TRIGGER WARNING: This post reflects on films depicting the cruel realities of the meat, dairy and egg industries.
It was an informative, honest, sobering presentation, rich in content, challenging to watch for most anyone brave enough to be there. I was there, and I’m glad I was.
UUSM’s Animal Ministry committee, Jef Travis, Bruno Lacombe Jacinda Virgin, Amy Lacombe, Karen Mathews, and Tracy Schuster, offered a handful of short films showing some of the realities of the meat, dairy and egg industries.
Let’s not mince words. The realities are harsh for the animals; most of the treatment they experience can only be called exploitation, torture, or slavery. The heartlessness and expediency with which things are done in order to get the products to market are very hard to witness and impossible to forget.
Some happier, more hopeful moments did transpire; these represented a far more significant fraction of the presentation than they do of the reality of things in these industries. But they do point to a way out and a way forward, mostly, it seems, in the hands of younger farmers.
We heard the story of Arnie and Frankie, two brother and sister pigs who managed to, quite by accident, wander away from certain death in the slaughterhouse to a nearby “sanctuary farm”, where they were taken in lovingly. The humans who run this farm see and talk about the pigs, quite literally, as persons with emotional needs and family ties, and treat them with respect.
A new word in my vocabulary: “transfarming,” not a word in the dictionary yet, but represents the way to get from here to something better, more humane, more in agreement with our values. These are formerly traditional raise-and-slaughter farms, perhaps passed on from grandparents to adult children who have come to realize that the life of a farm animal, a cow or a pig or a goat, is no life at all, where “the life before the killing” is actually worse than the end itself.
The committee offered a trigger warning before one of the films, Dairy Disclosed, that pointed to how the dairy industry and the veal industry collaborate in a decidedly cruel, hand-in-glove fashion. For a cow to produce milk, she must have been impregnated (invariably by forced human insemination); when her calf is born, it is taken from her immediately, so that the milking mechanisms can be attached to her, and she can be mechanically milked for a period of time until she must be impregnated again. The calf is loaded in a truck and taken to a veal farm, fattened and slaughtered. The experience carries enormous emotional trauma for both mother and child, as it “breaches that sacred bond”. The two animals wail in misery at the separation. About one in eight calves die of a broken heart, the emotional fallout from the separation.
This was the most poignant moment in the afternoon, for me. I had always seen farm animals, cows, pigs, chickens, as unfeeling, a blank, impassive look on their faces. I’ve understood the physical pain of the chains and darkness and solitude they live in, and of course the slaughter itself, although the latter might be the least painful moment of the animal’s life. However, the folks running these “sanctuary farms” understand that the animals have feelings quite analogous to our own, that they have bonds of attachment that nature has endowed them with, a natural order that humans too are a part of.
As a smugly settled omnivore, able to compartmentalize my understanding of industrial farming alongside my appetite for the finer things in life, I have always managed not to think about the disconnect living within me. Both my kids have been vegetarians of their own accord almost from the beginning. I was never attracted to vegetarianism for its dietary advantage. But I can’t get out of my head the sound and the image of the calf being dragged off of its mother’s udder and tossed into a wheelbarrow and carted away.
I applaud and thank UUAM for offering this experience.
The films:
- Wonder Pigs (12 mins)
- A Dying Sea (20 mins)
- Transfarming Switzerland (15 mins)
- Draw My LIfe (5 mins)
- Dairy Disclosed (26 mins)
- Akashinga (15 mins)
