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I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right spot. I just need to talk to someone who will understand and maybe forgive.
Yesterday started like a normal day. I came to this site to look for recipes and friendship. I've been a lacto-ovo vegetarian since 2003. I had started feeling uneasy about eating meat. At the time I couldn't exactly say why. It just started to feel wrong. Whenever anyone asked my why I became a vegetarian I would just say, "For ethical reasons." Even back then I suspected that I would eventually make the transition to Vegan.
So yesterday something inside me decided it was time to start making the final switch. I found this website. Found some promising recipes, then started to look around the rest of the site. Then I found the video.
When I started watching "Meet Your Meat" I didn't expect to find anything shocking. I grew up on a small family owned dairy farm. (300 acres, about 40 cows, a few dozen chickens.) Since I was familiar with the agriculture society I didn't expect to see anything that would upset me.
Well, I didn't actually SEE anything that surprised me. I had heard about factory farms before. What really devastated me were the things I started to remember about our own little farm. Horrible awful things that I had somehow forced myself to forget.
One of the worst memories took place about 30 years ago. I was about 6 at the time. There was a sick cow in the barn. My father called the "auction guy" to take her away. The cow was too sick to stand up so they tied a rope to her leg and dragged her screaming across the concrete floor and onto the truck. When I asked my father where they were taking her he said,"To sell for dog food." When I started crying Dad sent me into the house. When my mom found out why I was upset she just said "Thats just part of life, get use to it."
I started remember other things too. The "free range" chickens spent the winter in a unheated coop. When I asked why some of the chickens were missing toes I was told that they had frozen off in the winter.
The chickens were there for the eggs. Most of the roosters that hatched were killed as soon as they were big enough to eat.
Male calves were sent to the auction. Bull calves are useless on a dairy farm. I remember how their mothers would call out for them for days after they were sent away. A few years ago a local girl was kidnapped while out riding her bike. Her family went on TV begging for her return. The police found her clothes but they never found her body. Are the human mother and the cow mother really any different? They both just want their babies back home safe; but their babies are already dead.
I could go on and on. These memories just came flooding back to me. I spent most of the day yesterday crying and crying. I finally fell asleep for a couple of hours. I woke up with a headache and an upset stomach.
I don't know how I ever blocked these things from my mind in the first place.
Maybe I always knew these things were wrong and my brain just couldn't cope with being forced to grow up in the middle of it. It's like I had two minds. One that saw these things and understood what was happening. That mind got buried in my sub conscience. The second mind allowed me to cope with living there. It viewed without seeing, touched without feeling, heard without listening. It sounds crazy. It's like when they talked about "doublethink" in the book "1984"; allowing yourself to believe in two things that contradict each other. It's the only explanation I can think of for how I forgot about these things and why I remember them now.
Maybe it was these memories in my sub conscience that let me to veg*ism to begin with. Maybe I had to take the final decision to become vegan before I ready to deal with these memories. I still don't feel ready though. I still feel like crying.
One thought keeps coming back to me. I know I can't be the only one to experience this. Right now somewhere out there is another little girl standing in another barn watching another animal be mistreated.
She is out there crying, and her parents will tell her she's wrong.
Yesterday started like a normal day. I came to this site to look for recipes and friendship. I've been a lacto-ovo vegetarian since 2003. I had started feeling uneasy about eating meat. At the time I couldn't exactly say why. It just started to feel wrong. Whenever anyone asked my why I became a vegetarian I would just say, "For ethical reasons." Even back then I suspected that I would eventually make the transition to Vegan.
So yesterday something inside me decided it was time to start making the final switch. I found this website. Found some promising recipes, then started to look around the rest of the site. Then I found the video.
When I started watching "Meet Your Meat" I didn't expect to find anything shocking. I grew up on a small family owned dairy farm. (300 acres, about 40 cows, a few dozen chickens.) Since I was familiar with the agriculture society I didn't expect to see anything that would upset me.
Well, I didn't actually SEE anything that surprised me. I had heard about factory farms before. What really devastated me were the things I started to remember about our own little farm. Horrible awful things that I had somehow forced myself to forget.
One of the worst memories took place about 30 years ago. I was about 6 at the time. There was a sick cow in the barn. My father called the "auction guy" to take her away. The cow was too sick to stand up so they tied a rope to her leg and dragged her screaming across the concrete floor and onto the truck. When I asked my father where they were taking her he said,"To sell for dog food." When I started crying Dad sent me into the house. When my mom found out why I was upset she just said "Thats just part of life, get use to it."
I started remember other things too. The "free range" chickens spent the winter in a unheated coop. When I asked why some of the chickens were missing toes I was told that they had frozen off in the winter.
The chickens were there for the eggs. Most of the roosters that hatched were killed as soon as they were big enough to eat.
Male calves were sent to the auction. Bull calves are useless on a dairy farm. I remember how their mothers would call out for them for days after they were sent away. A few years ago a local girl was kidnapped while out riding her bike. Her family went on TV begging for her return. The police found her clothes but they never found her body. Are the human mother and the cow mother really any different? They both just want their babies back home safe; but their babies are already dead.
I could go on and on. These memories just came flooding back to me. I spent most of the day yesterday crying and crying. I finally fell asleep for a couple of hours. I woke up with a headache and an upset stomach.
I don't know how I ever blocked these things from my mind in the first place.
Maybe I always knew these things were wrong and my brain just couldn't cope with being forced to grow up in the middle of it. It's like I had two minds. One that saw these things and understood what was happening. That mind got buried in my sub conscience. The second mind allowed me to cope with living there. It viewed without seeing, touched without feeling, heard without listening. It sounds crazy. It's like when they talked about "doublethink" in the book "1984"; allowing yourself to believe in two things that contradict each other. It's the only explanation I can think of for how I forgot about these things and why I remember them now.
Maybe it was these memories in my sub conscience that let me to veg*ism to begin with. Maybe I had to take the final decision to become vegan before I ready to deal with these memories. I still don't feel ready though. I still feel like crying.
One thought keeps coming back to me. I know I can't be the only one to experience this. Right now somewhere out there is another little girl standing in another barn watching another animal be mistreated.
She is out there crying, and her parents will tell her she's wrong.
