A vegan holiday with restricted access?

Animal well-being

The way meat and dairy are being produced these days, is not quite relaxed. Some say it is like a war on animals. I recommend you to go to Youtube and search for “industrial animal farming” so that you can learn about what is going on. And organic farming is hardly any better. “Hey, but in summer we see all these happy cows walking around on the beautiful green meadows in the mountains,” right? Well, at least two things make these cows rather miserable. First of all, by nature cows are not mountain animals, so they struggle to move around. Second, they spend 6 months or more of every winter inside in stables without ever coming outside. They are prisoners of our privilege.

Human well-being

Did you look at the Youtube video’s? If you did, then you understand that by consuming meat and dairy, you consume suffering. There is no way in which this can be healthy. Indeed, scientists associate meat consumption with, amongst others, an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, colorectal cancer and type 2 diabetes. We don’t need meat or dairy for anything. Iron, proteins, calcium, vitamins are all plenteous in many plant-based foods. If someone has a lack of one of these, it’s not because they are vegan; it’s because they eat an unbalanced diet. The only serious candidate for deficiency is B12, and there are simple vegan pills for that. By the way, it seems that most vegans don’t have a lack of B12.

Keep in mind as well that the elements mentioned under ‘Ecology’ affect everybody, not only meat/dairy consumers.

"But... it's natural for humans to eat meat!" In the roughly half a million years of human existence, meat did play a role in our survival. But livestock farming is an unrelated story. We started doing that only roughly 10.000 years ago. Industrial livestock farming is even much more recent. A trifling period in the context of the full length of human existence. Until 10.000 years ago, we were strictly hunters-gatherers. We were a small quantity of humans in a world populated by much bigger amounts of animals. When we would go out hunting for meat, animals would have a honest chance of escaping. If you argue that ‘it is natural for humans to eat meat’, then that is the situation that you are referring to. Eating meat and dairy from livestock farming is in no way natural for humans. Anyway, if ‘what is natural for humans’ is your concern, then please get rid of your laptop. And of your seated job, your smartphone and Netflix; none of those are ‘natural for humans’.

Authentic connection

In the Crazy Camps, and even more so in the Crazy Balance Camps, connection is a keyword. We are looking to enhance the connection with ourself and with the others. Authentic connection is not an easy thing to achieve in our quotidian lives. Cerebral patterns, social survival strategies, cultural gender roles, and prejudice are just some of the elements that tend to influence the quality of our connections. They ‘stand between’ us and the others, and even between us and ourself.

When you eat meat or diary, you consume things that are not supposed to be in the human body. For dairy this is very obvious – mammals produce milk for their own babies, not for different species. But when it comes to meat, it’s not just (also on a spiritual level) the animals’ suffering that we take in. It’s also a lot of antibiotics, and hormonal imbalance. The animal farming lobby will point you out to the fact that at least the EU forbids to give ‘growth hormones’ and preventative antibiotics to cattle. But there are exceptions to the hormones rule, such as in the case of fertility problems of the animal. And currently fertility problems in cattle are becoming more and more frequent. As for antibiotics: in the world, the industry produces more antibiotics for cattle than for humans. They’re simply not labelled ‘prophylactics’ anymore, now they’re labelled ‘medicine’.