I saw an ad on a bus bench about a family farm that read something like: Beef: Its a family business. In the accompanying photograph was a happy family with a mom, a dad, a teenage son and an infant daughter. They stood in front of a barn, beaming with pride at the beauty and simplicity of raising a family in a farm environment.
But inside that barn, beyond the scope of the camera lens we cows, tied up in tiny pens, being force-fed large quantities of nutrient rich grains in order for them to become large enough to eat as quickly as possible. The floor, no doubt, made of concrete so that the manure could be sprayed off with a hose. And beyond that image is a slaughter house, where a long, curved passage-way made of smooth metal led the cows calmly into another concrete floored room where the cows are shot in the head with a pin designed to kill them instantly, but which seldom does its job as intended. This floor concrete not to remove excrement but to ensure that the blood from thousands of cows can be washed away down the drain in the centre of the room.
This is the image of the factory-like farm presented in the advertisement references above. One might imagine that an actual family farm - one that is small and really only there for the purpose of providing for a single household - would be significantly less disturbing. But one would most definitely be mistaken.
When I was a child my family raised animals for food. We had pigs, rabbits, chickens, and once a cow that a friend of the family was raising on our farm. I distinctly remember slaughter day, when rabbits were hung from the close line, dead, dangling, dripping with blood as we slit them open and used our hands to pull out their stomachs and intestines. I don't remember hating this as a child. In fact, I remember laughing. I also remember chasing headless chickens around the yard after my dad chopped their necks.
Looking back, I'm terrified by the ease with which I aided in the taking of so many lives. I know that I was a child, and given that I had not fully developed into a proper, independent human person, I cannot be held responsible for those actions; but at the same time, I think about the stories we hear of serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, who as very young ages slaughter animals, or simply - as in Dahmer's case, collected their carcasses - our of fascination, or fun, or whatever motivates a child towards the macabre, and I worry that by raising children in an atmosphere of animal torture we are raising future psychopaths.
Psychopaths are unique in that they do not feel the same types of human emotions that the average person feels yet find ways to mimic these emotions for personal gain, so perhaps this is the wrong word, but I'm not a psychologist. What I mean is, I worry that even if children are not raised like I was - slaughtering animals, and in some ways finding joy in that - children raised to view non-human animals as food or in any other way disposable, we are raising children who are self-centred, and forcing them to develop an emotional blind spot that is severely harmful to their proper human development.
When humans first began eating animals it was out of a feeling of necessity. Other animals long before humans consumed other animals as a fast and relatively nutrient rich source of calories for the maintenance of their lives. Humans, in times of scarcity, did the same. Most cultures throughout history who have consume non-human animals made up stories to feel more at ease with the killing of an animal. For example, many native American tribes developed myths that explained how the animal, as an intelligent, sentient and independent being offered up their bodies to humans. In taking this animals life, the hunter would thank the animal for its sacrifice.
I had no such stories. We killed animals. We ate them. That's what we do. That's what we've always done. Rather than using spirituality as an explanation, or appealing to the animals as its own independent being, we attempted a desperate appeal to tradition - one which fails in the face of logic, or real science.
But as a culture, we have stories. Our stories are the walls we build around slaughter houses. Our stories are the commercials that depict a milk-deprived child as literally flat, presumably meant to imply that we are boneless without dairy (despite studies that have shown the negative impacts of animal protein on calcium in human bodies). Our stories are the images on the label that show a beautiful field full of grass where the cow, it is implied, happily grazed. Our stories are the happy dinner table memories that we instil in our children, without thought of what it means that we are eating something that was once alive, that once breathed, that once thought, that once communicated.
My children will never eat meat. This is not because I am going to be a crazy mom who forces her beliefs upon her children - because as its core my decision to not consume animals and products made from them is a logical, reasonable one. My children will never eat meat because I will teach them how to think rationally, to read between the lines of the many stories we feed children about the consumption of animals, and to see through the advertisements on bus benches about beef being about family rather than cruelty. My children will never eat meat because they will recognize, through my guidance, that non-human animals have no less value than humans. They will learn what animal products do to the human body, how raising animals for food impacts the global environment, and how it feels to really, truly connect in friendship with non-human animals. They will learn all of this from me, and if I do my job as a parent to teach my child all of this, they will make the decision not to consume meat, even after I am no longer the one putting food on their tables.
