MAYA COHEN-RONEN ACTIVIST & PUBLISHED AUTHOR Maya Cohen-Ronen (pen name M. C Ronen) is a New Zealand vegan of nine years and animal rights activist. When she isn’t bearing witness outside the local slaughterhouse or protesting, she is a business analyst, a mother of two children, two dogs and one rabbit, and a published author. The final instalment of her ‘Liberation Trilogy’, a series of dystopian suspense books for vegans and pre-vegans, was published in July.
What made you go vegan? When he was a wee toddler, my son developed a keen interest in sharks. Back then I hardly knew anything about sharks and could barely name more than three. Through the marvel of his fascination, a new world had opened to me. I decided to foster and nurture his interest and joined him, diving into this wonderful world of animals unbeknown to me. From that point, the rout to Sea Shepherd was short. I learned what they did to preserve and defend the oceans and became a big supporter. Through them, I was finally exposed to the shocking extent of the atrocities perpetuated on ocean68
FORÇA VEGAN
ic lives. My son was young, but in my imagination, he would be grown, and we’d be braving the elements on a Sea Shepherd ship in the Southern Ocean, chasing whalers with rage and purpose. But then, to my surprise, I read somewhere that all Sea Shepherd ships were strictly vegan. Erm… what? Defending whales was all well and good but being vegan? Why be so… well… extreme? I decided to research it. I looked for vegan sites and read everything I could find. Lo and behold, it turned out the cows don’t really ‘give us milk’ after all… and the chicken, they don’t ‘give us eggs’… I was embarrassed at the level of my own ignorance. As a mother, it never occurred to me that all mammalian females must be pregnant first in or-
der to lactate, just like me. That was my watershed moment. I decided to go vegan, no detours or baby steps. My husband, then a vegetarian, followed me and the entire household became vegan. It’s been nine years since.
You are also an animal rights activist. What forms of activism do you engage in? I follow the phrase ‘doing nothing does harm’. Soon after becoming vegan, I felt the burning need to speak
