" So it made me think about blogging about special needs animals.

As you probably have realized I have a special place in my heart for abandoned dogs. I have gotten all of my dogs as rescues of some sort. I can't even think of buying a dog when I know there are so many animals out there waiting to be adopted and many of them wind up getting put to sleep because no one wants them. More recently (past few years) I realized how many special needs dogs were out there and how they must have an even harder time getting adopted because everyone thinks of them as "defective" or a "hassle" and no one wants to take the extra effort to adopt them and care for them. So I've decided that as soon as we have an opening on the ranch (which will not be for LONG time, lest you worry) we're going to adopt a special needs dog. Petfinder.com even has a special search category where you can search for only special needs dogs (and other animals)! I'm partial to the deaf, blind, paralyzed or missing limbs dogs. I'm especially enamored with paralyzed dogs that have little cart wheelchairs. How can you not want to help a little guy like this:


Sigh. I want to save him right now. But I'm resisting the urge. There will be plenty more special needs animals when we're ready for more dogs. But if you are thinking of adopting another animal take a minute and think about a special needs animal.

And then we cry?

Sometime earlier this summer my mom bought me a Chicken Soup for Pet Lover's Soul book at a garage sale. In case you didn't know, I'm totally a sucker for the Chicken Soup series. Something about sad/cute/sappy stories just get me. And clearly you know I love animals. So Chicken Soup about pets? Forget about it.

Like many things, I threw it in my backseat and kind of forgot about it. One Saturday Ange and I were driving to the Zionsville Farmer's Market and I for some random reason picked it up and was like "Hey, let's have a little read aloud on our way to the market!" Totally bad idea.

I start reading the very first story in the book and I only get a few pages in before I start sniffling. Ange is a little teary eyed but not as much as me. As the story progresses I start crying so much I can't even finish reading. Ange is dying to know the end of the story but I just couldn't do it. So she pulls off into a parking lot to finish the story and as she struggles to finish the story we're both crying our eyeballs out. The story was about a developmentally handicap boy who is homeless and rescues a dog. There are a ton of other little parts of the story that make it even sadder/sweeter but that basically sums it up.

So we're sitting in this parking lot, crying our heads off, and trying to pull it together so we can get to the Farmer's Market without it looking like we just got in a knock down drag out fight. After we finally pulled ourselves together we decided we should NOT read Chicken Soup for Pets in the car ever again, particularly if we'd like to not crash or sit on the side of the road like weirdos, and we are two of the most tender-hearted people on the planet. So ridiculous!

Oregon Zoo

As you know Ange & I are crazy animal lovers, so naturally we couldn't visit Portland without going to the Oregon Zoo! The majority of our trip was unplanned because we wanted to really go on vacation and not be tied to anything, so when we found ourselves with nothing to do on Sunday afternoon we thought the zoo would be a perfect excursion! We mapped out our train route and hit the rails!

The zoo was really easy to get to as there is a TriMet stop at the zoo entrance. Like I mentioned previously, we actually forgot our passes in the room, but the TriMet is different from any other mass transit system I've been on in that you don't really ever show your pass to anyone. You don't have to scan it to get through any turnstiles, you just jump on! So that is how we managed to not have our pass. You get a discount (small, but hey, anything helps!) and luckily the zoo man was nice and let us in with the discount anyway.

We walked through the entirety of the zoo stopping and taking some pics here and there. Ange took lots of animal pics which you can see on her blog, but I mostly like to take funny pictures so here are some of my gems.

This is Ange posing next to a sign talking about Small Fry...because she is a small fry.

Next we decided to ride some ponies in the petting zoo barn. Ange had a hard time with her steed, but I think she finally was able to get it under control.

Next we visited the Primate Center. Monkeys & apes are always so hilarious to me. The orangutans were so cute. They had a sheet with a whole cut in it. When we first got there, one was sitting underneath it and hiding. Sadly there were way too many people oohing and ahhing so I couldn't get a pic. It finally ditched the sheet and immediately the other one came over put it over his head and was walking around like a little ghost. We were cracking up. Here is the ghost climbing the tree.

When we were leaving the Primate Center we noticed some people looking over the railing to this one corner. We peeked around and saw this goofy chimp all laid out on the concrete enjoying the sun. It looked like he had fallen off the wall and was all sprawled out but we watched him long enough to know he was just sunbathing. Totally no care in the world.


Next we stopped at the Bat House which is pretty much the most disgusting place I've ever been. There were hundreds of bats just hanging upside down and bat poop all over the bottom of their exhibit. I just wanted to barf all over the place. Caught this gem of a photo showing a giant pair of testicles on one of the disgusting creatures. Serious kahones.


Finally, what would the zoo be without a little love? Luckily there were lots of nice people around willing to take pics of people so we got a cute snap in.


The zoo overall was pretty fantastic! It didn't have anything really that I haven't seen before, and it isn't huge by any means (about the same size as the Indy Zoo), but the layout and synchronicity with nature was really nice. They have made great pains to integrate it with the surrounding woods and landscape so that was cool to see. It was also very eco-friendly, which is no surprise since all of Portland seems very eco-friendly. A+!