Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (16 page)

I grew up on a farm in South Texas and I was five years old the first time I saw an animal slaughtered. It was November and the first norther of the season had arrived overnight, sending the temperatures down into the high forties. It had been hot the day before, and when I woke up that morning I was excited by the sudden change in the weather.

Cold weather meant the holidays were coming. It meant my mother would be baking cakes and cinnamon rolls. We would be getting a Christmas tree soon. It also meant I would finally be able to wear my “new” winter coat. It wasn’t really new. It was a hand-me-down from one of my older brothers who had long outgrown it. The coat was gray twill with a thick cotton fleece lining. It had a hood, deep pockets, a zipper in the front, and I thought it made me look very grown up. I had been trying it on for months, looking forward to having a legitimate reason to wear it, and now, at last, the first norther had arrived. It was the perfect weather for a new coat.

As it turned out, it was also the perfect weather for butchering a hog. On butcher days, my mother would close off the workroom from the rest of the house and open the doors and windows to let in the cold air, allowing us to work indoors with the meat without it spoiling. All this I learned about later. That particular morning in November, I was just excited about the cold weather and wearing my coat. My father was getting ready to go outside. He put on his heavy boots, his jacket, his winter cap, and got his .22 rifle out of the gun closet. When I asked if I could go with him, he said yes, but my mother looked at him disapprovingly and turned to me saying no, she was sure this was not something I would want to see. I don’t remember how long they discussed it, but my mother was eventually outvoted two to one. She reluctantly pulled my hood up over my head and tied it under my chin. As my dad and I walked out the back door, my mother told him to be careful and to make sure I was safely out of the way. That made it sound dangerous, which I thought was exciting, and I remember walking down to the hog pens happy to be going on an adventure.

At some point, I’m sure my father explained what was going to happen. He must have told me he was going to shoot a pig so we could make sausage and have bacon and pork chops, which I liked. But all I really remember about our walk is the cold air and the wet grass and feeling snug and safe and warm in my gray coat.

The hog pens were on two large concrete slabs that were tilted slightly to allow the manure to be easily hosed into a central trough that drained into a nearby cesspool. There were six pens in all, separated by horizontal metal pipes welded to upright metal posts. My father handed me the rifle to hold while he climbed over the bars into one of the pens, where there were about a dozen young pigs. Once he was inside, I handed him the rifle and he pulled me up onto the edge of the slab where I could hold onto the bars from the outside and see into the pen.

They were only three or four months old, nowhere near full grown. I was struck by how evident their different personalities were. Some were playing, running around each other in circles. They would press against one another, then do a little trick where one pig would stick her snout under the belly of another pig and lift him up an inch or so then turn and run, and the pig who had been lifted would chase after her like they were playing tag. Two or three pigs, however, stood perfectly still, watching my father’s every move as though they were aware that something was different about this morning. Most of them, though, thinking they were about to be fed, gathered around my father, who looked them over carefully then pointed to one of the pigs who was nuzzling his leg for food, and said, I think this is the one we want.

Using the barrel of the rifle, he gently tapped the pig on his shoulders, guiding him away from the other pigs toward the corner of the pen nearest where I was standing. To me, the pig seemed to think this was some kind of game he was eager to play but didn’t quite understand. With each tap, he would take a step forward then look back over his shoulder at my father, as though to check to see if he was doing it right. After a few more steps, when the pig was in the right position facing into the corner a few feet from where I was standing, my father glanced over to make sure I was watching, then he moved the muzzle of the gun to the back of the pig’s head. The pig tilted his head slightly and looked up at me. He gave a little grunt. My father pulled the trigger.

The bullet shattered the pig’s forehead on its exit and sent a fine splattering of blood into the air. I blinked when I felt the warm mist on my face and hands. When I opened my eyes, I saw the pig lying on his side and a thick stream of blood running from his head down the slanted concrete. The other pigs had scrambled for the opposite corner and were squealing and climbing on top of each other trying to get as far away as possible. My father knelt to make sure the pig was dead, then looked up for my reaction. I’m sure his heart stopped a moment when he saw me. I was covered with tiny drops of blood. He jumped out of the pen, lifted me off the slab and carried me to a water faucet where he wet his handkerchief, wiped the blood off my face, and washed my hands under the cold running water.

I remember that he was talking, but I don’t remember anything he said. I pulled away from him and started walking back to the house. He called, but I didn’t answer. Instead, I started running. I was again aware of the wet grass and the cold air, and I kept thinking that just a few minutes earlier, the blood on my coat had been inside the pig and he had been alive and happy and walking around with his friends, thinking he was going to get something to eat. And now he was dead with his head blown open and his blood running down the slab, and all this had happened because of me—because I wanted to go outside wearing my coat. Later, when I confessed this to my parents, they told me that the pig would have been killed whether I had been there or not. I did not find that comforting and I did not believe them.

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.

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 that had been confined there for months were gone, except for this one calf left in the alleyway. I believed I could help him, and called law enforcement; but he didn’t make it. I am constantly haunted by what I can’t do, but try not to focus on it.

At hatcheries that hatch egg-laying hens, millions of unwanted male chicks are discarded every year because they’re of no economic value—they don’t grow fast enough to be raised profitably for meat, and they’ll never lay eggs. I’ve seen Dumpsters filled with thousands of dead and dying male chicks; and I’ve also seen these day-old hatchlings dumped into a manure spreader to be put out on the field like fertilizer. I could hear faint chirping sounds coming from the manure spreader. Several chicks were trying to survive, perched on debris in the spreader, trying not to drown in the muck. I am struck by the irony of baby chicks, symbols of spring and new life, being killed immediately after emerging from their shells.

When documenting conditions at a Texas stockyard, I saw this cow in a pen, with her head flopped over to one side. I asked the stockyard worker what happened and was told that the cow was brought to the stockyard with her calf, and they were forcibly separated as is common in the cattle industry. Cows have very close bonds with their young, and when mother and calf are separated—usually at day one—the mother bellows and cries for hours and sometimes days. This mother fought to be with her calf, but she was restrained and couldn’t go after him as he was dragged away. When she lunged toward him, someone slammed the gate on her and her neck was broken. Her eyes were wide open, full of fear, moving and darting around. Sometimes her head would swing wildly across the floor, but she couldn’t lift it. There was actually a groove in the pen where her head had swung back and forth. I felt sick and pained and helpless. She was to be used for meat, so there was little chance she would be put out of her misery.