Expressed willingness to further consult with NGOs on various issues through relevant agencies, and better inter-agency/department coordination (ex. Education, APO, etc).
Officials also conscious of need to improve APO’s image/reputation, and formulate better PSA campaigns. “Short attention span” of public noted in regards to too long PSA material.
Post-Meeting Comments
Although overall meeting appeared to have a positive/motivated tone by members involved, issue of actual delivery/follow up on discussion points noted.
“Sometimes delivery not comprehensive enough or address minor/other issues”
D.2 Speech Transcript.
Vegan Youth Convention - Dr. Will Tuttle Speech Source: Event Organizers – Transcription Team.
Opening Speech:
Alright. Xie xie, xie xie, da jia hao.
So I am really delighted that we’re able to come together for this meeting this evening, and I am delighted also that we have simultaneous translation, so that I can speak without stopping after every sentence or two.
Welcome everyone, thank you for your caring hearts... And I’ll like to also give a special welcome to another VIP who is my wonderful spouse Madeleine, she’s sitting in the front here, let’s have a hand for Madeleine [and Switzerland] Her paintings are out here and we have been traveling now together for many years... Bringing the best we can the vegan awakening, the message of the vegan awakening to our world... And that if we fail to... To understand the consequences of our food choices and the consequences of our routine violence and abuse of other living beings, we will not have a viable future for our children.
So it’s very appropriate that our young people are here, because young people have a lot at stake in what we're doing, how we’re living, in the conversations that determine the future and the wellbeing not only of ourselves but of all living beings.
As all of you know if you’re here... The focus of our efforts is to help all of us make the connections between our abuse of animals and our own disease, our own social problems, the environmental devastation that is happening, and also the enormous suffering that these other beings endure.
And animals are like us, they essentially have interests that are as important to them as my interests are to me. Their suffering is as significant to them as my suffering is to me. And yet all of us are born into a culture where from the time we’re little infants, we’re compelled to participate in meals which are essentially reducing our natural capacities, our natural wisdom, empathy, and sensitivity... And many times I think, actually is children that help remind parents that “is it really right to be killing and abusing chickens, and pigs, and cows, and fishes?”.
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And modern science tells us that these beings have central nervous systems, basically like ours, capable of suffering and feeling pain. That they have complex social relations. That they’re capable of psychological suffering as well. And it's well understood that, these animals are driven into extremes of suffering by animal agriculture. They're very often, they’re driven into insanity by being terribly confined… so they’re banging their heads against the bars, chewing on the bars, pecking each other’s eyes out. But we don’t see any of that if we just order...some bacon, or ham, or chicken, somewhere.
So we are living, all of us, I think in a society where we’re encouraged to just stay shallow, to stay numb, to desensitize ourselves of the suffering we’re causing other beings. And the same thing goes really I think for the web of life here, the ecosystems that we depend on. It’s well understood now that animal agriculture is the primary driving force behind... Most really, most of the environmental devastation like the cutting down of rainforest for example. Nearly a hectare every second right now is being destroyed in the amazon for animal agriculture, to grow soybeans, to feed the imprisoned pigs, cows, and fishes. These are the lungs of the earth, and we're destroying them. We will not have a healthy climate or atmosphere if we continue doing this. And the same thing with the oceans which are being overfished. Not just to catch fish for people, but to catch fish to feed to imprisoned cows and pigs and other fishes. This is completely unsustainable.
So we have the suffering of ecosystems, of wildlife also who’re being driven to extinction because their habitat is destroyed, because we take our wallets and pay for meat, dairy products, and eggs.
In fact, I remember when we were here in Taiwan, that was just about three years ago, and I was talking about meat and dairy products and so forth, and then we went to New Zealand…
Australia, New Zealand, and in New Zealand… for quite a few years Madeleine had said” “Will, we gotta go to New Zealand, it’s the most beautiful country in the world, gotta go there see this green, pure, beautiful country” ... and so we went there and gave lectures, and we travelled around New Zealand, and it was not that way.
They now have massive dairy operations… 10,000 cows in one operation... The hill sides, all the trees are cut down… the streams are all brown and polluted… and I remember it was so ironic because I was asking the people in Taiwan…I said, “so you seem to eat a lot of dairy products here in Taiwan, where do you get your dairy products?”. People said: “oh we get them from New Zealand”. And then I saw the terrible devastation that this causes to the environment in New Zealand… and, so this is the price that is being paid but we are taught to ignore it… and the price that is also paid by hungry people.
We are growing enough food every year to feed everyone, more than everyone, enough to feed 10 billion people. We have about 7.5 billion people, but we have roughly 1 billion people starving…
because over half the grain we grow, instead of feeding it to the hungry people, we feed it to animals. And then that’s very wasteful, we eat their flesh, we eat dairy products and eggs… we’re wasting those resources. It’s well understood that it’s food shortages that are the primary cause behind conflict and war… refugees. So again, it goes back to animal agriculture. We can, such good news implicit in all of this… that we can become not only more aware ourselves, and much healthier ourselves. Last time I was here, it was 39 years since I’ve been to a hospital, so now it’s
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I guess close to 42, 3 years later… but we can not only be healthier, and we can clean up, and allow the oceans, and the rivers, and the forests to heal. We can allow our society to heal, we can feed everyone.
We can stop forcing people to stab animals all day, and to abuse them, and to pay for that, and eat that and feed that to our children, and cause illness, and destruction. Which essentially only enriches a tiny wealthy elite, actually. So, to understand that... If we are serious about making positive changes, each one of us can make an effort to understand the consequences of animal agriculture. Which very often we don’t read about in the newspapers, or hear about on television, unless we’re watching Da Ai TV or some of the more progressive media outlets. We can find out or we can gather like this, and talk about this, and learn from each other…. And I’ll like to close here, I don’t wanna go on too long. We’ll have plenty of time during the evening to go more deeply into these issues.
But… essentially, the good news... I think we have to remember that we have a lot of reason to know that we can positively transform our experience on this earth as human beings and we can stop violently killing and abusing literally millions of animals every day. Actually, scientist now realized… when we talk about marine animals, we are talking about human beings torturing and killing billions of animals every day. We are… human beings have become a force of utter destruction on this Earth, and it’s unnecessary, eating animal food is utterly unnecessary. It’s the most glorious realization, that all of us have been given this precious gift of a human body that does not require any animal to suffer to get all the nutrients that we need, to celebrate our lives here. Remember that! This is totally established, by the research that’s been done… All human beings, at all stages of life, can be adequately and wonderfully nourished by a plant based diet, infants, children, teenagers, adults, old people, pregnant women, nursing women, athletes.
So that’s the great good news, all the nutrients that we need come from plants, we don't have to murder and abuse animals to get any nutrients… and when we move to a plant based way of living, we shrink our environmental footprint, we allow the climate to heal, we allow our Earth to heal, we allow our bodies to heal. Science, we realize it… even people that are only 9 years old. If they die, and autopsy is done, they already have the beginnings of heart disease from eating animal foods. We can clean all that up, we can be healthy, and energetic. And we can share these ideas with love and respect. It’s not about judging or blaming anyone.It’s about just understanding the beautiful possibilities we have in the future if we make an effort to understand these ideas and live our lives in alignment with them. So thank you all so much for coming this afternoon, I think we should go ahead and get started. So bless you all, much love to you all, and as we’ve said, go vegan! Live vegan! That’s the message of the world peace diet, and I think… the message... if we are going to have a future, it will be a vegan future, and it will be beautiful. Much love to you, thank you, thank you.
Closing Speech:
I just really want to honor all of the people who are dedicating their lives and all of you actually, all of you who are here, I know you are making efforts to help make a positive difference in our world and as I said earlier, I think it’s very important to embody what veganism actually is, which is a heart of kindness and caring and to bring that element to our life, as vegans or even if we’re
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pre-vegans, as we move in that direction. I say there are two kinds of people in the world, there’s vegans and then there’s pre-vegans. If you’re not there yet, you’ll be there, in this life or the next.
But I think as we live our lives in this way with kindness, that we become much more effective and remember that ultimately the only one we can actually change is ourselves. We can change ourselves. We can’t actually change another person, but we can change ourselves, and as we embody the vegan value as respect and kindness more deeply, as we make an effort to understand the issues so that we are grounded in the understanding then we can plant seeds more effectively.
It’s really about planting seeds, every time you show a video or write a blog or create a meal or do a class; you’re planting seeds. And these seeds – I think the deeper our understanding is, the deeper and more effectively we can plant these seeds, and these seeds will grow. I think one of the underlying ideas is to remember that the most effective advocacy in many ways is sharing ourselves – listening, being willing to listen to others, because people will listen to us I think in many ways to the degree they feel that we are listening to them. So if we refuse to listen to other people, they probably won’t listen to us. So to be a good listener and to not only that but to share our own story. I think in a sense people sometimes ask me, “If you only had one sentence, what would you say?” And I think the basic sentence is something that reflects the idea of our own understanding.
It’s something like this: “I’m so grateful that I discovered that the only reason I was eating animal foods was because I was just following orders. I was just doing what I was told to do from the time I was a little kid. And now I don’t do it anymore and it’s great.” And then let go, just don’t try, in a sense, don’t try to change the person because if the person feels you are trying to change them, they will probably resist. Just plant the seed of our own understanding, the awakening that we were only eating animal foods because we were following orders, and we realize those orders are not in our best interest. They’re not in the best interest of anyone. And no one wants to just be a robot following orders that are not in their best interests that are harming them and harming the world.
So they may not know it was you that made them go vegan because you just let go but you plant those seeds of our own understanding and that is I think what really is very effective to do it with love and respect.
The other thing I want to underline is that dairy products have just as much violence in them as meat in many ways. I mean they really . . . from the very beginning I think it’s important to understand that as we move along the path that moving towards a completely plant-based diet and letting go of dairy products is enormously liberating. First of all because the milk of a cow is absolutely not something that we as human beings need to be healthy. The basic protein in dairy, in cow’s milk is casein and we do not have rennin, which is the hormone that’s needed to break that down, the enzyme needed to break down casein, so dairy products not only cause us a lot of problems but they are extremely abusive to mothers and to babies.
The whole animal industry is abusive to mothers and babies but it’s epitomized really in dairy products, and so as we get the dairy out of our system, if we’re vegetarians and move to becoming vegans, we’ll find our health really improves a lot and the sense of joy and harmony that we’re capable of feeling also improves and we can also understand that the dairy industry is one of the worst things in terms of global climate destabilization, cows eat a huge amount of grain. It’s very
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wasteful of water and resources to be eating dairy products. And also just remember that we still have in place subsidies for the animal industries and if people really had to pay what it actually costs for these things, it would be much more expensive than eating plant-based foods.
So as our society begins to awaken, and we see progress happening on all fronts. I think the most important thing is for each one of us to find what is our unique piece of the puzzle that we can contribute. What is my unique passion my interest? Is it music? Is it speaking? Is it writing? Is it education? Is it organizing? Is it just talking? Is it being an entrepreneur of some kind? We need people to work with government, people to work with education, people to work with religion, people to work on the internet with blogging, people to work in restaurants, creation and meals and every possible thing and to have an actual life that in some way contributing to bringing about this change which goes to the root of all of our problems, to help move our society in the direction of respect and kindness for animals and other people and ecosystems, is a life that I think is joyful and something we can work on together and Madeline and I, as we’ve been travelling especially for the last five, six years maybe – a lot internationally, and going to places like Africa and Western Asia and South America and to places like Eastern Europe and seeing the veganism booming and blooming everywhere.
New vegan restaurants cropping up everywhere and meetup groups and vegetarian veg fests. I love this Vegan Frenzy idea! These are all… It’s happening everywhere. It’s actually not being covered by the mass media but it’s actually happening and we’re all part of this movement and it depends on us. Our future depends on us. It doesn’t depend on corporations and financial institutions and governments. It really depends on us getting together like this at the grassroots level and sharing our ideas, and our thoughts and cultivating a heart of caring. So I’m gonna stop here. I think the movement is in really wonderfully good hands.
I’m so inspired by the beautiful people we’ve seen here on the stage this evening and again I’ve said this yesterday or the day before that people sometimes ask me, “What is the country that seems to be leading the way on planet Earth, what is the place?” And Taiwan I think is such a light in our world of bringing compassion and health, not just from a religious point of view which is important but from a point of view of consciousness and awareness, and environmental sensitivity and caring and health and freedom and a positive future for everyone. So I look forward to continue working together with all of you. Thanks again so much for the efforts you’re making. Bless you all, thank you very much!