“7/31/2009, 4:55pm EST”
“Not only is it disturbing, it’s hurtful. It’s a pet for God’s sake. It’s not been raised to suffer a death like that.”
— Linda Rodriguez, whose good-natured horse was surreptitiously and brutally slaughtered for its meat to be sold on the black market at an estimated $7-20 a pound, a practice on the rise in and around Miami, Florida. I’m glad Ms. Rodriguez is trying to think about the horse’s point of view, but she ridiculously implies that being raised in squalid confinement as a piece of eventual meat makes the slaughter somehow more justifiable and/or less traumatic. Late Update: Two key things here. First is that Rodriguez, surely cognizant of the pain and loss of life undergone by her beloved horse, nonetheless expresses her grief in a way that is all about herself. It’s “disturbing”… to her. It’s “hurtful”… to her. (Neither of these is nearly adequate to describe the horse’s perspective, obviously.) Moreover, the horse was a “pet” — an owned thing whose essence was to create pleasure for its owner. All of this belies a failure to comprehend the depth of this particular injustice, due to a preoccupation with the royal Me. Second and related to the first point, other animals that are bred and “raised” (if you can call it that) to be slaughtered are not therefore meant to be slaughtered in any deeper sense than the sense in which evil humans intend it. Here again Rodriguez’s perspective fails to consider the real victims. Instead, it’s all about the humans: whatever the humans intend for an animal, that becomes the purpose of that animal’s life. How outrageously arrogant. Let’s be clear: No matter how deeply humans usurp the life of another animal, that animal’s life does not actually adopt the purpose of those humans in any deep, morally relevant sense. The particular evil of that usurpation is not diminished.I could be wrong, but it seems like the statement of a person who hasn’t examined the equal but far more numerous tragedies that go into her own food. It’s the same cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization that afflicts many animal-loving meat-eaters and -enablers the world over.
Never leave home without it.
