cruelty free living festival

•The Cruelty Free Living Festival is the first of its kind in Sydney promoting veganism and education of inhumane treatment to animals in food production.

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The event was about animal protection, it’s in fact a human initiative. So I choose different human characters to tell the story of how ordinary people stand up against unnecessary inhumane treatment during food production and the virtue of respecting lives of other living things.

People from all walks of life gathered in Petersham’s Town Hall during a rainy Sunday morning, not for church, but to learn about veganism and support animals protection during human’s meat and dairy food consumption.

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Miss Lettuce, as known as Lana Benson, works in the Commonwealth Bank as a Project Manager at day time and a vegetarian twenty four seven for the last four months. “I’m thinking of going vegan. After you have made an effort trying to understand how our food came from, you just don’t have the heart to eat meats anymore,’’ Miss Lettuce selling raffle tickets in the venue said.
The 8-year-old-Celloist Shui-yi(left) and her classmate Robbie Baileys were putting money from the music they played to help protecting animals from inhumane treatment.They have earned $10.5 in the first hour of playing. Shui-yi said she would be aiming at the $30 target.The boy in the middle is Shui-yi’s 5-year-old brother.

With the rapidly disappearing rainforest, extinction in the wild is likely to be 2010 for Sumatran Orangutans and 2015 for Bornean Orangutans. Do you know intelligence of Orangutans is comparable to a five or six year old child?

One of the rare hippy found in the event, may be veganism is not longer a rare new age trend.
The two toddlers found themselves dancing along the music performance on stage while their parents were busy looking at the many stalls introducing festival visitors about vegan food, meditation and information regarding animals rights protection.

Background:
According to Animals Liberation NSW, modern food production often carries out in a massive scale and treatment to animals are often unnecessarily cruel and inhumane in order to obtain food from animals at the lowest costs. Farm animals like chicken, cows, pigs produce eggs, poultry, milk and meat to human beings consumption but are also the main targets subjected to tortures.•

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Example: The Battery Hen spends all her laying life in a cage crammed in with three and up to seven other birds. She stands for life on a space smaller than this leaflet. Her only exit is to the slaughterhouse.Cages are kept in huge artificially lit sheds. The hen stands on thin sloping wire - her feet and legs crippled. She cannot perch, preen, scratch in the dirt, dust-bathe, spread her wings, or escape to a quiet place to lay an egg - all activities known to be extremely important to the behavioral needs of a hen.

•Battery Hens are prone to bone breakages. Their bones are brittle through over-production of eggs and lack of exercise. A high percentage have Osteoporosis. By the time they are finally slaughtered up to 56 per cent of caged hens have suffered painful fractures.
Stressed and crowded hens peck at each other. Therefore farmers cut off a third of the chicken's beak with a hot wire guillotine. This causes severe pain at the time and the chicken may die of shock. Also the nerves in the beak stump are still active and the hen suffers pain for months, perhaps years afterwards. Many have great difficulty eating for the rest of their lives.