| Novelist Barbara Gowdy launches PSAs for rabble.ca's Vegan Challenge for Earth Week Barbara Gowdy introduces a series of public service announcements urging people and especially those who "live in their imagination" to participate in rabble.ca's Vegan Challenge for Earth Week. Gowdy is an award-winning, best-selling novelist whose book White Bone is written entirely from the perspective of African elephants. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award in 1996 and The Trillium Book Award in 2008, she has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a repeat finalist for the Giller Prize. In 2005 she was longlisted for The Booker Prize. She has been a vegetarian for 30 years and a vegan for ten. She challenges participants who take the Vegan Challenge for a week to imagine what it is like to be an animal raised for meat or to spend one's life as a pig in a crate. She especially appeals to writers. "People who their days imagining the existence of others" should go the extra mile and participate in the Vegan Challenge, she says. "As someone who makes here living as a writer and living in her imagination, I'd like to challenge everybody who lives in his or her imagination to take the Vegan Challenge and become a vegan for just a week. During that week, try and think about what it would be like to be raised as meat, what it would be like never to feel the sun on your head, the wind in your hair, to be caged, have no comprehension whatsoever of why this is happening to ... |
