ArchShari Black Velvet, editor of Black Velvet magazine had an interview with Alissa White-Gluz. The inspirational vocalist of Arch Enemy spoke with Black Velvet through Zoom. She shared her reasons for being vegan, her opinions on vigils, what causes someone to create suffering, and whether she believes there will ever be a day when all life is cherished.

Is Alissa White-Gluz vegan or vegetarian?

Alissa White-Gluz said:

“I think it is. If we wanna look at this just from a general perspective, children are not raised… If you look at a baby around a bunny or around a cat or a dog, if you just look at any baby when they see an animal, they’re in awe — they’re laughing; they’re smiling; they think it’s cool. They’re, like, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ They’re curious. The same way little kids stare at you, because they’re just taking it all in. This is the first time they’re seeing another human adult or seeing everything clearly. Their eyesight’s developing; they’re able to now take in new colors and textures and see the beautiful wings of a bird or the nice soft fur of a cat, and they look at animals and they have love and admiration for animals. And then, somewhere along the way, we are taught that actually we don’t love and admire animals; we just exploit and kill them. And that’s good and that’s normal. And I think that that kind of upbringing is what makes people… It becomes normal — it just becomes a daily routine, it becomes part of their habits, and they just don’t understand why there’s anything wrong with it. Their parents did it, they do it, [and] they don’t see anything wrong with it. And I get that, and that’s not their fault, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not commendable to recognize that it’s wrong now and change now.”

She also added:

“I think, unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the world that do mean to cause pain and sorrow to other humans, to themselves, to animals, and they do that by contributing to the food industries that kill animals or by fishing or by hunting. And they have all sorts of green-washing excuses up their sleeves to make it seem like they’re not doing it for any intentionally damaging way. But, at the end of the day, the same excuse that they use, like, ‘Oh, we’re the top of the food chain,’ okay, yeah, we’re the most advanced species when it comes to technology, and we now have the technology to not need to eat any animal products. We don’t need to hunt. We don’t need to fish. We don’t need to do that. We’re advanced. We’re smart. So we’re beyond this now. We’ve evolved past this, and I think it’s just time that everybody accepts that and we just move away from using animals in anything. It’s completely unnecessary.”