How to Live a Cruelty-Free Life

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette and I am a registered dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic and I am going to talk to you about how to live a cruelty free life. A lot of people have asked about this topic and what they are getting at is how do you know where your foods come from. How do they know that they are not causing animals undo pain? That has been a lot in the press lately about different slaughter houses that have not been using humane tactics and there has been very disturbing images for a lot of people to see and that has caused a lot of people to question where their food comes from so if you are really concerned and do want to make that effort to live a cruelty free life you really want to start learning where your food comes from. So the first thing if you are a meat eater, the easiest way to be cruelty free is to angle from the meats that say free range so free range beef, free range chickens, if you eat eggs if you want to go for the cage free type eggs. Dairy products though they are also part of this milk, cheese, you want to look for milk and cheese and other dairy products that say that they are hormone free, that the animals weren't injected with a lot of undue steroids, that type of thing and to go even a step further if you really are very very concerned and want to be able to verify your foods, the easiest way to do that is to shop local. Go to your farmer's market. A lot of the local vendors do grow and raise their animals organically and a lot of them are more than happy to offer tours so you can actually go and physically see where your food is coming from. You can actually go see the cows that are out in the pasture or you can see the chickens that are roaming around that are going to be laying eggs or may potentially become food on the table. You can actually see how the cheese is made, how the yogurt is made so that is the best way to truly live a cruelty free life if you are going to be consuming animal products. The other thing to keep in mind is clothing, belts, shoes, purses, handbags, all of those things have the potential to be made from leather and of course leather comes from animal hides so if you are concerned about that the easiest thing to do is to not purchase leather products, to actually go for products that are made without animal parts so cloth things, nylon belts, handbags, that type of thing, the fake leather options, those are all animal free animal friendly type options. So a few things to keep in mind when you are trying to live a cruelty free life."