It wasn’t until a decade after the death of my beloved dog that I woke up. I first awoke to find myself hospitalized, after having eaten what turned out to be my very last piece of meat – a hamburger that had been contaminated with the foodborne bacteria, campylobacter. And then I awoke to the truth. I awoke to the truth about what is perhaps the most entrenched and brutal industry in human history, an industry that permeates virtually every aspect of human and nonhuman existence and whose very survival depends on denial.
The truth is that nonhuman animals are intelligent, sentient beings. Pigs, for instance, are as intelligent as three-year-old humans; and scientists have demonstrated that fish and certain crustaceans have pain receptors, such that some food manufacturers no longer sell live lobsters and crabs on the grounds that boiling them alive is inhumane.
The truth is that approximately 95% of the meat, eggs, and dairy that make it to our plates comes from animals who lived and died in abject misery. (And the other 5%, from so-called organic or humane farms is, I assure you, far from cruelty-free.) For instance, baby animals are routinely castrated and have their horns and beaks cut off without any painkiller whatsoever. They are born and raised in crowded, filthy, dark environments where their existence is one of torment and terror. The females may be hooked up to so-called rape racks, where they are forcibly impregnated, over and over, only to have their offspring taken from them just hours after birth. (There are few sounds as haunting as the wailing of a cow on a dairy farm, as her baby is carried off.). And when it comes time for slaughter, these beings are shackled by their ankles, dragged along a conveyor belt, sliced open, and plunged into boiling water, often while fully conscious.
The truth is that, according to the United Nations, animal agriculture is one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems facing the world today. Consider, for instance, the fact that greenhouse gas emissions caused by so-called livestock exceed that caused by all cars, trucks, ships, buses, and airplanes combined.
The truth is that there is overwhelming evidence linking the consumption of animal products with some of the most prevalent and debilitating diseases in the western world, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
The truth is that those on the front lines of killing – the meatpackers and slaughterhouse workers – are economically and physically exploited and are often traumatized by an industry whose business is violence. Human Rights Watch states that the working conditions of these individuals are so appalling they violate basic human rights; and not surprisingly, such violence begets violence. For instance, one worker stated (and I apologize in advance for the brief profanity):
“One time I took my knife…and I sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of bologna. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into its nose. Now that hog really went nuts, brushing its nose all over the place. I still had a bunch of salt left…and I stuck the salt right up the hog’s ass. The poor hog didn’t know whether to **** or go blind.”1
The truth is that, globally, 124,000 farmed animals are slaughtered…not every day, or even every hour….but every, single, minute. And so I would like to take a moment of silence, to honor the victims on whose behalf I stand here today, and to commemorate the 124,000 of them who will be killed during the next sixty seconds.
(Sixty seconds of silence)
Thank you.
And the truth was that an entire society of rational, caring people – just like myself – had somehow checked their hearts and minds at the door to enable a global atrocity that has caused more bloodshed than all wars, genocides, famines, and natural disasters combined, in what could only be called a collective madness.
We tearfully bury the bodies of deceased dogs, yet we contentedly consume the bodies of dead pigs. We stop in our tracks to return a fallen bird to her nest, while our chicken nuggets await us back home. We laugh beside our children as they reach toward the calf in the petting zoo, though we feed them the very milk that was taken from this baby, milk that was taken along with his mother. We would call it abuse if a happy, healthy golden retriever were slaughtered just because people liked the way her thighs taste, and yet, when the very same thing is done to individuals of other species we call it humane. We don snorkels and masks and fins to stare in awe at the sundry creatures of the sea, balm to our busy minds, yet we may also soothe ourselves by tricking these same beings into impaling themselves to death on the ends of our sharpened hooks. And the methods of mass destruction….How many times had I heedlessly driven past the squat, elongated factories – windowless sheds in remote locations in which hundreds of thousands of individuals were caged and confined, castrated and cauterized and cut open – factories that bore a haunting resemblance to other architectures of the darker chapters of our history? And how many times had I cheerfully hummed to my radio as truckloads of terrified animals passed me on their way to slaughter, the whites of their eyes flashing from behind dark little slats?
Something was horribly wrong.
How on earth had such a glaring truth been so fully eclipsed by denial?
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