Last Updated on March 1, 2026
We are often told that tradition justifies harm and that “care” cancels out exploitation. Growing up in a culture of conformity in Communist Romania, I saw this contradiction firsthand. I loved animals before I understood anything else, yet I lived in a world where a named calf could become meat by sunset.
My journey to veganism wasn’t sparked solely by a book or a documentary; it was also built on a foundation of my memories. From the stray kittens of my neighborhood to a heartbroken polar bear in New York, I finally saw through the veil. This is my life before vegan.
The Shadow of Conformity
I grew up in a system that taught conformity. In a country where questioning was not encouraged, and tradition was rarely examined. But even that environment did not stop me from questioning the harm I had witnessed, and it also did not stop me from eventually becoming vegan.
I was born in Romania during communism, a country where hardship was ordinary, and survival shaped everything. When you grow up inside something, you don’t question it; you absorb it and make the best of it. I guess this is what shaped my resilience when I moved to Canada at 21 years old, on my own.
The Blurred Line of Adoration
I loved animals before I understood anything else about the world. Cats, dogs, anyone sentient and breathing. However, I never made a distinction between the animals I adored and the animals on my plate because no one taught me to. That line simply didn’t exist in my childhood, and we all know most of us have had the same experience.
Some of my happiest memories are of going to the zoo. Looking back, I think it wasn’t just about the animals. It was one of the few times my mostly absent father would spend uninterrupted time with me.
I was chasing two things at once: animals and connection. In my mind, they blurred together.
The older I got, and the more I started to question things, the less interest I had in zoos because I finally started to see through the veil of advertising of “happy zoo animals,” a juxtaposition to the famous “happy cow.”
Seeing Through the Veil
I am ashamed to admit how long it took me to stop visiting these prisons for animals. It finally happened while I was visiting New York’s Central Park Zoo, where I witnessed the saddest polar bear I’ve ever seen in my life. I felt his sadness and misery so intensely that I started to cry and promised myself, and that poor innocent bear, that I would never ever fund this for the rest of my life. And this was way before I made the connection and went vegan.
Cruelty in Plain Sight
In my childhood neighbourhood, stray animals wandered everywhere. I would walk to school alone and sometimes come home carrying a kitten or a puppy I had found wandering on the street. To me, they weren’t a disposable inconvenience. They were simply beings who needed protection.
Not everyone saw animals that way. As beings. And many still don’t.
There was a boy known for hurting animals in our neighbourhood. One day, a cat I had tried to rescue was found dead. I can’t go into details here because it is very graphic. I remember the silence around it. The whispers. The way cruelty could exist in plain sight and still be treated as something almost inevitable.
The Contradiction of “Normal”
During school breaks, I stayed in my grandmother’s village. She raised animals the way many families did: feeding them, tending to them, naming them, and eventually killing them. I watched them grow. And then I watched them die at the hands of my grandmother.
What stayed with me wasn’t only the violence. It was the contradiction.
Affection one day, slaughter the next. A calf with a name (Greta) was reduced to meat by a hammer held by my uncle. A rooster fed in the morning and gone by evening by my grandmother’s axe. The adults called it food and tradition. They called it necessity. They called it normal.
But even as a child, something inside me resisted the word “normal.”
I didn’t have the language for it yet. I only had the feeling that love should not be conditional on usefulness.
Beyond Theory: A Foundation of Ethics
Years later, when I speak for the animals as an animal rights activist, and people tell me I don’t understand “real farming” or that animals are raised with love and killed “humanely,” I think back to that village. I think about how easily we learn to separate tenderness from outcome. How do we convince ourselves that “care” cancels exploitation and harm?
Culture can explain behaviour, but it cannot make it harmless.
I grew up surrounded by animals. I grew up loving them. And I grew up watching how quickly that love could be withdrawn when their purpose was fulfilled.
That is where my ethics began, not in theory, but in memory.
If you pay for someone to be killed, you don’t love them. You might like how they taste, or you might like the tradition they represent, but that isn’t love. Love is not conditional on how useful someone is to you.
— Paul Bashir, Co-Founder of Anonymous for the Voiceless
Animal lover? Check out A Guide to Going Vegan For the Animals for more ways to show your love for animals.
Brought to you by The Vegan Experience.
Cristina C is a Romanian-born abolitionist vegan writer whose work centers animal liberation, feminism, and ethical accountability. Her perspective is shaped by migration, resilience, and a commitment to confronting normalized harm.
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