Wednesday, November 04, 2009

vegan day

sunday was perfect weather for biking the 6.5km down the creek trails to the convent for world vegan day. the only photo i took the whole day was this one of a few of the MANY bikes parked around the convent area that i took quickly as we were leaving:


(i also took a far away photo of some birds we saw along trail on the way but it wasn't a good photo-- it was just to help me figure out what they were later. i love my melboure's wildlife book-- turns out they were red-rumped parrots)

vegan day was good. weird that the first one in melbourne was my first year in oz and it was just a small group of people having a vegan picnic at albert park (we had trouble finding the group and walked around for ages before finding a group of people and dogs that we thought looked like the right group). now its a massive gathering of all kinds of animal friendly businesses and groups. by the time we got there it was pretty crowded but we went around to all the stalls sampling things (mostly chocolate) and then went around a second time and bought lots of goodies. the line ups for lunch were really long (and there wasn't as much choice in good hot food to eat as there has been in the past) so we ended up getting ice cream for lunch (and it was really good). we also caught the last half of a talk on climate change which was interesting. what she was talking about wasn't really anything i didn't know but she did have a couple interesting facts like this one:


If everyone in the UK abstained from eating meat even for one day a week, this would save 13 megatons CO2 of greenhouse gas emissions. This would result in greater carbon savings than taking 5 million cars off the road in the UK (10.4 Mt CO2). (Source stats: Nicolaas G. Pierson
Foundation)
she stated it as: if everyone in the UK went vegan 7 days a week it would be the equivalent of taking about 35 million cars off the road in the UK(that's more cars then there are there).
i like random facts like that.
one other photo- wombat enjoying her vegan "pig's ear" from vegan pet:
Posted by Picasa

2 comments:

Tahn said...

Shame we weren't in contact earlier - would have loved to meet you at WVD! My kids and I rode our bikes, but we cheated a bit by catching the train too (we were running late).
Tahn

Anonymous said...

hi shawna. wombat looks adorable ho-ing into that ear! i get them for my dog suzie. at first she goes a little nuts and buries them 4 or 5 times but always goes back to them and devours them in a few minutes. I get mine from a really good pet supply shop on moreland road in coburg called pet love
http://fairestfeed.blogspot.com/2009/09/one-for-pups-vegetarian-pigs-ears.html