Honor God's Creatures on Easter

Today is Palm Sunday, which means Easter (except for Eastern Orthodox religions), is a week from today.

However you choose to celebrate it -- whether a non-religious excuse to get together with family or a highly religious event even greater than Christmas -- please do so without contributing to the suffering of animals.

If you believe in God or in a god, think about how He or she would feel about his (ok, I'm done with the capitalization and am using the male pronoun for ease) creatures being tortured for their flesh.

Would God condone the actions seen in the undercover video in my last post? Would he want you to contribute to that suffering and cruelty?

Sure, it's been tradition to color eggs -- we even call them Easter eggs. But how about forgoing that this year? You can hide plastic Easter eggs instead. Explain to your children that the eggs that they may have colored last year hurt the chickens. Kids LOVE animals; I'm sure they'd understand.

Why not wrap white paper around the plastic eggs and have your children draw on those instead? Or to make it easier, they could draw an Easter scene on a flat piece of paper. Those scenes would likely include bunnies and chicks -- and those chicks will be free on grass, not trapped in cages with the rotting remains of their cagemates.

And instead of the traditional Easter ham, break tradition. Show your kids some of the many videos online of happy pigs in animal sanctuaries. I bet they (and you, too) would be amazed at how frolicking pigs look similar to dogs.

The Internet is filled with delicious vegan recipes. To begin, check out ChooseVeg.com.

If you have any suggestions of other animal-friendly Easter traditions, please post them in the Comments section. Happy Easter!

(Photo courtesy of Jon Bockman.)