This week we asked Richard Deboo, animal rights activist, public speaker and author of the newly released vegan ethics book Nine steps to Eden to answer a few questions about his new book for the Vegetarian Hungary blog. Richard is a committed vegan who stayed in budaveg when visiting Budapest in 2008. You can read a sample chapter of his book online here.1. When, how and why did you become vegetarian, what was the main reason?
This was for fundamentally ethical reasons – I knew from some of my friends who were vegan already that one could live perfectly well without eating any animal products, and so I could no longer justify to myself that it was “ok” for me to continue to eat other animals. I had always been interested in political action to stop the exploitation of my fellow humans and so I knew that to be ethically and logically consistent I had to want to stop exploiting other animals as well – and that needed to start with me, by ensuring that I lived a cruelty-free lifestyle.
