Experiences of the actual slaughter of domestic animals for food are available only to a minority and the generation that has memories of such experiences becomes smaller and smaller over each year. Television and advertising supply our experience with typifications of these animals but they are so cartoon like that they obscure from view the systematic and massive slaughter that occurs daily.
It is probably impossible for persons even to imagine the amount of blood, feathers, hair, and entrails that are by-products of this killing process. Equally unimaginable is the scale upon which individual animal sentience is confined under “factory farms” and then is efficiently extinguished without thought about the deeper meaning of such acts. For these reasons, food animals have a mostly shadowy relation to us. The connection between neatly packaged meat in the supermarkets and a once living animal is further obscure by a food culture that has shaped our tastes in a manner that is largely disconnected from a sense of primary relation with the natural world. That further diminish the possibility that animals will be understood to possess qualities that constitute them as sentience beings with relative autonomy and internal dimensions that are not fully known. Notions of their “spirit”, their internal complexity, and their religious or moral standing in relation to the human world become increasingly difficult to sustain.
Finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. -Henry Beston
INQUIRIM VITAE 