Our pigs arrived two days ago, and never did anything cuter grace a cloven hoof. They're about 25 pounds each now, and we're going to get them to about 240. Then we are going to kill them and eat them.
I've been warned not to name them. I've been warned to keep it always in mind that we're raising them for food. I've been warned to not become too attached to them. And I think these warnings, clearly well-intentioned, are misguided -- for two reasons.
First is what we owe the pigs, which are smart, social animals. They thrive on the company of each other, and of the people who keep them. Withholding affection does a disservice to an animal connected to us, and withholding it in the hope that it will help us weather the day that the animal dies is, I think, selfish.
My great-uncle Frank was a subsistence farmer in Minnesota, and he believed that loving an animal was part of a farmer's duty; hardening yourself to your livestock was a failure of stewardship. Part of giving an animal the best life you can is allowing your emotions to be invested in its well-being.
Hardening is also a slippery slope. It can start with refusing to name your pigs, or feed them treats by hand, or spend time in the pen with them. It can end with factory farms and gestation crates.
But this isn't just about what we owe the pigs. It's about the kind of people we want to be. Hardening doesn't hurt only the hardenee; it also hurts the hardener. Withholding love from something in the hopes that its death will hurt less doesn't seem like a strategy for a rich, fulfilling life. You risk becoming the kind of person who uses gestation crates.
I know, going in, that the day we kill these pigs will be very hard. I will be sad and I will cry. But the prospect of steeling myself against their piggy charm every day between now and then is intolerable.
There are people who believe that eating meat but being unwilling to kill is hypocritical and, although I do kill some of my own meat, I don't think that's true. You can believe that meat-eating is moral but prefer someone else to do the killing, assuming that someone is willing to oblige.
But there's something you can't do. You can't look away. You can't be squishy or squeamish about the adorable creatures that are killed for your consumption, and then consume them. You can't say, "But they're so cute!" and then close your eyes until someone else makes the problem go away. Ethical meat eating begins with ensuring the animals we eat live well, and ends with an open-eyed acknowledgement of what we do to turn those animals into dinner.
So I will love these pigs, and then I will kill them and eat them.
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Ask anyone I know. I LOVE bacon. But if I raised something from an adorable little baby, fed it, raised it, loved it, I just couldn't kill it. I'd eat it if it died, but I just couldn't kill it.
(sigh) It's like the old song says:
You always kill and eat the one you love,
The one you shouldn't kill and eat at all.
...So If I killed and ate you last night,
It's because I love you most of all.
(sniff) Sorry, it always does this to me. Just a minute...OK...I'm good.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Ah, the versatility of our language...
Because there could never truly be a "compassionate" kill if it were deemed "unnecessary", we must find a way to make it right via justification, denial, and a little diversion stemming from an obvious element of guilt. Quite frankly, there are just too many outrageously different views/opinions in the world about animals to not challenge ourselves more, esp. in terms of our individual motivations/fears and personal desires.
One thing is for certain though. If there were any semblance of a so-called truth in this world, we definitely wouldn’t have been discriminating against races/members of select people/animals all this time or be content about stopping progress halfway through.
"There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting." ~ Buddha
Like all fundamentalists, fundamentalist vegans act like they have a monopoly on truth and morality, and like all fundamentalists, they are wrong about that. Until you learn to respect that some other people might see things differently than you, you are part of the problem, and not the solution.
Like several of the omnivore posters here, for years I was a vegetarian. I changed my ways when I learned about the essential importance of animals in any truly sustainable system of agriculture. Words can't fully describe how much better I feel with animal foods in my diet. Feel free to disagree with me about animals in agriculture, but know that you are also in disagreement with virtually all of the world's foremost sustainable ag experts, which is why animals and animal inputs are essential to every major form of sustainable agriculture.
Like all fundamentalists, vegans need to recognize that intelligent people can disagree. The charges of oppression, murder, slavery, and cruelty, just because we see things differently than you, are unconscionable.
The negative attitudes certainly flow both ways.
treachery is one of the tools in the skill set of evil, so it is best not to practice it, because practice leads to mastery, and we naturally tend to do what we know how to do.
to intentionally and voluntarily kill an animal for your food creates profoundly bad karma. that's one reason why enlightened religions strongly and repeatedly advise against it, to spare humans the karmic consequences of such a grave mistake.
Frogs are fiends.
http://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html
for the most part, animals are enslaved by their instincts, and typically don't have a choice, but we do. we can honor our good fortune and make the best of it, by refraining from voluntarily conducting ourselves like those who can naturally do no better.