How was VeggieAnimals born?

I'm Sonia, founder of VeggieAnimals and I want to share with you how this wonderful project created for and by animals was created.

"This is what I want to do with my life".

I was walking down the street when I overheard a girl saying to another girl "I'm vegan", my head wondered what that meant, and when I got home, I googled "vegan".

That was 15 years ago, and the only three entries that appeared were a video of the inhabitants of de la Vega, a video of animal testing and a video of a rabbit rescue.

When I saw that video, the rescue video, I said, this is what I want to do with my life.
It was the 24th of December, and that same day I emptied my fridge of animal food, at dinner, the sea bream remained untouched on the plate, I looked at it as if a veil had been removed and it was a new reality.

The weight of activism

After two months I started coordinating Igualdad Animal in Catalonia. Our work focused on three main areas: education, through talks and street events, investigation, in different places where animals are exploited and killed, and rescues.

Little by little, my work as a nursery education teacher was changing in my order of priorities. Although I believe that education is basic and possibly one of the most important things to do in the fight for animal rights, my day was divided between working in the mornings at the education centre, and filming and photographing farms at night.

There came a time when I just wanted to dedicate myself to helping animals and that, added to the fact that, every time I had to order 100% vegetable feed, I experienced all sorts of problems, made me "take the plunge".

Why did I experience so many problems when I ordered food?

On the one hand, nobody answered your doubts, and there were many, many, many of them. We are all afraid when we make the change to a 100% plant-based diet, and I didn't feel that I had any support, any guidance.

On the other hand, I was not an expert in veterinary formulas, far from it, but they seemed to me that they could be much improved. Delivery was "uncertain", as they came from England and Italy, and although there were some distributors in Spain, it was not easy to obtain them.
And finally, the price, I had to give up things to be able to feed the dogs and cats I lived with on a 100% plant-based diet. The prices were very high, but I didn't want to contribute to other animals dying so that my dogs and cats could be fed.

I told myself, "Why don't you stop complaining and do it yourself?"

And so VeggieAnimals began to take shape, I left my position as a civil servant, and dedicated myself to continuing to carry out research and rescues while setting up the project.

c Of course, my project had to have the veterinary support that I lacked so much, formulas that were more than perfect, and a price that was as reasonable as possible. It wasn't easy, because people thought I was crazy, they helped me in a town hall with the viability plan and although it came out favourable, I could feel how the person who was guiding me looked at me like "you're going to get a bad shock", the same with suppliers, you called the factories to ask them to make production for you and they laughed at you.

Even so, I have to say that things went very smoothly, I was very sure about it and I was passionate about what I was creating because I knew it was going to help a lot of animals, so those comments, faces and mockery didn't affect me at all (possibly they affect me more today). In 2 years VeggieAnimals was ready to be born, it was September 2014. I remember already having the feed in a mini warehouse, we could already sell, but I was scared to death, and I didn't dare to launch it on the market until 2 months later, in November 2014.

And here we are, VeggieAnimals is a beautiful project, formed by vegans and activists, that maintains its values and objectives, 7 years later it is still a project for and on behalf of animals.

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur @weanimals