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gertvegan
Nov 30th, 2005, 11:07 AM
The queen of pleather

KELLY HOUSEN, Spark, 11/30/2005, www.delawareonline.com (http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051130/SPARK/511300313/-1/NEWS01)

Kimberly Dooley is too sexy for leather.

That's what she thinks, and the 6,000 people who voted her the winner of PETA'S "I'm too sexy for leather contest" would seem to agree.

But Kimberly wasn't always anti-leather. She lives in Townsend now, but she's a Texas native who once enjoyed a big juicy steak with her cowboy brethren.

"I ate tons of steak and chicken -- drank a gallon of milk every day," she said.

Now she hasn't had a steak in the three years that she's been a vegan. She also hasn't had eggs, milk, butter or ice cream. In fact, she doesn't even eat honey.

"I had always said I'd be a vegetarian if I knew how," Kim said. "But I never tried to learn how. Then when you decide, it's like a light switch inside you turns on. It was much easier than I thought it would be."

Kim wasn't the first in her family to go vegan. While she was working in the Coast Guard after graduating from Middletown High School in 2000, her mom and sister read "Slaughterhouse" by Gail A. Eisnitz. After reading it, they went vegan, but didn't encourage Kim to do so because they were afraid that it would be hard for Kim to have balanced meals on a Coast Guard ship without eating meat. So they said nothing.

"I had no idea why they stopped eating meat," Kim said. "I finally suckered the information out of my sister and started doing my own research."

Kim also read "Slaughterhouse," the 1997 investigation into the American meat industry, with long passages about how animals are treated at slaughterhouses and factory farms.

"I'm an animal lover anyway. To think about the cruelty she describes is one thing, but to go as far as to think about how unsanitary it is -- that's a whole different level," Kim said.

After reading the book, she stopped eating meat and any animal products. Cold turkey.

"I've always loved food," Kim said. "But I've never enjoyed eating as much as I've enjoyed it the past three years."

She joined PETA, and is as active as she can be, in between classes and work. Kim actually entered the contest as a way to get people she knew to go to the PETA Web site.

"I totally understand that it's a publicity thing to get people to go to the Web site," she said. "But if I can get people to go there and learn, I'm glad that people who had never been there went on. I hoped they learned something."

And it was a meat-eating friend Kim drew to the PETA Web site with her sexy pleather picture (www.cowsarecool.com) who first told her that the site now announces her as the winner. PETA hasn't contacted her yet, but as soon as they do, she's ready to pick out her new pleather.

Q and A in the link above. ;)