Earthlings

For reasons most obvious to Professor Bump, I met up with Cool Cat at around 7:15 pm. I arrived before she did, and I had already acquired the first round of vegetarian handouts. The faces of prominent celebrities garnished the pages; they were being quoted on why they were vegetarian. Although interesting, it did little to persuade me. For me, celebrities are stupid until they prove otherwise. So, I chatted up Cool Cat. We attempted discussing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the conversation couldn’t be torn away from the awesome hold Victorian literature has on us. Before the movie commenced, Cat and I grabbed some bagels. Well, Cat grabbed one; I took two, half a raisin-cranberry loaf, orange juice, and three vegan Oreo cookies. I generously laced the bagels with the tofu/cream cheese.

The documentary started innocently enough, cliché enough. The camera zoomed into the Earth from the majestic view of space; the voice of the capable Joaquin Phoenix introduced the Earth and her inhabitants. Plants, animals, oceans, water, it was all there. But the mood quickly soured. Words like racism, sexism, species-ism, prejudice, and injustice began weaving into his narrative. It was an assault on the senses. Pictures of animal slaughter were paralleled with Holocaust ones, Joaquin Phoenix mourned the explicitly connected actions of our brutally insensitive race. This is the gist of the evening: the human race has proven, yet again, that we are miserable, inconsiderate, pathetic excuses for animals. We are the only part of the animal kingdom that kills for sport; we are the only organisms on this planet whose selfishness far exceeds the natural balance between predator and prey. And we are crudely going about it. We are literally raping animals out of any possible happiness. We bled them to death, beat them to death, stomp on them when they’re in our way, cut their beaks off, and snip their tails off. There was such a cacophony of terrorized animal shrieks that my head is still throbbing from the maddening noises of their agony. They are massed together, killed together, under fed, in some cases over fed, and always mistreated. The cows that milked to exhaustion, living maybe half their projected life expectancy, are sold to fast-food chains. Hens are caged in pens so small they can never stretch their wings. This extreme confinement maddens them, and they bounce into the cages until they start losing their feathers, rubbing their skin raw into sores that get infected, but never addressed medically. And this evil industry makes no exceptions. How can it be someone’s job to fire steel rods into pig’s heads as they struggle to get away? How can women sit, contain a goose with their thighs, and pluck them bare? Why do matadors get something out of killing an animal that has been weakened and is unfairly matched from the start? We’re filth, nasty and rotten.

I’ve given up pork. I know I’ll eat meat again; it is going to be organic, and I will chew it wondering if any of the organic standards were really kept, wondering if my chicken lived at all like a chicken without the curse of man would. But I have given up pork. My audio memory can’t drive their piercing oinks out.