When someone is suffering, I believe it is wrong to look the other away. It doesn’t matter if the sufferer has two legs or four or asks for help in words we can understand or with body language that is just as easy to comprehend. Leo Tolstoy, an ethical vegetarian and one of my inspirations, wrote, “[W]e should take pity on animals in the same way as we do on each other. And we all know this, if we do not deaden the voice of our conscience inside us.”

The pigs I was trying to help on that fateful day were undoubtedly suffering. Crammed into a transport truck on a sweltering day, these helpless animals – covered with their own excrement, being crushed together and slowly suffocating from heat – stared at me through the trailer’s metal slats with their pleading eyes.