*I suppose I just wanted to share my reason behind going vegan. I want you to understand how high schools can encourage such brutality toward animals, but in rare cases can also change the way some see them.* Originally, there were so many things urging me towards the change, but I somehow never made the actual switch. Now, when I say that I was addicted to dairy milk...I mean I was literally addicted to it. It’s all I ever drank. Glass after glass, meal after meal, from morning until I brushed my teeth for the night. I even ordered milk at restaurants. I kid you not, the first word I ever said was ‘cheese’. The thought of running out of some form of dairy was my nightmare. I was a huge proponent of reducing meat consumption, but still naively believed that there was no suffering in my milk. Flash forward to my junior year of high school. By then I had curiously joined every vegan Facebook page I could find, but out of laziness and little motivation, continued living off my animal products...until the day in biology class where we were introduced the fetal pig lab. It sickened me to the core, as I am a naturally empathetic person. I considered opting out of it, but the teacher threatened the lab workbook would be much more difficult to complete without the hands-on experience. Out of peer pressure and a fear instilled in me by the teacher, I participated. I don’t remember anything about what I learned from that damn packet I was forced to do, but I sure as hell will never forget the events of that class. Never had I first-hand witnessed such brutality and heartlessness.These classmates had been with me since Kindergarten and I expected a mournful tone in the room during the dissection. I watched as these children grew with me and laughed with me and learned with me. Never in my wildest imagination could I fathom the things they did to a baby, whose sole purpose in this world was for our own selfish gain. They laughed, they named them, they took pictures with them, they mutilated their tiny bodies as if they were made of clay. My face grew tight and I swear the room began to spin as I sat imprisoned in that biology room for 40 minutes, spectating such acts of cruelty and of no empathy at all. They chuckled at each other’s lame pig jokes, at the dilapidated corpses without any blood, at the way one of the babies had taken its last breath with its little tongue exposed. My classmates could have done the killing themselves...and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I suppose I had never seen such cruelty for myself. I had read about it, I had watched it on the television, but I had never witnessed it first-hand. These were my friends, my heartless, cold friends that objectified these innocent babies. There was a part of me that believed none of them were capable of such brutality. Eventually, I took up the courage to ask the teacher where the pigs had come from, hoping and praying they were just stillborns. No one else in that room cared, nor wanted to hear the truth. He was blunt. “The mother was sent to the slaughterhouse and they removed the babies after.” Never had I felt words impale me with such force that I physically cringed. I berated the teacher for almost 15 minutes about the details, trying to uncover some unknown compassion for these innocent lives. It never came. I began to question everything I thought I knew about humans. If they were so willing to send a pregnant sow off to slaughter, what else were they willing to do? For the rest of class I let my partner, who was just as silent and disturbed, do all the work. I just sat there and nodded my head, holding back tears. It tore apart my soul to listen to the cheers of my fellow comrades as they dismantled their babies. To those teens, they were no such thing. They were hot dogs and bacon and ham steaks. They were objects, nothing more. Seeing such joy in their eyes as they sliced and diced their ‘lab’ scared me to the core. How they could look at their little faces and still make a bacon joke or scrape a knife along their tongue in a fit of ecstasy was such a mystery that I swear a piece of my soul died that day. I went home and cried the hardest I had ever. My mother talked with me as I sobbed for the stolen lives of these innocuous souls, for the ruthless torture of their bodies by my guiltless colleagues. The only peace I found was in my mother’s reminder that those baby pigs never had to know pain. They only ever knew the warmth and safety of their mother’s womb. Maybe they heard their mother scream as her life was ended, but before they even knew what was happening, their hearts stopped and they died in a tranquil slumber. My mother told me that my classmates’ hid their guilt through humor. They objectified the pigs as a way to drown out their guilt. If a pregnant woman were ever killed in such a manner, outrage would only begin to describe the backlash. That bothered me immensely. How could no one make the connection? As my mother had advised, I went back to that biology room for the second day of the lab and did my half of the work on the pig. My mother said the best thing I could do for the baby was to make sure her life wasn’t wasted, now that her life was already lost. As I completed the lab, I was gentle and I softly whispered to that baby to thank her. If we had been required to name our fetus, I would have called her Justice. That’s what I promised her. I promised her that I would bring justice to her lost life and to the billions like her. Those two days were excruciatingly painful for me. When we were finished, the pigs were not buried...no, her final resting place was the landfill...a cold, hellhole to thank her for all she had done for us. I wish I could have saved her and held her with blood in her veins and a wet snout to kiss me with. Never could I look at animal products the same way again. The first to go was pig meat, then cow meat, then eggs, then dairy milk, and then everything and anything that came from a living being. Justice taught me that. She taught me that we all come into this world for different purposes and maybe humans don’t completely understand those reasons, but it is never our right to take it upon ourselves to give sentient beings the purposes we believe they should have. A pig deserves to know the feeling of the sun on his face, a mother’s kisses, the joy of the first time he sees a bird soar above his head. Justice taught me that we rape this from them, mercilessly we give them a purpose here, believing that without this purpose, they are useless. No amount of documentaries or news articles could teach me such awareness. I needed to understand it for myself. The lab taught me things about my character, about my supposed friends, and about life. I think a lot about Justice and I hope there is a heaven. I hope she’s with her mother and I pray there is no pain wherever she is. Her physical body may be in some horrid landfill, but a piece of her soul is with me...and I will always hold onto it until I can give it back to her someday. If there is one thing I could to say to her, it’s ‘I’m sorry.’
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 16:23:56 +0000
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