Hunting and fishing were my passions in life. I realized that despite what I had been told, I was not biologically a meat eater. Since I had no biological necessity to eat meat, I had no necessity to kill the animals I was eating.

Oddly enough, I felt like I was an animal lover. And I believed that I was doing what was best for them as a species (I was wrong). And I honestly did have remorse for the animals I killed (in some bastardized way) but I just thought that it was my ecological niche as a human being to be a predator because that’s what I had been taught. Much like the rest of carnism, the entire foundation for what I thought was reality was, in fact, false. Once I became aware that I was a hypocrite and wrong, it was so easy to just give it up.

It’s just like the rest of carnism really. There’s also the whole toxic masculinity wrinkle in which I felt like hunting and fishing was some sort of romanticized escape to being a manly frontiersman or something. Once I connected that manliness has absolutely nothing to do with hurting wild animals, that part was easy to give up, too.