I used to be a voracious meat eater. I loved my pork chops
and I especially loved steaks. I loved them big and thick and I loved them
rare. I even liked gnawing on the t-bone after dinner when I was a kid. You
can’t be a polite adult and do such a thing, but I do remember that I enjoyed
that part of being a carnivore, (when I was a kid of course.)
I could eat about as big of a piece of steak as you might
serve a volunteer fireman or maybe your local high school linebacker. I paid attention to
this at cookouts. I could eat about as much flesh of a cow as any man twice my
size. I ate as much or more than my dad or my husband. Easy. I did love my
steak. A lot.
Obviously I was and am aware of where those pork chops and t
bones come from but I did what most people do, I put that reality utterly out of
my mind. I just liked meat too much.
Until one day.
It was early in July of 1992. I was visiting my in-laws in Southern
Illinois with my husband and two small children. When I say small I mean small too, I was still breastfeeding
my youngest child who was about 8 months old. (That fact will come into play
later in the story.)
I had the opportunity to go on a guided horseback ride in a
nearby National park. I was thrilled. I had not been on a horse in quite some
time and I was looking forward to having someone else mind the children for a
good chunk of the day while I spent some time in the saddle.
The ride was nice enough, and the horses were calm and
steady mounts. It was just me and the one guide and he was a man of few words,
which was just fine with me. I had long stretches of my own thoughts, the view
of trees and the sound of my horse’s hooves walking along the dirt path. I was
quite happy and really at peace, enjoying the quiet sounds of the woods around
me.
We were fairly near the end of our long ride when the trail
came through a picnic area. There were a
few people gathered there, setting up for what seemed to be a rather large
Fourth of July party. A man was getting out of a pickup
truck and opening a stock trailer. We were coming up on the truck and circling
back around toward the trailer itself. The man had gone inside and untied a
rope and at the end of it was a rather large sow. At this point we were about
30 or 40 feet away and getting closer to this man and his pig. He was rather
rough with the poor thing and yanked her hard down the ramp of the trailer.
The pig was scared, you see. She did not know where she was
or what was happening and she was planting her feet with trepidation. I watched
her stop and then try to hide from what was happening. She was trying to hide her
face behind the man’s legs. She was looking to him to protect her you see. She
was looking to him for help…just like you would see a dog do with its human.
Her tail was tucked, she was trembling, and she was trying to bury her head in
the back of the man’s knees, just peeking around him to see where she was.
This did not please the man much I could tell. He wanted her
out of the trailer without this resistance. He yanked harder and pulled her
down the ramp. At this point we were nearly upon the pair.
We stepped a bit closer and the pig saw the horses and me
and the guide walking towards her. I then noticed that she must have recently
given birth and nursed babies. Her teats were big and swollen and recently
suckled. I thought to her and myself, “You are a nursing mama, just like me.” She
looked up at me directly and she held my gaze and I saw the fear in her eyes, I felt like she was asking me to help her, because the man was not..
Still, and ridiculously, it seems to me now, I did not realize
what was about to happen.
The man bent down and pulled a long sharp knife from a
holster on his leg. Not wasting any movement and still bent over he began to slice
the mama sow’s throat.
She widened her eyes in surprise and screamed. She was still
looking at me, she did not blink, and she fixated on my eyes. She screamed and
screamed again, tried to struggle but was held tight.
I never stopped walking the horse. I was in my own state of
shock I guess. My guide did not seem to be terribly interested in what was
happening from what I could tell. He never interrupted our pace or turned away
from what was taking place. My eyes were locked with mama pig's eyes. I had no power to look away.
At the third or
fourth saw of the man’s hand and as the blood streamed from the mama pig’s body
into the dry brown dirt we finally passed the pair. My stomach started to
churn and my eyes began to sting with tears but I walked on. Amazingly, the horses moved
forward steady and true, and did not react; as my own body
wanted to react, by running away or maybe with some screams of my own.
The pig was still making terrible wet and struggling, choking noises
as I finally turned my head and that’s when I saw a group of women nearby chit-chatting.
Probably about shoes. Or maybe recipes.
At first they did not even seem to acknowledge the harrowing
scene so near by, but one woman finally did say something. She seemed very annoyed that she had to raise her voice
to be heard over the death cries of the pig. She turned her head and wrinkled
her nose toward the man and then said to her friends, “God, I wish that pig
would just shut UP already!” She looked at me. She rolled her eyes.
Slowly, the horses made their way out of the picnic park and
my ride ended and without a single word to that guide about what we had witnessed;
I got into my car and drove back to my mother-in-law’s house.
I knew I wouldn’t be eating meat anytime soon and it ended
up I simply gave up eating mammals all together from that day forward. In my mind the body language and mind connection I had with that pig, the thing that I witnessed could just as easily taken place if the animal was a smart and docile dog. From that day forward the idea of pork seems interchangeable with one of dog meat. And in Korea, that would be a reality and not so far fetched.
So, that makes 16 years since I ate
a bite of steak.
I still eat fish. I still eat chicken. My body insists upon
and operates better on protein. I decided that for myself, I could not eat anything that I myself
would not want a hand in killing. A sort of “Little House on the Prairie”
theory of eating, as it were.
I often think about Native Americans. Many tribes had
wonderful sacred ways regarding the animals they hunted and killed for food.
They reverently acknowledged the spirit and were so appreciative of the gift
the creature gave with its life for the nourishment of the tribe. It’s a
far cry from the attitude of that woman at the picnic, or from someone picking up
a sanitized, refrigerated and cellophaned piece of an animal at the grocery
store. We don’t even call the meat pig or cow. We say pork or beef. Better to
separate us humans from other classes of mammals that we eat, I guess.
Sure, I absolutely believe that humans are omnivores and as
I said in a previous post, I do not begrudge anyone’s choice to eat meat be it
from pigs or cows or lambs or horses or dogs or cats or any other creature mammal
or not. I can’t personally be a part of it. But, I don’t think I have a right to
make that choice for others. Please hear that idea loud and clear, you
carnivores out there.
Eat all the meat you want. I am not telling you NOT to!
What I do hope for, and sometimes really insist upon, at
least in conversation with some people, is an acknowledgement of what it is you are putting into your mouth, and
how that piece of flesh got there: How that
calf was born, how it lived, how it was treated and what kind of life it experienced
and how it was killed to get on to your plate.
If you can live with that knowledge and still swallow, so be
it.
It’s the hypocrisy of those who cannot, that I truly abhor.
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