As I See It

      I love animals. Okay, that’s the understatement of the year. Sometimes when I think about dogs in a shelter, I actually feel physical pain. When I read an inspirational story about a heroic dog, horse; parrot even (yes, I’ve read some), my face will certainly be stained with tears.

      So a while ago, when my mom quoted a Rolling Stone article about the treatment of pigs in one of the nations largest pork producers (Pork’s Dirty Secret), I was not only appalled, but I had to see for myself.

      As a normal woman in America I have a sort of love hate relationship with food. I love to sit down to a home cooked meal, feasting not only my taste buds, but my sight and smell senses as well. However, I hate the affect that same full-sensory experience has on my thighs. Nonetheless, other than that minor setback in my relationship with food, I pretty much existed in blissful ignorance. Until I Googled that article, that is.

      The article does not mince words about the living conditions of millions of pigs that reside(if you can use that word) in the Smithfield facilities. Not only do they live in squalor and filth, but that filth is then filtered into the surrounding area by waste disposal. The pigs are not living for the time that they are alive. They reside by the hundreds, sometimes thousands in barn like buildings, often times being trampled to death. They are kept living merely by the administration of countless antibiotics. As the article says (“There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth.”) this is not a life. 

In reading that, I began to think about what I was doing by purchasing their products, by consuming the meat from those animals. I considered that if Smithfield was doing it, likely, most others were as well. I could not, in good conscience, contribute to their revenue any longer. But beyond my desire to withdraw my own consumership of their products, I thought about the bigger issue. Rarely had I considered that the slab of meat I ate for dinner(or the savory bacon I fried up to put on my sandwich or eat with my toast) was a creature that had not only been killed inhumanely, but had not been given a chance to live at all. 

This was not something I could accept, and it set off for me a spiral effect of re-examination at the foods I ate and the companies I supported. When we say we value life, we often mean human life, but why is the life of an animal so different than our own? I am not a New Ager. I do not believe in Reincarnation. When I die, I will go to the Father, I will not be back as a fuzzy chick or fluffy cat. So, because I believe that, I must wonder what God meant when he said for us to be the ruler over the creatures of the earth. And, I really don’t think he meant for us to torture them for our own food.