EATING ANIMALS
Thanksgiving Day
Thursday, November 23, 2017
A vegan friend is going to
the country to pet a turkey today. I put this line on my FB page.
I know there is cruelty to
animals when they are slaughtered or butchered in order that I may eat meat,
beef, pork, lamb, chicken and turkey. Cruelty, torture and anything that causes
pain are abhorrent to me. Yet my mind and heart are not affected to the process
that provides the food I choose too eat. I won’t go fishing because I can’t
stand the thought of the pain inflicted on a hooked fish and then see them
flounder out of the water unable to breathe, yet I love to eat fish.
I am thankful for the meat,
fowl and fish that I eat and enjoy so very much. Yet my heart is a lump of coal
then it comes to feelings about the death of the animals.
The reason why is usually a
lie or t least a rationalization. Why eat animal and fish flesh? I am
conditioned as I have always eaten them, from childhood on. Human beings have
always done so. Whatever suffering animals face is far away from my experience.
In fact if I were ever to visit an animal slaughterhouse, see the cattle
bashed, bleeding, moaning and crashing about, I might give up meat.
In the summer of 1945, I
worked on a farm in Oneida, New York, run by Mr. and Mrs. Putman. I helped
harvest string beans, helped with the milking and doing whatever chores to
which I was assigned. One day Put said he and his neighbors were going to
butcher a pig. I used the word slaughter, the men laughed and told me one
slaughtered cattle but butchered pigs. (I wonder what word they used for
chickens, turkeys, sheep and fish?)
The men dragged the pig
outside and strung him upside down. Someone slit the pig throat, blood squirted
out and the pig squealed and wriggled as gravity help drain the blood and like
out of the pig. It took at least an hour for the pig to die. I hated to watch
but I stuck it out. The pig was taken to a butcher who cut it up and froze the
parts.
I felt afraid, disgusted and
horrified. The other people stood around, laughed, gossiped and joked easily
and in a relaxed fashion. I suspect they had done pig-sticking lots of times. I
was the virgin to the activity.
There are stories I have read
where male and female cooks go out to the chicken coop, grab a fowl bird, grasp
it neck and twirl it around until the animal suffocates. The variation on this
is the bird is grabbed and the cook slits the throat of the bird. Kosher
killing of chicken is similar but the butcher stuns the fowl before cutting the
throat and bleeding the chicken.
Many regard industrialized
killing of chicken using cold water and electricity as cruel and painful to the
animal. The U.S. has not standardized methods for killing chickens.
I will eat meat, fowl and
fish. It is nutritious and delicious when prepared well. It is a choice I make
knowing that I have closed myself off from the cruelty of killing animals. That
is yet another example of the ambiguity of moral choice.
posted by RWC | 11:00 AM
2 Comments:
Thanks for this post (on "Thanks"giving, no less).
I try to give thanks to God and to the animal whose flesh I'm eating when I eat meat. It helps just a little bit.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and Ann.
Robert - When I was about 7 my mother was doing a TV profile of a packing plant in South Dakota and I tagged along. When time came to go into the slaughter house the guide objected but I said I'd be ok. In those days they hit the cows on the head with a sledge hammer, which made an interesting "BONK." Then the pigs came in hanging by one foot squealing bloody murder right before a man cut its carotid. A bloody mess ensued. One cow and one pig after another. My uncle had us watch while he wrung a chicken's neck in the back yard and then chopped its head off. It was fried that night by y G'mother and was absolutely delicious. On top of that, after she quit raising her own, my G'mother used to take us to the Peoria River docks where she picked a live chicken from a cage. The attendant put on rubber gloves and attached its feet to an electrified conveyor belt - even at such a young age I realized the chicken was participating in its own demise, a paradox I still think about: involuntary suicide. I don't know why none of these memories bother me, and that fact doesn't bother me. We did and do these things so millions of people can eat. We also slaughter people (Native Americans, Africans, African Americans) for far less practical reasons. That just seems to be the way things are. Few seem to like it, fewer seem willing to do much about it (including me). Like you said, examples of the ambiguity of moral choice.
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