While it’s wonderful and so vital to immerse ourselves in love and gratitude and to fully enjoy our family time during holidays, I am never forgetting the animals. It goes beyond bringing vegan food to share or displaying message wear. This past weekend we celebrated mothers, for their strength, perseverance, invulnerable love, fierce protectiveness, and every other exquisite trait of those who have brought forth life since the dawn of time.

Image via Compassion Over Killing

But all of these traits that we find admirable in our mothers are present in other mothers, too. They’re in the mama cows that wail for their stolen calves, the mama pigs that fight with all they’ve got to protect their babes, the mama dogs that sustain burns as a result of rescuing their little ones from house fires. The love of mothers is all around us, and yet this love is most often made invisible to continue brutal businesses in the name of taste, fashion, and status. Only on occasion, stories like the mama pup heroes make the headlines, and everyone coos over them like it’s such an anomaly. News flash, it’s not!

Animal use and abuse. It all starts with the use and abuse of mothers. Without them, there would be no birth. Without birth, there would be no industry. But, these mothers have no say in their reproduction. They do not consent to the continuation of cruelty and captivity. This system is so monstrously wrong, and it must be stopped.

Image via Farm Sanctuary

This is where the good part comes. The hope of change. The evolution of our species. We can make a difference. Each and every one of us. We vegans have opened our hearts to the whole animal world. But we also still remember what we were like before, when our hearts were closed up tightly, when we wore our blinders religiously. Hold compassion for your past self and extend that compassion to nonvegans (think of them as pre-vegan, really) everywhere. Think about what helped you to open your eyes for the first time. Find a way to merge this with your passions, and you’ll be a super badass advocate for the animals!

The world is waking up, but the animals are suffering in every moment. The mamas are still suffering. We can’t shrug off a vegan world as idealistic. There’s no time to debate. Do. Act. For the love of the animals, make waves, create change. Together we can to positively affect this world and end animal suffering. Let’s do this!