Meatless Mondays: Seamus and Juliana Dever’s Animal Loving Ways

TVRage is presenting a brand new series called Meatless Mondays, where we will showcase some of our favorite actors and actresses who are vegan or vegetarian. For those who don’t know, Meatless Mondays is a worldwide campaign encouraging others to eliminate meat from their diets once a week to improve their health and the planet’s health.

As a relatively new vegan myself, it’s inspiring to hear from fellow plant-based eaters and learn about their healthy journey - the successes and the difficulties. Going vegan or vegetarian isn’t just about eating healthy, but it’s about benefiting the planet, helping animals and treating your body right.

This Monday, I’m turning Meatless Mondays into a couples edition by featuring onscreen and real-life married duo Seamus and Juliana Dever.

You might recognize the Devers from ABC’s hit series ‘Castle.’ For those who don’t know, Seamus and Juliana play Kevin and Jenny Ryan. Yes, the married couple play a married couple on TV! Not only are these two lovebirds all about the acting world, but they are also all about promoting and protecting the animal community.

Did you know that for 19 years combined - Seamus (10) and Juliana (9) - the two have been avid vegetarians? Why did these two decide to go in a cruelty-free direction? I’m glad you asked! For Seamus, he grew up around vegetarianism, as his father’s been one since the late 1960s, but Seamus openly admits he didn’t grow up as a dedicated meat-free eater.

“I craved burgers and stuff like that, but my parents never served that sort of food in our home. I never knew what ribs were, until maybe when I was like 10. I would get ridiculed in school for eating mushroom pizza! So, I kinda grew up with it, and I realized that it was sort of was something that I could live with, and it wouldn’t disrupt my life in some revolutionary, horrifying way,” Seamus told Life + Dog in a 2013 interview.

He also added, “And when I moved out to LA I found that it was something that I could do easily, as opposed to places like Texas where I’ve performed in the Shakespeare Festival and realized that it’s really hard to be a vegetarian there! It’s so much easier in California for sure, but I sort of made the moral choice with a couple of instances. There’s an insane cattle farm on the 5 Freeway in Central California if you drive up to San Francisco; you pass it and you’re like ‘WOW, this is amazingly huge and crazy,’ and another thing that affected my decision was ‘Fast Food Nation.’ It was at that point I realized that there’s this machine that I don’t really want to be a part of, and if I can live with creatures not having to suffer, then I will feel better about myself and the life that I live.”

As for his wife, Julie (as Seamus calls her) made the veg jump after they adopted their first dog, George, who died a few years ago. “She realized that there was this animal in our home that she loved and cared about and she felt, ‘How can we make this distinction between one animal and decide it’s worth saving, then and turn around and say another animal is worth killing?’" Seamus revealed.

Their animal-friendly actions don’t stop with their vegetarian diets, but extend to raising rescue dogs. They have two rescues, Maizy, a beagle, and Sophie, a Corgi/German Shepherd mix. They love their pets unconditionally, and Seamus even revealed to Life + Dog that if he could give away $1 million it would go to Stray Animal Rescue in St. Louis, where the owner rescues dogs from bad neighborhoods that “are afraid of human beings.”

It definitely looks like these two are in sync - on and off the screen.

Be sure to watch Seamus and Juliana talk with LivingEco’s Ken Spector at the Humane Society of the United States’ 2013 Genesis Awards about their love of animals and why they haven’t gone fully vegan...yet.

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