We moved to Chile when I was three to start a new life in a better place. And I must admit, it is not a bad place. I have been homeschooled for most of my life, ever since I was vaccinated against my will in a public school, after that my mum herself took on the weight of teaching me, while also working in the company that my parents had started. My dad is a nutritionist, and this has been somewhat helpful to me. If I decide to be completely healthy, eat absolutely raw...well, I'll have his support, but if I decide to stop contributing to unfair animals' deaths...that is another story.

To be frank, he hasn't thrown a hissy fit, but it always seems to be the father who refuses to accept that his kid has become a vegetarian. My mother, on the other hand, has been very patient, and she has supported me through all the cruel words that my dad gave me. Last year if he had said that we are meant to eat meat, that humans actually keep animals from going extinct because we raise animals (for killing) and that vegetarians die on an average of six years earlier I would have listened attently to him. But here's where we part.

Quite a long time ago, perhaps a year ago, although I cannot remember exactly, me and my parents sat down to watch a show on the news; a gory glimpse at what really happens to animals. It showed illegal dog-fights, mad cow disease, dead fowls being rammed back into crates when trucks overturned, animals being tortured and tested on and all the things that make many humans somewhat less than human in my opinion. After that, I went vegetarian. I have absolutely no idea why I went back to eating meat after a few months. I think it was because in my happy world there were no reminders of what was really happening, and I unconsciously denied all that I had seen on that show.

Eventually it was PETA who woke me up. I was visiting their website and I saw a video that showed how animals were murdered, hung by their legs while their throats were slit and other images that made my stomach turn...a stomach that turned even more when I sat down to a chicken lunch. I remember picking at the chicken, and then realizing that I didn't HAVE to eat dead animals, not ever again.

I gave up white and red meat, but kept on eating fish for a few months. When I went to someone's house and had to explain my vegetarianism I always added that I ate fish, and they were like, "Why?" So I said that I believed that fish were allowed to live a happier life than other animals, and they would say, "So you cut that life short?" Or something along those lines. It didn't take me long to see that I either ate animals, or I didn't...fish are animals, no matter how many times my dad says that they have no nervous system, so I stopped eating them. I wonder if you have ever looked into an aquarium, pausing to study the mesmerising eloquence of the moves that fishes make, the way they move through the water. It is truly a pity to waste them as food.

Sometimes I hold my most adorable, loving and beautiful cat, Chloe, and look into her large, yellow eyes as she sits with her paws on my shoulder, purring at me, and I say "I would never, ever eat you," and finally I know that I truly mean it.

When she wrote this article Nadine had been veg for only a few months. "I recently decided not to eat any fish, because I realized that it is, in fact, horribly hypocritical of me to promote lessening animal suffering, over some naive belief that fish cannot feel...Three Cheers for Vegs!"