A vegan couple have been sentenced to life in prison by a US court over the death of their malnourished baby.

The baby died six weeks after birth after being fed a diet largely made up of soy milk and organic apple juice.

Defence lawyers for Lamont Thomas and Jade Sanders said they had starved their child unintentionally by adhering to a strictly vegan diet.

But prosecutors in the US city of Atlanta said the couple had deliberately neglected their child.

"No matter how many times they want to say, 'We're vegans, we're vegetarians,' that's not the issue in this case," Prosecutor Chuck Boring is quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.

"The child died because he was not fed. Period," he said.

Strict vegans adhere to a diet that avoids all animal products.

Crown Shakur weighed 3.5lb (1.6kg) at the time of his death in April 2004.

The baby was born in a bathtub in the couple's house.

Defence lawyer Brandon Lewis is quoted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper as saying the couple did not take their child to a doctor because they feared hospitals were full of germs.

Defence lawyers said the couple did not realise the baby's life was in danger until it was too late.

A jury deliberated for seven hours before delivering its verdict on 2 May.

Sentencing the couple, the judge said the murder verdict made the life sentence mandatory.

Jade Sanders told the judge: "I loved my son - and I did not starve him."

According to the AP news agency, Lamont Thomas complained that he had not known he was being tried for a felony - rather than the lesser offence of a misdemeanour.

"We had no idea involuntary manslaughter was a felony. We were told for three years this was a misdemeanour," he reportedly said. "It takes money to prove this wasn't a felony - money we don't have."

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My response:

I think that this case should be taken very seriously and be remembered by every veg*n who aspires to raise a child as a veg*n. I really think that it is a very dangerous idea because of several different reasons. The first and foremost being that the veg*n diet itself causes the mother to have a significantly reduced quality of breastmilk that is largely due to vitamin B-12 deficiency, but is not limited only to that. There are other types of deficiencies that are also associated with it as well. Read the other articles that I have posted in the previous section for more information about that issue. The point being that it is not safe to rely on your breastmilk alone (as meat-eaters can) to feed your newborn baby if you are a veg*n mother because even the best planned veg*n diets can cause this effect and proper supplementation is not only stressed by doctors but is in fact a requirement if you want a healthy baby.

Now that is just the physical aspect of the problem. There is also a mental aspect to this that I think is being overlooked by the reporters in this case: the majority of the people who follow a veg*n diet really do tend to believe that it is the most healthy diet for every human being, including infants, which I believe leads them to a dangerous kind of placebo effect in their mentality that not only puts their own health at risk in reality, but also (and especially) that of their babies. It is even a greater problem in the cases of young children because their systems are more fragile and demanding than those of adults because they are new and they are growing. In other words, it is like they really believe that they are invincible in a way just because they follow a veg*n diet when it comes to things like malnutrition and disease, which actually puts them at even greater risk of said ailments because then they fail to take the proper steps to avoid getting sick from them because they think that they don't need to and the problem becomes even more serious when they have children because they insist on forcing them to subsist on a less-than-optimal diet which can lead straight to cases of infant death such as this one. And for anyone who is thinking that this is an isolated case, think again. This is not the first time that a baby has died or nearly died because of a disorder that was caused by the malnutrition that stemmed from the belief systems of their veg*n parents. This is also not the first time that a veg*n parent has seen legal action taken against them for this reason. See the root section of this page to read about similar cases that have occurred in the past.

Another important issue to consider is the fact that most veg*n parents at this time were not actually raised themselves on that kind of diet, they were fed animal products by their parents before they converted to veg*nism later in life, usually in their teens or early adulthood, and may have only been following the new diet for a few years or so at the time that they have a baby. The reason that this is an important factor in this case is that growing up on diet that includes animal products normally causes a person to build up massive stores of the various nutrients that generally only come from animal products or are more abundant in them, which can last for several years after the person stops consuming them on a regular basis or severely reduces their intake of them. This gives a false impression that a veg*n diet is healthier because if the person was consuming excessive quantities of animal products before they adopted their veg*n diet, they may have been overweight and then saw a massive and speedy reduction in their fat stores shortly after becoming a veg*n, and because they still have some stores of the vital nutrients left in their body from the animal products that they had consumed in the past, it might take several years for them to develop the actual symptoms of malnutrition that will eventually occur in them if they continue a veg*n diet without proper supplementation to make up for the loss of nutrient sources that they have chosen to abstain from. It is also true that veg*ns tend to have less of a chance of contracting heart disease and cancer as compared to those who subsist on the “typical American diet”, which usually involves consuming *excessive* quantities of animal products on a regular basis that are high in fat and cholesterol, such as cheese and fatty portions of factory-farmed meat, and not getting enough fiber and exercise to counteract it, which naturally leads them to obesity and ultimately the health problems that are associated with that condition. What is being overlooked here, though, is the moderate non-veg*n diets such as those which are traditionally followed by Asian peoples and indigenous tribes all over the world, which are actually the most healthy and lead to the longest possible lifespans, such as that of the traditional Okinawans, which includes fish and other types of seafood as well as raw, home-raised goat meat. But veg*ns don’t want you to know about that because it undermines the image they are trying to create in the public eye that their diet, which deliberately excludes all animal products on the sheer basis of a twisted kind of morality rather than actual health benefits, is actually the healthiest diet for everyone to follow, even when they find out that it is not really true. Because the truth is, they really do care more about the animal rights agenda than they do about human health and they have no qualms about using deceptive and potentially dangerous tactics to get people to do what they want. The reason being, they perceive all meat-eaters as the scum of the earth, especially those who have the nerve to actually do the killing themselves, and do not feel guilty about hurting them as long as they believe that it is going to help protect animals and/or the environment. And they always do. Even if there are fatal consequences to people because of it, all the better for the Earth, they will say, because less humans = less animals getting killed by them and that's all they really care about. That's all there is to it in the end when you get past all the sugarcoating of their philosophy. That is how their minds really work. And they really do believe that they are working for the greater good and they go right on believing it even when they are proven wrong time and again, despite the fact that their efforts do nothing at all to really help animals, rather the exact opposite in most cases, because they are in a serious state of denial and don't want to face reality so they can continue pretending in the fantasy world that they have created for themselves where they are superior to everyone else in every way just because of their diet and it doesn't matter how much wrong they do because their veg*nism always makes up for it. That's what they think. Seriously, it's as though they really believe that a veg*n diet alone builds up so much good karma in a person's soul that they can do pretty much whatever they want as long as they remain a veg*n and still get to Nirvana or whatever it is that they believe is waiting for them in the afterlife. Yeah right. Please read the other articles that I have posted in other sections of this website for more information about how the work of animal rights advocates undermines animal welfare and actually winds up causing more suffering and death for animals as well as for people, which in my book adds up to doubly bad joojoo.

The last issue that I want to point out regarding this case has to do with economics and financial constraints, because the vegan couple in question were admittedly poor. First of all, let me point out that veg*nism and being poor do not mix very well. Contrary to what veg*n advocates want people to believe, veg*n diets are potentially a lot harder on poor people than non-veg*n diets are, depending on the kind of area that you live in, and are generally much harder to stay on for people who live in rural areas as well, especially if they are not rich. This may seem strange to some when considering the cost of high-quality cuts of meat versus the cost of most common non-animal products that come from local grains, fruits and vegetables that are readily available in every typical grocery store in America, and the perception that is created by the generally higher prices of meat may lead one to believe that cutting meat out of their diet altogether will automatically lead them to spending less on food overall. However, I will venture to argue that this is not what ultimately winds up occurring in most cases. What is being forgotten about, foremostly, is the fact that poorly planned veg*n diets are invitations to disaster. The decision to go on a veg*n diet should never be taken lightly and it does actually require a lot of careful planning in order to be successful. In other words, it is not something that anyone can just jump right into without experiencing undesirable effects. Most veg*n advocates don’t try to argue with that fact because the last thing they want is for a bunch of meat-eaters to try to convert to veg*nism all of a sudden with disastrous consequences that will defame their movement and make it even less popular than it already is. So, they do in fact highly stress the need for careful planning and readily offer carefully-worded pamphlets and starter-kits to aid people who have decided to undergo the transformation in order to minimize the bad publicity that they know arises out of people’s failure to follow the diet correctly. I will say that is a commendable effort to some extent, I will at least give them that, but there is another factor that they are deliberately choosing to ignore and/or inform potential converts about that I believe was a serious issue in the case of the death of Crown Shakur. The parents were not only ill-informed about parenting as well as the veg*n diet’s proven ill effects on infants, but they were also quite poor. Why does that matter? It matters because the simple fact is that in order for one to subsist healthfully on a veg*n diet, especially a strict vegan one, supplementation is required as well as an extremely varied diet that includes many exotic fruits and vegetables that usually have to be imported from far-off regions and therefore cost quite a lot and are quite difficult to find in regular grocery stores. So you are going to wind up spending a lot of extra money on the supplements that you need as well as all the exotic plant foods that you are going to have to spend a lot of extra time looking for as well as the extra money it costs to have them shipped to you or the gas money it costs you to drive to that special shop 100 miles away that happens to carry them. Things like kelp and avocados, for example, which are highly recommended for filling out vegan diets, are not necessarily as easy for some people to come by than it is for others, and veg*ns are always encouraged to consume a lot of various and oftentimes exotic types of fruit, nuts, berries, sea foliage, and other things that only come from tropical areas such as jungles and places like that, which can also be quite expensive because they only grow in certain regions at certain times of the year and tend to expire quite rapidly even when kept in the best of conditions. This is especially true of poor people who live in rural parts of middle America, such as myself. I know for a fact that none of the grocery stores within a 20-mile radius of where I live carry products like that because they are not grown or even can be grown anywhere near this region, and the largest city, which is about 40 miles away and is still considered a small town by most people who actually live in big cities, may not have them either, outside of a few fancy restaurants that I cannot even afford to eat at so much as once a month, let alone every day. So, basically, I could not be a vegan even if I really wanted to be one, and yet I should still be villainized for eating meat according to most AR advocates. This is exactly why the primary advocates who are the driving force behind the veg*n/AR movement live in big cities rather than in rural areas and tend to have incomes that put them well above the poverty line so that the rising cost of fuel is not going to dissuade them from getting what they want and need in order to maintain their special diet. Big cities also tend to have better job markets than rural areas where jobs are harder to come by because there are less businesses, and many people in rural areas such as myself just have to make do with jobs that are less desirable and pay less money simply because we have no other choice. The veg*ns may not be willing to admit it and they may not even fully realize it, but I do think that in the back of their minds they secretly know that their station in life is one of the biggest contributing factors as to why they are able to do what they do and not suffer any obvious adverse effects from it. In other words, they are not going to be willing to move to a rural location at any time in their lives while they are maintaining a veg*n diet unless they're filthy rich because then they will have to learn the hard way just how difficult it really is to maintain in an environment where choices are much more limited and products are not as widely available, where you have to pay more for lesser quality items and have much less of a selection to choose from and have to drive further to get them, because that is what living in a rural area is all about. It’s rural because it has less businesses and less businesses means less products and services that are available to the inhabitants of the region, and their scarcity makes them more costly and they can get away with providing lesser quality products and services for higher prices in areas where they have a monopoly in a certain area of trade. It’s a really simple concept that is largely ignored by the veg*n community as they continue to insist that their lifestyle is not only the best for everyone in the entire world but also just as easy for everyone to follow as it is for them, which is completely untrue in both cases. And the reason I brought this up is because of the fact that the parents of that baby who died as a result of their negligence were vegans who were also poor and their cupboards were completely bare when the police entered their home. So, what that tells me is that it’s not just that they didn’t have enough money to buy food, it’s that they didn’t have enough money to buy *vegan* food. That’s what I think. Because, I’m poor as well. I’m not just talking out of my ass here, I know exactly what it’s like to be poor because I have lived that way for most of my life. I grew up that way and I make less than $10k a year right now and I have to live with my mother who works three jobs and makes only a little more than I do and we do have a hard time getting all of our bills paid on time. But you know what? We aren’t starving and never have been. One thing that we have always had enough of is food to eat, although it might not always be the best in quality or the healthiest. I’m actually a bit overweight right now because I can’t afford to buy healthier foods that are low in fat and still satisfying enough for me to live on, because, sadly enough, healthier foods that are fresh and fulfilling are actually a lot more expensive than most of the processed foods that are higher in fat because the latter can be mass produced and are easier to store and ship and they last a lot longer because of the preservatives. So, unfortunately, I do eat a lot of cheap junk food that is easy to get because you can find it in every grocery store, even the one in the little podunk town that I have to drive 3 miles to get to, which is the closest one to our house. And I would love to be able to adopt a healthier diet such as the one I was living on when I was stationed in Okinawa, Japan for a year, but that really is just not possible for me right now because of my income and the type of area that I live in at the moment. Oh well. But anyway, the point being that unless you are completely homeless and have literally no income whatsoever, you have absolutely no excuse to be starving your baby. And even if you are in that kind of situation, there are government programs such as Food Stamps and Welfare than can help a lot with that as long as you have some kind of job, as well as programs to get free baby formula and baby food from Medicaid and other charities that specialize in helping the children of destitute parents. But of course, as vegans, they wouldn’t allow their baby to have any formula that was made from cow’s milk or any food that might contain non-vegan ingredients, which severely limited their willingness to accept any form of charity that might have been offered to them despite the fact that it was desperately needed to ensure the survival of their child. They actually preferred to have their baby starve to death instead, and because of that I do believe that they deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison if only to prevent them from having any more children to abuse with their overstrict veg*n diet and their inability to swallow their pride. And every veg*n or potential veg*n out there who might be reading this needs to really consider the implications of what I’m trying to point out here so that the same thing doesn’t happen to them, and they also need to realize that as cases like this are piling up, veg*nism in and off itself is in serious danger of being considered a type of full-blown child abuse that is a severely punishable offense by law. In other words, it might actually become illegal for parents to deliberately deprive their children of animal products under any circumstance because of the vegan parents who have let their children die of starvation when they could have easily been saved by meat-eaters who were willing to help them.

One other thing that I want to mention is the comment that was made in the second article about the parents being afraid of sending their baby to the hospital because they were scared of the hospital being filled with germs. As if having the baby in the bathtub of their shitty apartment was any more sanitary! I bet they didn’t even sanitize the bathtub first, the thing that they wash themselves in when they are dirty, because they probably didn’t even own any disinfectant, since as far as I am aware, there is no such thing as vegan disinfectant. So, what was really going on there? I think it’s more likely that they just didn’t want any meat-eaters touching or caring for their baby, since most people who work in the healthcare field are meat-eaters. Most veg*ns detest meat-eaters and they associate eating meat with being filthy of both mind and body, which is a sad misconception considering that most veg*ns, especially poor ones, are more likely to live in unsanitary conditions because they think that it is more natural to do so and using disinfectants, which are usually quite expensive, to deliberately kill massive quantities of germs, which are living beings too, is morally unacceptable to them, on top of the fact that most disinfectants are tested on animals as a necessary part of their development to ensure their safety for use around humans and pets. There's also the fact that they won't use insectisides or other poisons and traps for the same reasons to control the more visible pests such as insects and rodents that contaminate living areas with their feces and spread diseases and bacteria through bites as well. And hospitals use tons of disinfectants, pest control techniques, and other products that are unvegan because they require animal testing and/or contain animal-derived substances or are used for actually killing animals that are considered vermin in order to maintain the highest possible degree of cleanliness in their buildings. They were probably also afraid that when the doctors saw the condition of their baby that they would get in trouble for it as well as being unhappy about the idea of their baby getting taken away from them and cared for by meat-eaters instead. I honestly believe that these people are a lot smarter than they were pretending to be and they really weren’t so ignorant of the facts as they claim to have been. I think that they knew very well that their baby was going to die because they had found out that it was impossible to keep an infant alive on a vegan diet with their level of income, and they preferred to let the baby die rather than having it be cared for by meat-eaters who would have been able to give it a better life by turning the kid into a meat-eater, perhaps because of their mentality that any human who eats meat is better off dead or deserves to be killed, even if it is their own child. I really wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, and if so then I think they really deserve the death penalty themselves instead of life imprisonment, because that is nothing less than cold-blooded murder of the first degree. This may seem like an extreme viewpoint to some, but it makes a lot more sense to me than assuming that they were just so stupid that they actually failed to notice that their baby was emaciated and accidentally let him starve to death, as if that is just some common mistake that any parent could make. Yeah right. I also think that it’s a shame the prosecutors of this case didn’t think of this possibility or bother to mention it during the trial, probably because they didn’t know enough about the mentality of veg*n extremists for it to even dawn on them as a real possibility. But the truth is, as I have learned, they really are that crazy. It also makes me angry that the defense lawyers for the parents tried to get the jury to be more sympathetic toward them just because they were vegans, as if their veganism somehow exempts them from having the same level of responsibilities for their children’s health and safety as everyone else. It makes me angry because a lot of veg*ns do seem to espouse the mentality that they are special and deserve special privileges when it comes to committing crimes that no one else has, whether they are harassing hunters, farmers, and/or medical researchers and their families or letting their own kids starve to death. It’s like they actually think that they should be except from every crime that their philosophy and lifestyle choice requires them to commit just because they are veg*ns and they can’t help it. I think that’s bullshit. Just remember if nothing else that no one has ever killed their baby by feeding it animal-drived products and yet babies have in fact died from being denied them. That fact alone proves beyond any reasonable doubt that veg*n diets are indeed unnatural for humans.