Aussie woman becomes a butcher and pig farmer after living vegetarian for a decade

An Australian woman who was vegetarian for over a decade says she returned to eating meat when pregnant with her third child, and never looked back. 

Tammi Jonas, from regional Victoria, became vegetarian in her youth after reading Animal Liberation, the book written by Australian philosopher Peter Singer in the 1970s. 

Jonas says she lived a plant-based lifestyle for close to a decade and successfully ate vegetarian through two pregnancies. 

But it when she was pregnant with her third child in her 30s that everything changed. 

"I had been pregnant twice before, but this the third time was different and I became dangerously anaemic,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

Despite taking various supplements and eating a number of iron-rich foods, her body simply needed more nourishment.

"I was at work one day and just thought: 'a burger would fix this'." 

Jonas told 10 Daily she began eating red meat once a week through her pregnancy and was mindful of only eating meat from ethically farmed and slaughtered animals.

"I never thought it was immoral to take an animal's life for food - I've always been comfortable with my place in the food chain, but I thought it was immoral to treat [animals] cruelly, to not allow them to go outside and breathe fresh air and to be confined in crowds in sheds," she said.

It lead her down the path of producing her own sustainable meat, as the former vegetarian turned to pig farming. Now Jonas and her husband Stuart have been running Jonai Farms and Meatsmiths for eight years.

Jonas describes her farming practices to Daily Mail Australia as ethical and holistic.

She explained there are no harmful chemicals used in her farming practices, and the animals live to roam freely around their land. 

"Some people will draw an ethical line that killing is bad," she said.

"But I don't believe that - I don't think killing an animal for consumption is unethical if it had a good life."

As evidenced by her Instagram page, Jonas sticks to ethically sourced meats. 

"Here's some of the uncommonly delicious food produced in ethical and ecologically-sound ways we've enjoyed in the last couple weeks," she captioned one of her recent posts.

Newshub.