It’s your crap. Own it.

I was raised on a dairy farm. I grew up eating meat, including some of the cows that had grown up from calves I’d raised. Once a year or so, my dad culled an animal from the herd and took it for slaughter, and that was where the beef we ate came from. Happily, my father never took to slaughter any of the animals we’d given names to, but I know some of them eventually ended up on a plate, whether it was ours or not, because that’s what happens to dairy cattle that fail to produce adequate milk, and there’s very little difference between a fat holstein and a fat angus when it comes to buying an animal you’re going to turn to steak. My dad had also worked for a year or two as a meat inspector for the USDA when I was a kid, so I’ve seen the insides of more than a few slaughterhouses. Sometimes when I played hooky from school, Dad would take me on his rounds, and I used to sit on milk cans and watch them skin the cows; I was fascinated by the process. So I grew up knowing where meat came from. I told myself the calves I was bottle feeding were future milk cows so they were safe, but when I grew up, I knew that wasn’t always true, and all cows meet the slaughterhouse eventually. Thankfully by then, my dad had sold off the dairy, because it would pain me to raise a baby calf that I knew would one day be steak.

But here’s the thing: it might not have mattered if I’d known it when I was a kid, anyway. Cows have their place in the food chain, and sadly for them, it’s beneath humans. So they end up as steak. That’s the way of it, and most people don’t bother to consider the ramifications of what it means for the cow, myself included. We want our burgers and steaks, so we go to the store, scoop up that cellophane-wrapped styrofoam tray of beef and toss it on the grill. No one loves steak more than I do, and for a lot of years, I ate meat with little thought to where it was coming from.

I was wrong.

A cow is a living being. It feels pain and fear. And all cows are not exactly alike, though I will grant you they’re mostly the same, and as a species, they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed. But they do have personalities, and they will follow you around like a dog if you spend enough time with them for them to bond to you. They can be taught “tricks.” Yet we view them as beneath us, here for our benefit, and we think that makes them unworthy of respect or dignity. And that’s simply not true.

I’m not trying to dissuade you from eating beef (or pork – pigs are smarter than your dog, fyi), but I would like you to stop and consider how you want to treat the animals you eat. Take responsibility for how you treat God’s creatures, especially those you plan on sacrificing so that you can eat them. Look them full in the metaphorical face and acknowledge that you are killing another living being. And then grant them the full measure of compassion they deserve. A cow has no say or choice in how it’s treated or the manner of its death. I’m sure given a choice, it would prefer to stay out in pasture than to be loaded onto a too-crowded truck and driven to a slaughterhouse, where someone’s going to hit it in the head with a hammer or shoot it in the head with a .22 before they slit its throat while it’s still living. (Yes, that IS how they do it; I’ve had the misfortune of witnessing it myself, and it’s gruesome.) Do we really need to shove them around with bulldozers and force them to move around with broken legs while we’re at it? Do we as a species really need to be that frigging cruel just so we can have a hamburger?

Legislators in Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota think that we do. More, they think that it should be against the law for people who feel differently to bring cruelty to light and show others how slaughter facilities are treating the animals they kill. http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/04/25/18677994.php

So here’s the deal: If you’re going to eat meat, you need to acknowledge where that meat comes from. You need to own up to how that meat gets from a living being to your dinner plate. You don’t have to like it. You DO have to be honest about it. And if it bothers you – and dear God, I hope it does, because if it doesn’t, there’s probably something really freaking WRONG with you – then you have some choices to make. The first is pretty easy: do you want to keep eating animals or not? If you choose to keep eating them, you need to really look at how the animals you eat are raised and how they’re slaughtered, and make other choices, like whether or not to educate yourself about where the meat you’re buying comes from, how that facility treats the animals they slaughter, and how the animals are raised (in pens or free-range, for example). I hope that you’ll decide to eat animals from places that don’t move them around with bulldozers or keep them in pens where they stand knee-deep in excrement their entire lives and never see a single blade of actual grass. Whatever you decide, I think we as a species have an obligation to treat the animals we kill with compassion and respect. We have an obligation to speak up when we see facilities treating animals with cruelty, to say that it is NOT okay. If you eat animals, you owe it to them to own your decision to do so. And that means stepping up to the plate and taking responsibility for how they are treated. They’re treated that way because we decide to eat them, and for no other reason. It’s our responsibility to make sure they’re treated decently during their time here. Own it.

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