I remember being a child and sitting with the horrors of animal agriculture. It wasn’t just the scale of the atrocity, the level of suffering, the absolute innocence and defencelessness of the victims — it was the utter normalcy of it, the way every single person I knew took part in it and found it unremarkable to do so, the way that I, a vegetarian child, was treated as extreme and anti-social for seeing the atrocity.
This empathy was innate. I did not have to learn it. I knew that a cow or a pig was just as real as my dog who I loved. I knew that it was unspeakably wrong to treat living beings as objects. I knew that the scale of the atrocity was much larger than my child’s brain could comprehend. I knew it was an emergency. I knew each animal trapped in there had only one precious life. I knew that each animal was an individual: there is no generic “cow” — there is only this one specific cow who loves her one precious life, and this one, and this one, and this one, endlessly to a scale beyond comprehension.
I remember, as a child, how terrifying it was to me how other people did not seem to care. I remember trying to explain, and understanding that the best case scenario is that I would be understood as a special kind of person: a vegetarian, and I would be accommodated (mostly) based on the understanding that humans can be particular about what they eat. Even this was often a stretch, because a child, let alone a girlchild, has no right to bodily autonomy or moral decision making of her own. I went to bed hungry and had to defend my dietary choices often as a child.
The accommodation, when it was made, was made for me, a human being. A sexually abused girlchild living in an incestuous patriarchal family but still a human being — I would, for example, never be put in a “milking machine.” The accommodation was made for me and not the animals. The animals: the wild ones I saw in the forest, the rabbits, the foxes, the deer, the wild ones I saw in the water, the frogs, the fish, the loons. Their homes growing smaller and smaller, their worlds filled with increasing danger as everything turns to poison. Taxidermied on my grandfather’s wall, eyes gone and replaced with glass: the wild ones.
The animals: the farmed ones I was familiar with growing up in the country, the cows, the pigs, the chickens, the goats, but to a scale unimaginable to me. The majority of animals on the planet, kept in cages, their children taken again and again, the panic as they are loaded into the truck to the slaughterhouse, the smell of blood and the cries of their fellow captives. Their bodies domesticated and caged but still holding the ancestral wisdom to RUN FUCKING RUN yet they can’t run. Their eyes wild with panic, their eyes containing the entire universe of their one precious life. No accommodations were made for the animals. The idea that we could show mercy, that we could change a little about our lives in order to stop the atrocity, was scoffed at. Of course there would be no consideration of the animals. What a silly thing to think.
I remember being a child, trying to integrate this knowledge, trying to understand what it meant about the world, that every single person I knew not only accepted the atrocity but took part in it. The atrocity was normal, kept just out of sight. The atrocity, everyone felt, was justified. This was the way of things and wasn’t I aware, didn’t I understand? It was sweet of me to be so soft and sensitive, but nature, I was assured, was not so forgiving. Nature (the only god and the only mother I knew) was cruel and unforgiving — just ask the mouse caught in the cat’s claws. And so, with a steady certainty in the rightness and naturalness of the atrocity, the humans assured themselves that their gratuitous cruelty at the unthinkable scale of billions was just exactly as it should be.
At some point I understood that humans showed no mercy. And while I may not end up in a “milking machine” I was just as domesticated as the cows. All my right and natural instincts were eroded as I was forced to accept the sexual abuse of my grandfather and father. Everything inside of me was fractured and distorted: seeking love from my captors, repressing the right instinct to run, to fight, because there was nowhere to go and no way to win. Slowly I became an animal walking straight to slaughter, the panic turned to resignation. Slowly I became like every abused animal becomes: a stranger to myself and the world. Broken, the word they use for horses who learn to obey.
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