20,000 Cows, a Lismore Vegetarian Restaurant for 41 years with the tagline: Food for the way Home, may be unable to reopen at its usual location due to the owner of the building looking to rezone and sell up.

This week on social media, the post below was put out from the 20,000 Cows team letting the community know that there was the likelihood that the current owner of the building where 20,000 Cows has been for decades, has decided to sell, and what's more, may rezone the building as a residential block.

This would mean Restaurant owner Marijonas Vilkelis-Curas- 'Mari' would need to find a new location if he wished to continue unless the new owner opted to rezone back to a commercial zoning. Mari told the Lismore App, however, there just isn't anywhere suitable, despite his attempts to find somewhere around Lismore and in Nimbin.

This is after a huge amount of community support for 20,000 Cows to re-open, following the flooding of the restaurant during both floods this year, via a Go Fund Me Page Audra, his daughter, created. Over $15k of support from a goal of $20k was raised for Mari to recover from the losses his restaurant endured.

Mari said "the cognitive dissonance between patting our family dog, and eating an animal that was once similarly peacefully existing, and the way society has normalised this, is the reason I originally started 20,000 Cows", starting the first in the Dandenong Ranges, then in Mildura. He said, "I was the first owner of a Vegetarian Restaurant in Australia in 1981!"

Moving to Lismore and starting the Lismore restaurant in the early '90s meant that the region had an opportunity to engage in the experience as well. He said, "In all those years in Lismore, we never had a night where no one came to eat, sometimes there were only a couple of people, but at other times, it was a full house"

The responses from the community on Facebook were huge, with hundreds of people responding to the loss of their favourite dining experience, but Mari said "I originally started based on the idea that the community needed awareness around this 'norming of violence' and now it seems so many have 'woken up to it' and with this wave of awareness, I don't know if the restaurant is as needed as it was a few decades ago, which is a good thing, but of course, if I can, I will re-open."