Senior Emily Bohn contemplated the switch to being a vegetarian during the summer of 2019. She told her parents she didn’t want to eat meat anymore, several months later.

“When I was a little kid, I had a recurring dream in which predatory animals would eat the smaller prey alive as the prey was screaming so that freaked me out a lot. So as I got older, I started to think about how in this society we consume some animals and not others. Like sometimes we consume pigs and not dogs. I don’t like the idea of eating a dog, so why would I want to eat a pig? When I realized things about the slaughterhouse, I began to start cutting beef out of my life and then began to start cutting out dairy,” Bohn said. 

Bohn fully committed to becoming a vegetarian after her dog of three years, Sassy, ran away. 

“I developed a higher sense of compassion for both animals and people and started feeling disgusted by the idea of meat, both in a psychological and physical sense.” 

Switching to becoming a vegetarian opens to change. 

“It’s really opened me up to different perspectives; for instance, I remember seeing a bunch of people making fun of vegans on the internet in 2016 and I just went along with it because I had no sense of individuality. So I had denounced the entire vegan diet for two years, but then I became a vegetarian. It’s encouraged me to rethink prior opinions I held and be more open-minded,” Bohn said.