Death of an Activist

I’m writing this at 2 a.m. the day after a fellow activist was killed at a vigil for pigs at Fearman’s Pork slaughterhouse in Burlington, Ontario. I can’t get it out of my mind. This is a vigil I have attended. I have stood on the corners with signs; I have stood at the gate entrance, providing water and succor to the pigs held in captivity in transport trucks. I have bore witness to the cruelty withstood by these baby pigs. I have seen their cuts and bruises from mistreatment; I have watched as they foamed at the mouth out of fear and dehydration; I have witnessed them walking over their dead comrades in the truck, pigs who did not survive the trip. I have seen the result of living beings crammed into a truck for days on end in 40 deg heat or sub zero temperatures, with no food or water, covered in puke and shit. But no body cares about that because “mmm bacon”.

It reminds me of the old photos of the trains running to Auschwitz.

So here I am at 2 a.m., feeling angry, so angry that I’m about to kick some meat-eating butt because apparently, even someone – a human – dying is not enough. There is an uproar now, but when it all dies down, will anything have changed? Oh yes – life will have changed for Regan’s family and friends, but that’s a small price to pay for your Big Mac isn’t it? It doesn’t directly affect you, right? And hey, if we can turn a blind eye to millions of animals brutalized and used as commodities every single day, then the death of one activist is a mere drop in a very big pond.

Let me ask you something: do pictures of the Yulin Dog Meat Festival enraged you, upset you, incense you? Well, what’s the difference between the dog meat festival and the annual ribfest celebrations we hold? It’s a “fest” right? If someone put a plate of luscious ribs in front of you, could you tell if they were dog meat or pork or beef? Bet that’s a big fat fucking NO.

So fuck off with your “the dog meat festival is wrong”, because if that festival is wrong, so is ribfest. They are ribs. Flesh and bone. Does it matter which animal was caged and mistreated and ultimately killed to get it? If it does to you, then you are NOT an animal lover. You are a PET LOVER, and there’s a big fucking difference.

It means you discriminate over which life is valuable and which isn’t – you feel you have the power over life to be able to state unequivocally that someone should be fought for at all costs, but someone else is expendable. And why? Because of their shape? Colour of their fur/skin?…..oh wait…..See what I just did there?

So fuck off.

You can’t be an animal lover and eat meat. You cannot eat meat without perpetuating a vile, gross industry of torturing and killing animals, therefore how can you say you are an animal lover? If defies logic. It simply does.

When shown slaughterhouse images you are disgusted, angered, you know it’s wrong: but you eat that burger on your plate anyway. Knowing. KNOWING. The drivers of the trucks transporting those pigs: they know. The employees clicking away at their keyboards: they know too. But when they take their lunch break and they bite into their bologna sandwiches or leftover chicken wings, they don’t care. It’s disgusting and it’s frustrating for those of us awakened to the reality and fighting to make changes. And when I hear someone died fighting for those changes, and no one is listening and learning, then I fear for our world. Truly.

When you see these images, Yulin Dog Meat Festival or pigs in gestation crates or calves in tiny veal crates, you want social media censored so you don’t have to be affected by the atrocities, but that is the wrong thing. Why aren’t you questioning your revulsion? Why aren’t you trying to find out more about these atrocities you don’t want on your newsfeed? Here’s a thought: rather than burying your head in the sand, or asking social media to bury the images, you should be stopping the actual acts that create the images YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE!

Don’t like seeing images of dogs in cages? Well you can block it but the dogs will still be suffering. Don’t like seeing cows having throats cut and pigs prodded with electric shock batons into a gas chamber? It’s not going to stop just because you don’t see the images anymore. The dogs will still be boiled alive – so will turkeys and chickens for that matter. Just because you don’t see the images on your timeline, doesn’t mean it isn’t still happening. Stop eating meat; don’t kill the messenger.

Don’t censor the truth, change the reality.

#goveganforregan

No One Has To Die!

Humans like to play god. We like to think god gave us the power to be god on earth because according to some questionable archaic manuscript “he made us in his image” – whatever that is. We like to think we have superior intelligence, (god given or evolved) and should therefore be in charge of the world around us. Humans are control freaks and narcissists, and the millennia have shown us to be dominating, cruel, and destructive – to everything and everyone – including ourselves.

As we formed our respective societies and cultures, we graduated from hunter-gatherers, basically eating whatever came our way – to farmers: growing our food and learning how to utilize it in its various forms, how to store it to last us through cold, barren weather, and how to fine tune its basic nature to give us more variety and better quality. We are pretty amazing when it comes to stuff like that.

I mean, the things we are able to do to food today to sustain us all with healthful options is nothing short of god like. As a result of our smarts and our new and improved diet, we grew as a species exponentially. This of course, meant we needed more food.

One of our strategies in feeding ourselves to keep up with the increased demand was to eliminate hunting as a mainstay and adapt animal husbandry into our farming practices. (Note: in the 1300s a “husbandman” was a farmer, so this aspect of farming became known under this sobriquet) So we bred and domesticated the animals we used to hunt. This way, we didn’t have to brave the elements and rely on our accuracy with aim in order to eat meat. We just had to go outside to our field and there was a plethora of quiet, trusting victims we could brutalize to put on our plates. Our food production had changed to keep up with our populations and needs. Gradually, farms turned into factories, churning out animal products faster than we could use them.

Our species had erupted like a human Vesuvius, and dammit we were hangry! So food became mass produced and then transported everywhere, even into space. We became a raging inferno of consumption, not just food, in everything.

Animals weren’t considered living beings; they were commodities to be exploited for our own gain. They were disposable. They were products. They were the epitome of the “use and toss” mentality. Maybe once of a day, a farmer cared about the animals he raised, even though they still might end up as food, he may have provided them with the best care he could. He may have even shed a tear on slaughter day. Native Americans are said to pray to the spirit of the animal they hunt and kill, to thank it for it’s beneficence to their people. Today however, that is mostly not the case. Our meat is lined up in a grocery store freezer, wrapped in plastic and labelled neutrally. There is no comparison to the living creature it once was. No one thinks about the animal as a being, as a living creature who thinks, feels love, feels fear, is happy or sad – just like us. As long as an animal is the “commodity” on a farm, whether for it’s meat or other by-product, its value is only as good as the dollar value the economy places upon it.

No one thinks about the feelings of the mother cow as her baby is taken from her right after birth so we can harvest her milk; no one thinks about the baby, bawling for his mother as he is locked into a small container to confine his movements so his flesh will remain tender for veal. We turn a blind eye to truck after truck filled with living beings driving down the highway, eyes meeting ours through our windows; eyes that you couldn’t tell weren’t human except for the setting. Do you look away? Do you block it out? (Although once of a day, humans were pushed into containers en masse and transported to so-called work camps, and I’m pretty sure anyone meeting their eyes looked away too.)

And what’s sad about all of this is we don’t need to eat meat to survive. Our farming skills, our nutritional knowledge has also progressed to the extent we understand meat-centric diets are bad for us, and plant-based is not only completely doable, but also super delicious.

And no one has to die!

But whether a small family farm or giant farming conglomerate, one thing cannot be disputed: there is no humane way to die. Electrocuted, throat slashed, boiled alive, strung up then cut, gassed, it’s all cruel, painful, and unnecessary. These animals didn’t ask to be kept in a barn all their short lives; to be kicked and pushed into subservience; to be kept in small cages, lying in their own filth; to have their babies removed right after birth; to be artificially inseminated over and over again by men with tools and thick arms. They didn’t ask to be born into this world of cruelty and inhumanity. They didn’t agree to be oppressed and tortured for our gain. They have no voice to speak their truth. And because of that – because they can’t fight back – they are victimized again and again and again.

And I’m here to tell you, peeps, it doesn’t matter if the cow was “grass-fed” or the chicken was “free range”. It’s all the same when you’re loaded into the back of a truck with prods and jackboots only to end up at a bloody abattoir, smelling the carnage of others gone before you, facing the steely eyes of the executioner who just wants to get his paycheck at the end of the week and doesn’t give two shits whether he is careful in how he administers the coup de grace. (Holocaust survivors recounted similar reasoning.)

Don’t be fooled by big business propaganda: these positive terms used to convince us the animals led a happy life prior to dying is just so much hype. Like the term “Work Camps” during WWII, cartoon drawings of laughing cows; cute, chubby pigs standing before a grill in chef hats; chickens waving on a roadside sign wearing a napkin bib: these are gimmicks designed to keep us blind to the reality of what these beings go through, how they suffer, before being unceremoniously killed all in the name of feeding our families. (Funny, not funny, this excuse was used for the “work camps” too!)

Yes, the meat you feed your family was once a living, breathing animal – like yourself. Like your children. Like your pets. Where is our god-like intelligence now? Either we are not as smart as we think we are or we are purposely turning a blind eye to mass murder on a global scale – once again.