An Acute Attack of Conscience

I remember the first time the thought occurred to me.

I grew up in a small Texas town that makes its money primarily through agribusiness, and even more specifically, from crops like rice, corn, soybeans, and maize. These crops by and large do not feed hungry humans; they are all sold to feed animals raised for slaughter. Endless rows of rust-red maize (sorghum, to non-locals) baked under the Texas sun every summer, and I still tell the passage of the year by the acres of crops I pass by when I drive southeast to visit my parents.

Being a farming town it also had its share of farm animals. 4H, Future Farmers of America, and even the Boy Scouts got into raising calves and chickens as projects, which were auctioned off at the County Fair every May.

I don't remember how old I was, but I remember helping a friend (I don't remember which friend, it could have been one of several) bottle-feed her 4H calf. I'd never seen anything so cute as that lanky, slobbering baby girl, sucking greedily at a huge bottle of milk. She had large and liquid brown eyes, wildly long eyelashes, and a tail that whipped back and forth in rhythm with her swallows.

"What are you going to do with her?" I asked.

My friend shrugged. "Sell her at the Fair."

"Sell her to who?"

Another shrug.

"For what?"

Shrug. "Meat, probably."

Meat?

Meat was that thing that took up two-thirds of the dinner plate; it came in vibrant pink slabs, wrapped in shiny plastic and stacked two and three deep at the supermarket, where my mother would painstakingly select among the packages for the perfect roast while my chubby legs froze in their cutoff shorts waiting by the cart. Meat was what I smelled cooking on hundreds of back porches on Sunday afternoons. Meat was the flat round pepperoni on pizza, the white cubes in a pot pie, the spicy filling in a taco.

It was at that moment that the connection was made in my mind: meat was also a cow.

Meat had big shining eyes, and a lively tail; it jumped in the air after butterflies; it sucked on a bottle; it missed its mother, who could very well have been the ribs I ate last Sunday.

Being a child, though, I was easily influenced, and not ready to believe that my family and community participated in wholesale massacre of such sweet, nurturing animals. We had to have meat, I was told; people ate meat, that's just how it was. Big animals ate little ones.

I had no facts to back up my discomfort about the subject. I had no name for it. But the feeling remained, and persisted through every hamburger and slice of bacon I ate: this isn't right.

One of my favorite movies was Charlotte's Web; I knew that what almost happened to Wilbur in the movie was what happened to every last one of those 4H calves and piglets and chicks--but my father was a pharmacist, not a farmer. I was a step farther from culpability than other kids. Sure, I ate the animals, but I didn't raise them to be killed and I certainly didn't kill them. The very idea made my skin crawl.

There were, of course, no vegetarians in my hometown. The whole notion was absurd to its citizens, some sort of crazy hippie bullshit that only happened at college--kind of like being gay. It was that thing that happened in other places, but not here. Weird, subversive, and wholly unacceptable.

As you might expect, during my abortive attempt at college, I took the plunge and was a vegetarian for over a year. That was how I learned to cook. I discovered Chinese food, refried beans, hummus, couscous--a whole world of culinary opportunity was thrown wide open once a meat-and-two-veggies was no longer the construction of my meals.

It didn't last. I could blame my friends, who weren't exactly the most supportive in the world, practically waving bacon in my face and saying, "Come on, you know you like it…" I could blame depression, stress, whatever; but all of these excuses are just that. In reality the failing was entirely my own. I wasn't strong enough to stick to my convictions; it was the same fear that kept me from speaking up publicly about religion, or defending my political ideology to my family. I became an omnivore again, but not without a price.

The price was my conscience. From that year, I could no longer claim ignorance. I had studied animal rights, knew all about the horror of slaughterhouses, knew statistics and figures about the health risks of meat and BSE and how the human body isn't made to be carnivorous, despite the "Cave-Man Diet" fads and Atkins nonsense that allow us to rationalize the inexcusable. I was not one of the millions of people uneducated about the reality of meat--I was willfully ignorant, and that was so much worse.

Every vegetarian I met, every new vegan cookbook I saw on the shelves, every time I ate at one of the veggie-friendly Austin restaurants (of which there are many, this being the easiest city in Texas to be a veggiesaurus), it was like a twist of the knife. It wasn't just liberal bleeding-heart guilt--I began to feel a shadow of what I suspect people felt during the Holocaust, pretending like the massacre was something that happened far away to "those other people" and that there were no ashes falling from the sky. They turned their heads, and I turned mine; you may not equate nine million Jews with eight million farm animals (killed each year in America alone), but I do, because it's just as senseless and just as pointless, and just another excuse for humans to assert their dominance over the children of the Goddess, whether on two legs, four, or wings. Historians say that the Jews were treated like animals--but if it's so heinous, so disgusting to contemplate treating humans like animals, then how do we justify treating animals like animals in the first place?

All of the arguments for such behavior ring hollowly to me. They are a shell of self-importance, the massive arrogance of the human race, a pasted veneer of "morality" covering up a great big empty lie. You can argue all day and night about the theological and ethical niceties, but essentially it boils down to: we justify it by simply not thinking about it. We don't want to hear it. Meat-eaters often get angry at vegetarians simply for being vegetarians, because it holds a mirror up to what they don't want to contemplate. They take vegetarianism as a personal attack on their own choices--why? Could it be because deep down they know they have no excuses either?

In the nearly nine years since I moved to Austin, and the nearly eleven since I became Wiccan, I have undergone more than one transformation. I have tried my hand at a variety of careers and found them all lacking, except one. I have been in and out of the Pagan community. I have gone from student to teacher, Initiate to Priestess. I have become a completely different person than the giddy small-town girl I was in 1996, and am still becoming.

And in all that time, through all of that, there was one thing that I couldn't escape--I was a hypocrite, and until I could summon the courage to walk my talk, I would never really be who I am.

Ethics aren't an easy subject for anyone. We don't live in a black and white world, though some of us would like to make it so. Pagans in particular have a hard time negotiating our beliefs in a world that seems determined to undermine them from the moment we step out our doors. We want to connect with Nature, and honor Her; big business and government want to exploit and ultimately kill Her. We want to embrace freedom and the rights of individuals to be who they are without judgment; our society continues to elect leaders who care only for themselves and will legislate our liberty into the ground. We want to change the world, but the world is so big, and we're so small, that it seems doomed from the beginning to even try.

But we try anyway, because even if nothing ever changes, the fact will remain that someone, somewhere, did something. Someone spoke out. Someone stood up.

Someone cared.

And so for seven years or more, there's been a still small voice in my soul growing steadily into a scream of righteous indignation. I ignored it and ignored it, but it grew louder and louder, until sometime in Autumn 2004, it drowned out everything else and had to be answered.

Because, you see, I knew better. As I said, I knew all the facts, I had seen the photos, the suffering, the intolerable cruelty of it all. I had read research reports on BSE (that's bovine spongioform encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease, in case you aren't hip to the lingo) and on the direct correlation between eating meat and dying of things like heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's. I had seen the pictures of debeaked chickens and of veal calves imprisoned in cages so small they couldn't turn around, and had read account after account of animals being skinned alive because taking the time to properly stun them wasted time and therefore money. I knew about the rape racks, where cows are forcibly impregnated over and over to keep their milk flowing for dairy farms. I knew about the half-rotten leftovers, euthanized pets, and waste that went to rendering plants to become pet food, livestock food, margarine, and cosmetics.

I knew.

And I pretended not to know.

Why?

Not because I felt like humans are justified in eating other animals. I don't think we are, but I know there are several fairly convincing arguments that, in a world without factory farming, I could agree with. Not because I thought I needed the iron and protein and vitamin B12 and calcium that we supposedly get in such high quality and quantity from animal flesh. Why did I turn a blind eye?

Because it tastes good.

Because it's easier.

Because I didn't want to be made fun of.

I can't say exactly when this realization hit me, but it was sometime in the Fall of 2004, right after reading Starhawk's The Earth Path. I can't describe the moment it all came together, but one night, I found myself sitting in front of my altar with all these horrific visions of animals in pain dancing viciously through my head, while I sobbed like an orphan and mentally begged the Goddess to forgive me for participating in the corruption, greed, and cruelty of a system that was polluting the environment, clogging our arteries, and denying sweet-faced calves the simple pleasure of standing in the sunlight next to their mothers and breathing the free air.

I decided that it simply wasn't worth it. I weighed my "becauses" against my knowledge and the understanding in my heart, and there was no contest. I was out of excuses--or, I had never had any, and finally admitted it.

To stand up and declare yourself Pagan, or lesbian, or feminist, or a variety of other "fringe" groups, is to set yourself apart from the mainstream. It is to choose not to be a part of the corporate greed machine. It is to say with certainty that you will think for yourself, make your own choices, chart your own course by your own star. It is to show other people that there is another way to live.

Scary? Hell yes. An extraordinary life can't be made through ordinary means. It's not uncharted territory, but it is new, and winds far from the well-trodden road.

Worth it?

Hell yes.

Copyright 2006 Dianne Sylvan. All rights reserved.