January 22, 2025

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

The common social wisdom is that having pets teaches kids responsibility, but mostly it reinforces human superiority and the idea that non-humans exist at our discretion.

On the other hand, I love seeing how much people love their pets and it gives me hope that we can extend our empathy beyond cats and dogs to other animals, including those currently considered to be food.

As kids, my sister and I always had pets. Tom was our first New Zealand pet: a big fluffy black cat. The lawyer who handled the purchase of our first house had kittens at home and suggested we adopt one “to complete your family”. Tom lived into his late teens. I know I loved him, and I remember clearly what he looked like, but I don’t remember his personality. I do remember a recurring nightmare in which I would ‘wake up’ and see Tom’s severed tail curled up next to my pillow, crawling with tiny insects.

At one stage Sue and I persuaded Mum we should get guinea pigs. She agreed, with the proviso that we would have to be responsible for cleaning their cage. We loved Fluffy and Tod, but – predictably – we didn’t love cleaning their cage. When Mum took over that task it set off an allergic reaction and the guinea pigs had to be rehomed. Roaming dogs in their new neighbourhood upended the cage and killed them. Later Sue and I convinced our parents we should get a dog: we went to the SPCA and chose Karla because she was sitting quietly at the back of the cage, not clamouring loudly for attention like the rest of them. She had a winning smile and a Basil Brush tail and quickly became an important member of the family. We thought she was a corgi/Shetland Sheepdog cross but later discovered she was a purebred Cardigan Welsh corgi. She tolerated Sue and I dressing her up; I have a photo of her in my nightshirt, asleep with her head on my pillow, and another photo of her wearing my small orange backpack. Contrary to her behaviour at the SPCA she loved to bark, especially at the beach; she would run up and down for hours chasing seagulls and barking at waves. She didn’t like to swim but would follow us into the sea and try to round us up. When we went tramping, she’d run constant circles around us, ensuring her pack stayed together.

Mum was keen to have hens at home for their eggs; she bought a clutch of fertilised bantam eggs from the local tomato grower and brought them home along with a borrowed broody bantam. We loved those chooks. They were always intended to be free-range, but Dad had built a cage for them to go into at night. I’m sure they did sleep in there for a while, but my memory is of them sleeping in the towering bamboo thicket in one corner of the garden. There would be a lot of preparatory clucking as they got ready to fly up to the flat roof of the adjacent shed, and the same again as they got ready to fly the next stage up into the bamboo. And in the morning, there would be another commotion of clucking as they launched themselves down to the lawn. My sister and I used to watch Batman on television each day at 5pm, and during the summer the bantams would fly in through the wide-open sash windows in the living room and perch on the back of the couch behind us. I can’t remember how long the bantams lived, but I do remember at least one of them drowned in our neighbours’ swimming pool. I don’t think it ever seemed strange at the time that we loved our pet chickens and ate other chickens for dinner.

At high school, my closest friend and I hung out in the science room at lunchtimes, because we liked playing with the hooded rats (and because we were socially awkward). The rats were bred by the science teacher to be dissected, and when it came time for them to be killed, we offered to despatch them ourselves rather than trusting someone else with the task. We put about six of them in a bell jar with chloroform and watched as the life faded away from them. One moment they were busy and warm and present, and the next they were cold and stiff and gone. When the science lab stopped breeding rats my friend and I each took a couple of rats home and kept them as pets.

After I left home, I adopted an SPCA cat, Georgia. After a few years, she developed some sort of urinary problem. I was unable to stop her peeing in the house – the worst was when she peed on one of the elements on the stove, but I didn’t know about it until I turned the element on. Cat wee always smells bad, but burning cat wee smells absolutely vile. The vet tried one medication for a possible infection and when that didn't work, another medication for anxiety, but nothing worked. In the end, I took her to the vet to be put down because it seemed like a permanent condition. A few hours later the vet phoned me and said another of their clients had just lost their beloved elderly cat who looked just like Georgia, and they wanted to adopt her. I agreed, of course, and I hope it worked out for all of them.

When our household went vegan, we had two cats, Tui and Lyra. Lyra was an outdoorsy kinda gal and mostly came inside to eat. Tui was a homebody and loved to be in the midst of things: she would sit on a chair at the dining table while we ate, and there was a seat for her next to Mackenzie’s desk so she could be next to him when he was playing computer games. I had the dilemma of whether to move them from their socially acceptable but unnatural diet of meaty cat biscuits (raw insects, lizards, birds and rodents are natural food for a cat, not processed meat from huge animals like cows) to an unnatural diet of vegan cat biscuits. There were no commercially available vegan cat biscuits in Aotearoa New Zealand back then, so I mail-ordered ingredients from the United States and made them myself. It was surprisingly successful, given how fussy cats are. Later I was able to move them on to commercial vegan cat biscuits. Lyra died aged 10, of lung cancer, but Tui lived to be 18. In her later years, she couldn’t crunch the biscuits up, and I decided to move her on to canned non-vegan food. But more compassionate options should be available soon. In the United States, one company has launched cat biscuits made with mouse meat cultured in vats (from a cell sample taken from a live mouse) – similar to the lab-grown meat that is slowly being launched for human consumption. Given that 25% of meat in the United States is consumed by pet cats and dogs, this is a very positive development.

We also had two rats: my youngest son had asked for guinea pigs for his sixth birthday. Instead, I bought him a pair of white rats, knowing they’d be more friendly and interactive than guinea pigs. (Guinea pigs are such nervous animals; I don’t know how they became common children’s pets.) He named the rats Olga and Mac, and they were a delight. They loved hanging out with us, especially sitting on a shoulder or sleeping in a dressing gown pocket or sweatshirt hood. When they needed to pee, they’d start running up and down my arm in an urgent manner; I’d take them back to their cage (which was suspended from the ceiling to keep them away from the cats) and they’d rush to a corner of the cage and pee.

Pets are a fraught topic for vegans who are, for the most part, animal lovers. So while many vegans love spending time with non-human animals, the very concept of pet ownership is anathema to ethical veganism: in an ideal vegan world, all animals would have autonomy. Our society has a long history of household pets, and often those pets live long and happy lives – and they bring a lot of joy and love to their humans. Vegans and non-vegans alike are horrified when extreme cases of pet abuse are reported, but the everyday abuse is less obvious: goldfish in bowls, budgies in cages, dogs like pugs deliberately bred with deformed faces (bulging eyes and squished-in noses) because they look cute, puppy-farming of fashionable breeds. It’s not right for living beings to be treated as commodities.

When Tui died, Colin and I decided not to get another pet, for reasons ethical (we don’t agree with the ownership of animals, we don’t agree with feeding pets meat from other animals, we don’t like that cats kill mice, birds and lizards) and selfish (we don’t like cleaning litter trays, we like to be able to go away for the weekend on the spur of the moment). We did a lot of housesitting and loved spending that time with other people’s pets. Then about eight years after Tui died, we met Puss, a solid old black cat with very thick long fur. We had moved into a small warehouse apartment in a light industrial development in Mt Albert. Puss was very independent: he was fed by various neighbours but spent most of his time outside. By the time we met him, he was starting to feel his age and when it rained heavily he loved coming inside and being wrapped in a towel. He came and sat on my lap one morning when I was still in bed and Colin was making porridge. When the porridge was ready, we didn’t want to disturb Puss, so Colin hopped back into bed and we ate our porridge in bed. What a pair of softies we are. Mostly, though, Puss sat outside, accepting compliments from passersby, or slept in a polystyrene box outside our door. Six months later, Puss was clearly unwell. The vet did some tests and asked us to bring him back in a couple of weeks. But within a week he died during the night in his cosy polystyrene box. We put a death notice on our door to let the neighbours know.

A couple of months later we agreed to be an emergency foster home for a tiny four-week-old tortoiseshell kitten found near a friend’s house. Of course, within a week we’d fallen madly in love with her and couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. It was a classic foster fail situation. When we had to relocate to Northern Ireland, we knew we couldn’t put Maisie through the trauma of the flight in the cargo hold especially as we don’t know how long we’ll be living here. Rehoming Maisie was one of the hardest parts of moving countries, but we found her a great new home where her quirky boisterous personality is very much appreciated.

The issue of pets is far more difficult and conflicting than the issue of food for me as a vegan. I simply say ‘no thanks’ to non-vegan food, and I have plenty of other options. But there are so many pets needing homes, and having a pet can be so rewarding, that it’s not as simple as saying ‘no thanks’.