My name is Colleen Patrick Goudreau. I'm an author, speaker, and podcaster.

I'm dedicated to empowering people to manifest their values of compassion and wellness in their everyday lives.

You can learn more about who I am and what I do by visiting joyful vegan.com.

Ethical vegetarianism outside of religious doctrine is not some newfangled novel idea.

It hearkens back thousands of years and at its core is compassion, a universal principle

grounded in religious and secular philosophies resonating with men, women,

and children all around the world, all across the ages.

Many people think of veganism as a new reactionary trend against what we call factory

farming. But for centuries, men and women have been thinking about, writing about, and

expressing distress over the violence inherent in killing animals for human use and consumption.

My personal veganism is part of a long continuum of men and women from ancient times until today who stopped

eating animals and their eggs and milk, not because they witnessed a modern mechanized,

industrialized factory system but because they didn't want to be part

of the brutal and unnecessary process of turning sentient animals into butchered bodies.

Six century philosopher Pythagoras

abstained from the flesh of animals

and advised his followers to do the same

out of a sense of justice, not only for ourselves and our ancestors,

he fervently believed in the transmigration of souls, but also for the animals themselves.

Though we have no primary written texts of Pythagoras,

the Pythagorean doctrine has been well pieced together

from secondary sources, including Avid's

...