“We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
-Henry Beston
I’ve been grappling with this for a while. I’m NOT a saint, here. I’m a hypocrite.
I love nature. I connect more with the innocence and purity of animals than I do with most people, these days. I love our wild turkeys, our deer, the bees and hummingbirds…our family members (cats, dogs, and previously two mice).
I also eat meat. I stopped for a while after watching this years ago, but found that all “vegan” meat was riddled with chemicals that are terrible for our health. I went back to dissociation from my food. I’m feeling guilty, again.
I want to be more mindful of where I purchase or acquire my meat sources. I need to remember to source most of my food in its whole, unadulterated form.
Currently, I buy 1/2 cow each year to feed my family. I also participated in a chicken “harvest” (a kind term for slaughter) with friends. I could not bring myself to do the killing…but I did the gutting and skinning. I felt pained to see each chicken brought to the cone, placed upside down, with their neck slit with a knife.
I recognize that I am not desperate enough to kill my own animal for meat.
I see their eyes. I know their love for their own. I’ve humbly observe the communication between a mother hen and her chicks and the “pecking order” of chickens, the soulful eyes of cows….I recall the mourning cries for their stillborn calves from my childhood.
I first watched this film while pregnant with my son. My adrenaline skyrocketed. I hadn’t really “thought” about the conditions we’ve placed other lives into for our “convenience” since I was young.
When I was maybe 10 or so, I recall holding the door shut at our family home, so my parents couldn’t greet the butcher when he would arrive to take one of our steers.
I recall crying when I watched him put a gun to the head of one of our beloved friends, before shooting him dead. The cow I called “Freckles.” The cows I brushed and watched play on our property.
And yet….that experience was much kinder than the death of most animals we consume by the billions, today.
Pets. Food. Fashion. Entertainment. Experiments. Watch the video.
Why do we do this to our fellow beings? For lack of a better term: our factory farms and mindless purchases feel vile and dark. Disconnected. Evil.
Eating meats from a grocery store is not what I want to do, nor who I want to be. I have to remember this again, as I’ve made myself disconnect for convenience while shopping to feed my family. We can’t forget how they’re over-vaccinating and drugging our factory-farmed animals. We can’t forget the conditions they’re raised in, to produce products for the consumption of billions of clueless meat-eaters. Ick.
Can we all do better? Yes. How? Start by going hyper-local. Raise your own, harvest your own. Give love, time, and care to the animals that we sacrifice for our meals.
We could stand to explore whole-foods that offer complete proteins (like quinoa, beans and rice, etc). For the meat-eating die-hards out there: start raising and killing your own. It may give you a better sense of connection and gratitude for life and sacrifice. We must end our dependency on factory-farmed/mega-farmed foods, IMO.
I understand that we all depend on each other in this ecosystem. I want us to get back to the land. Harvest what we need to survive. No more of this “convenience” of the mega-farms that require glyphosate to grow crops, or the pace to raise animals in shockingly horrible conditions before stressing them out with a slaughterhouse to feed our desire for 3+ meals of processed meat each day.
Remember my video on how they kill animals they think are at “risk” for catching the fake “flu?” This is how they kill millions of healthy birds after they used fraudulent PCR tests to determine that a few had the fake “bird flu.”
How many lives were sacrificed without nourishing us? BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS.
Was this really necessary?
This foam-suffocation death was courtesy of Israel Chemicals Limited. More on that, here:
Can we do better? Yes. Only if we face the consequences of our purchases and food choices.
I’ll ask you to please: raise your own. Slaughter your own (or go hyper-local). Give thanks to the life around you. Consume mindfully and with gratitude and awareness of the life you took from a sentient being.
We can’t do this if we don’t know where our food, clothing (fashion), entertainment, and medical experiments come from.
I hope you watch. You consider. And you rethink your consumption habits in the future.
Love, Kat
