Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [64]
My mother washed the blood out of the gray jacket, but I never wore it again. I had changed. I was now aware that I lived in a place where animals were killed. I never walked by the cement slab without remembering that pig, the first of thousands of animals I saw butchered or loaded up for transport to the slaughterhouse. It never got easier to watch. It was never okay with me and I could never understand why it didn’t seem to bother anyone else. My parents often said that they didn’t enjoy killing animals, but they had to because that’s how we got our food. I was taught in school that eating meat was essential for good health, and since every single person I knew and loved did it, how could it be wrong?
It took years to unravel and correct all the misperceptions and misinformation from my childhood. In time, I learned that my family’s hog operation was idyllic compared with what happens on today’s factory farms and in modern slaughterhouses, where death is neither quick nor painless. As I became more interested in farmed-animal welfare, I watched many videos. One in particular still haunts me. It showed an endless stream of pigs, each hanging by one of their back legs on hooks attached to a moving track, like clothes at a dry cleaner. The pigs were screaming and struggling to free themselves as one by one, the workers slit open the veins in their necks and began hacking them apart, some while they were visibly still alive and conscious, their eyes bulging, their expressive faces twisted in agony, fear, and confusion.
Pigs are intelligent, highly social animals with personalities as complex and unique as any cat or dog. But that doesn’t stop us from killing 115 million of them every year.
My journey into this awareness of animals began with the killing of a small white pig on that chilly November morning. With that experience, I learned to doubt, and eventually, to challenge, the status quo and to ask questions, all of which were variations on the one question no one could answer: If killing animals for food is necessary and right, why in my heart and soul does it feel so deeply wrong?
I stopped eating meat when I was twenty-four years old. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. I’m fifty now, and when I consider all the choices I’ve made in my life, I can say without hesitation that the choice to stop eating meat is by far the single best decision I’ve ever made.
It was effortless. I was ready. I had been ready since I was five.
My friend Gene Baur, one of the founders of the New York State–based organization Farm Sanctuary, has also seen a lot. He goes to factory farms and tries to rescue animals who have been discarded because they can’t walk or are not in shape to be profitable. Here’s a story he recently told me.
Gene Baur’s Story: The Rescuer
I visited this veal farm several times, documenting how calves were chained by the neck unable to walk or even turn around. They lived in a dark windowless shed. Over the weeks, the calves grew larger, and became increasingly cramped and frustrated by their confinement. One day, I went back to the farm and found the crates empty because the calves had been sent to slaughter. But one calf was too sick to walk onto the slaughterhouse truck and had collapsed in the alleyway, where he was left to die. The calf was on his side and not able to lift his head. When I stepped in front of him, he looked at me. There was fear in his eyes, and he probably didn’t want to ever see a human being again. It was such an eerie moment; the calf was so quiet. The whole barn was quiet and empty. The animals