“They played music for the cows before they killed them”
The 5th Dan Karate Black Belt won Gold and Silver on European and World Championships, he leads a dojo with 370 people in Switzerland — and he is a vegan activist: meet athlete Pascal Egger.
Interview: Nicole McLaren
Pascal, you don’t look exactly like you would fall apart any time soon.
Ha, not in any foreseeable future! I am training Karate for 24 years now, and I am vegan for 3. I had never been healthier. I am older now but feel so much better than when I was younger. I feel really fit. I think if I went back to my former meat-loaden diet, that would make me fall apart.
Ellen DeGeneres famously quoted that she became vegan after watching “Earthlings”. Many people did so after that documentary. You too. Congratulations!
Thank you.
It might be the most gory film out there. I myself never made it through. I chickened out after the first few minutes.
To be honest I needed 2 or 3 approaches too. But I told myself: these things happen — if I watch it or not. It is the animals’ reality. I felt I had to see that with my own eyes. From there it only got worse: I watched the most horrible footage of animal abuse out there. Slaughterhouses, vivisection, electrocution, alive skinning, alive burning — you name it. I think I watched them all.
Why would you do that?
It helped me go the way I wanted to. Hear-say was not enough for me. I wanted to join the discussion, and I wanted to know first-hand what we are talking about here.
Did you ditch meat and dairy over night, after “Earthlings”?
Dairy yes. But up to that I had eaten beef tenderloin daily, and I obsessively clung on to it; my mind was that pre-conditioned. So I searched for a little farm in Lucerne that raises their animals picture-perfectly, and that slaughters them “humanly”.
“Humane slaughter”. Interesting. What would that be, exactly?
I know, right…? But back then I still believed in this myth. So I went into that farm and they showed me how the animals are raised — admittedly absolutely exemplary! — and I watched how they slaughtered 2 cows right there. And you know what?
What?
They play music for them.
They let them listen to music before they kill them? That’s perverse.
It is. Apparently it has a calming effect on them. But yeah, after having found that farm, I kept eating meat from that one exclusively, and I patted myself on the back for having found that moral loophole and I felt really good about it.
So what changed that?
It hit me about a month later. I knew already that there is just no nice way to steal a mother’s child, so dairy was off the table. Same for eggs: there is absolutely no moral justification in killing every second little chick right after birth — all males are useless for the industry -; to end a whole life in exchange for a few seconds of palate-tickling. And then all of a sudden I understood: it does not matter how a cow had been raised. The happiest as well as the most miserable cow meets the very same brutally-bloody fate. It is the very act of killing that is deplorable. That realization dawned on me 3 years ago, and I am vegan ever since.
Many moan that the transition would be too hard for them. Was it hard for you?
Not at all. I do everything in life wholeheartedly. What was hard though was finding myself all of a sudden in a minority surrounded by a society that still thinks like I used to. Seeing that they are not there yet, that is hard. I underestimated that impact — it is an emotional burden, for sure. But the change is every day worth fighting for!
Some say optimistically that The Vegan age has begun. Do you think the world is transitioning into a vegan future?
The movement is growing exponentially, the vegan market is exploding. What we need now is to reach the critical point of 10% of the population. Then it may spill over to the masses, and we get to the point of no return. I imagine in the future meat might even be illegal.
You yourself not only transitioned from an omnivore to a vegan, you went way further: you became an activist.
It took some time, though. At the very beginning I did not even talk about my veganism to my closest friends. When I was invited for dinner I just tried clandestinely to “eat around the meat”. Then I became more and more confident in my choice of living, started talking to people, raising awareness; educating. Now I attend vigils regularly, where activists bear witness in the wee hours of the morning, when trucks tightly cramped with victims arrive at the slaughterhouse; we take farewell together. Additionally I am the local organizer in Lucerne for Anonymous for the Voiceless, a super successful way of street activism. Within 2 years they grew into a movement of hundreds of chapters all around the globe. In Lucerne we started with 6 activists and now we are nearly 30. People speak up, the silence is over. We are many, and we are powerful.
I am sure on those street events or from friends and family you hear a lot of anti-vegan stances. How do you deal with the endless annoying protein deficiency jokes?
I have a lot of patience with people. If someone gets nasty I will just not put my energy into them. These people are not the pioneers. They will turn vegan, eventually, when they are forced to — for example for declining health reasons.
You saw a lot of animal abuse. What hurts you the most?
I was inside farms, slaughterhouses and sanctuaries. I saw footage of baby calves being ripped away from their mother, and it is heartbreaking. The difference is this: on a sanctuary you are not allowed to get close to a cow and her newborn, because she will aggressively protect it.
As any mother would!
Exactly. Milk cows on the other hand… their will is broken. They endure that trauma of a stolen baby again and again and again. That left me as a karateka really horrified. Because I can defend myself. If someone attacked me I could — and would! — fight for my life. That lies within the instinct of every living creature. But the cows, the pigs, the chicken? They are denied even that. They have no right at all. Absolutely zero. Even the eventual cow or sheep that miraculously gets off the slaughter truck, the one lucky one that actually manages to flee somehow — it has no chance. Enemies everywhere. There is no refuge it could seek shelter in. If you think about it a bit, you notice that this system is really sick. A phrase that I read somewhere keeps coming back to me, specially when I attend a vigil and I see all those innocent creatures born to die: “The only thing we need from animals is forgiveness.”
Is it forgivable, what we have done?
No. Never. But it is our duty to stand up against this.
You are an activist not only on the street and in front of slaughterhouses but sometimes also in your dojo. You have hundreds of karate students. Now as the winter season started — do you see a lot of fur?
I do, sadly, and my patience there is thinly spread. Once a mother of one of my students came to pick her up, and we had a chat. All of a sudden I noticed her fur-lined hoodie. She saw my look and reassured me that it was fake fur. It looked too real to me though. We spread the hair — and there it was, underneath: skin. Not woven fabric. I even ripped a hair out and lit it, and the typical smell of burnt hair confirmed it was fur indeed.
How did she react?
She was stunned and got very uncomfortable. But she is still wearing it.
What about the karate kids?
You know, one of them came to me recently and showed me triumphantly her fur-rimmed jacket, which was clearly fake fur, detectable from a mile ago. “You would not be opposed to that, would you?”, she asked.
And?
I told her that it sends the wrong message: “You still advertise fur. You would also not want your class mate come to school with, let’s say, a fake gun — right?” That made her ponder.
She might also re-think her food choices.
She might, hopefully. Already about 10 of my friends are vegan.
Hoorray! Success!
Indeed. You know, I see my dojo and my circle of friends as the miniature version of the world. If it is possible to initiate change here — I know it’s possible out there, too.
