#1: Ask a child

...and a little child will lead them Isaiah 11:6b

This post begins my list of reasons for giving up eating animal products. As I mentioned in my previous post, it is not the first reason, only the one I decided to discuss first.

There probably isn't a hunter alive that does not at least get a little miffed at the movie Bambi. I remember going with a friend to see a re-release of the movie in the theater (the last one before its move over to home video). When it came to the famous scene of hunter vs. Bambi's mother my ears were suddenly accosted by shrill, hellish wails. A mother suddenly jumped up and dragged her hysterical boys from the theater. I heard, "They're going to kill the mother, don't let them kill the mother!" (or something along those lines).

Me? I was secretly cheering for the hunter and (not so secretly) angry at parents that would let their children watch such a movie in the first place without teaching them the facts of life.

What has to happen in a child's heart to change it from one such as was possessed by those two children, to one like mine? Strangely enough we automatically assume the problem is with the child.

A friend accounted to me a time she was eating with some coworkers when the topic of animal cruelty and factory farms came up. It wasn't long into the conversation when someone stated they didn't want to talk about it anymore. They would rather not know where their meat came from and they were more comfortable pretending it didn't come from animals. Really.

I recall, as a child, almost vomiting when I realized the thing I found in my food was a vein. Up to the point I really had never made the connection that at one time what I was eating use to be alive. I, like most children. I would have to struggle through the nausea many times before adulthood finally cleansed me of that weakness.

It was a long time before I once again started thinking about the source of my food. At forty years of age I had finally outgrown the need for pretending. The food, the chicken, steak, pork chop, came from something that was once alive. Something sentient and feeling. Something innocent. Only this innocence wasn't anesthetized by social mores, it was simply destroyed for my entertainment. The hunter had won and any screaming children dragged out of the theater.

This post has turned into more of a ramble and for that I apologize. My point is this: I saw a dark irony in the disparity between the child screaming for the deer who was about to die and and the pretense of my adulthood. I realized that if normal had to be defined by how well I could pretend, then something was seriously wrong with me.

Perhaps the screaming child scares us. We want to slap him or drag him out of sight (and hopefully out of mind), anything to shut his blathering mouth. We don't want to be reminded of the fact that our lunch used to be something other than what we are pretending it to be.

In short, I woke up and, like those two boys, started screaming.