My love of animals and how I've awakened in the last 2 years.

As a disclaimer I must say that I do not blame any person for what they eat.  This is only a personal experience of a personal awakening, that I felt that the universe really showed me within the past year, that I never felt before.  This is why I felt that part of the thinning of the veil, of the pre-existing matrix is unraveling, at least for me.  

I grew up eating meat.  I never thought it mattered, because meat is food.  It's protein.  However, on a personal level, I realized that I cannot kill an animal myself.  It absolutely breaks my heart.  I had to kill a bird to put it out of its misery because our cat caught and wounded it.  It disturbed me.. because I absolutely love animals.  I realized that buying meat at the grocery store and taking it home to cook it was a disconnect, because I could not kill the animal myself and dismember its body to eat it.   I believe that the love in one's heart is their intuition and using that I realized I can not eat meat anymore.   When I was a child I grew up on a cattle farm and we raised the cattle to kill them and eat them.  Somehow back then, seemingly when the matrix was firmly in place, we didn't care, or we didn't realize or have a real conscience of raising baby calves, watching them be born and letting them grow up in the herd and then killing them for their meat.   Back then we didn't realize it was wrong.  Cattle are huge, benevolent creatures that could have killed us, but as a child I ran around with them and played with them, they had their family, and would graze together and loved eachother.  Back then, the mobile butcher would come out and kill, slaughter them in front of the other members of their family.   My grandma said that the bull had real tears and would cry.   How in the world we could have done that back then saddens me, in hindsight.   That was in the 1980s when I was in elementary school.  It's only in the last year now that I gave up eating meat because I realized if I cannot kill the animal myself, it would absolutely break my heart to kill an animal.  So I decided to give up eating meat altogether.   On the farm when I was a child I helped my uncle kill a chicken to eat it for dinner and back then I didn't think anything of it, because that's farm life.  It was normalized.  However, now if I had a chicken, I'd tell the chicken in my heart that I will find other food so it can live.  This is my own experience.  If you have doubts, if you love animals and can't kill an animal yourself, then ask yourself and sleep on it. 

Another aspect of how I've woken up in terms of what has been normalized when it comes to animals were when horses were transportation.  I never really thought much of seeing old photos of horse drawn carriages.  That's just the way it was before automobiles were invented.  However, it's occurred to me that it was so sad how horses were slaves.  Whipped to make them run faster.  In the past I knew people that had horses and they were expected to be ridden.  That was just normalized and the way it was.  Horses are intelligent, telepathic, majestic and beautiful beings.  If I had a horse he/she wouldn't be my slave and forced to be ridden, but my friend and I would only ride him/her if he/she would want to do that for me, not as my slave but as my friend.  I see this realization within myself to be a thinning of the veil of what my whole life I didn't realize was wrong.  Animals are to be loved and cherished.  They are special, beautiful beings we share our wonderful planet with.  I've also learned of cases of people that had pet pigs that the pigs are intelligent beings that would risk themselves to find help for their human that needed help, not unlike dogs.  I feel guilty for eating pork as a result of all of this realization.