Greetings and Salutations!

Though my blog title might hint otherwise, this is NOT a place—as yet anyway—to find yummy vegan dishes. There are many other blogs out there you can stumble on, like I did, to get great recipes or to just drool over lovely photos of vegan meals.

No, you have arrived at a rather strange place. While I am a vegan (I would go as far as saying a struggling vegan), I define myself more as a devoted slave to six beautiful house rabbits who, as you will eventually learn here at The Hoppy Vegan, led me to this positive new lifestyle. At The Hoppy Vegan, you will bear witness to my new journey with food, AND enjoy the adventures of rabbitdom. I emphatically believe that no one has ever lived till they have shared their life with one of these beautiful animals. Anyone can have a cat or a dog—but to share their home with a rabbit is to truly learn about nature and, as I have, learn to look at ALL animals in a new way.

I will not go out of my way to be controversial or provocative, though I should warn you that I have a tendency of unintentionally pissing people off. (Some days all I have to do is say pass the soymilk to do that.) Please take my views, my words, for what they are, and PLEASE don’t go all defensive! Just read, laugh, learn, comment, and keep it all in perspective.

By the way, I’m not just talking to my meat-loving audience either. Do you know why many people think vegans have no sense of humor? That vegans are super-judgmental? Because some are. And many will no doubt get upset if I confess to breaking down and having a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from the excess Halloween dump a co-worker brought to work (I figured the Reese’s did me the least harm compared to the Hershey bars). To save our sanity, we need to laugh more in a world where animals are so brutally exploited. (By the way, there are good reasons why many vegans devoted to animal rights issues SEEM to have little sense of humor. When you witness the suffering of so many animals in factory farms, in shelters, on the streets, etc. it can really tear at your soul. It’s hard to laugh knowing shelters kill rabbits just because they have no room and no time to adopt them out to good homes. But we can, and actually do, laugh. Need more proof? Check out Dan Piraro of BIZARRO fame, linked here. I aim to keep this blog as lighthearted as I can (and that will be easy to do when you see the photos of the rabbits who have brought such pure joy to my life.). This is not to say I won’t show some serious material—you can bet I will, especially when it concerns my rabbit friends. But I want to smile too. Don’t you?

So let’s get hopping and blogging. (But please - leave the PETA—People Eating Tasty Animals—line out of here. It really isn’t funny—and frankly, it’s OLD.)

Paulette a.k.a. The Hoppy Vegan