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| So what happened with being vegetarian? |  |  | |
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Thinking of that fatted calf. I'm still vegetarian. When I was a kid, my Dad would go shooting things to provide meat for the table. Pigeons, pheasant, grouse, rabbits, hares, deer - and one Christmas, a swan, which he insisted was a goose (because swans belong to the monarch in England) but we knew well enough what it was. Anyway, I thought it was a privilege to go out shooting with him, as soon as I was old enough to keep up. It seemed a fabulous thing to me to be creeping around the forest at dawn, always moving upwind, seeing the foxes and badgers and deer doing their thing. But whenever he raised the gun, I stuck my fingers in my ears and shut my eyes and hoped he's miss. Few of the animals he shot died instantly. I killed very many small animals and birds that were wounded, cracking their necks. I soon grew to hate it. Hares make a weird sound when they're wounded, exactly like a crying baby. It's hard to grab them and finish them off. But the deer were the worst, with their big eyes watching you as they lay there bleeding. He once gave me the knife to finish off a deer that I could get to faster than him. It lay in the bracken with a hole in its chest and blood coming out, but otherwise, just lying upright, watching me. I failed to put the knife in, and just waited there with it. I hadn't realised being vegetarian was an option till I was sucked in by the cult at the age of 16. It was to me a great relief. I couldn't disassociate the suffering I'd seen with the meat on the table. I still don't disassociate the suffering from the product. It seems revolting. Sometimes I wonder how many people would eat meat if they could get to know the animal first, and if they had to kill it themselves. But I've also seen great barbarity in the far east, animals being bludgeoned to death slowly and apparently that seems joyful to the men with the sticks. And in the Philippines, men torturing pigs to death by tickling their hearts with pointed sticks, taking an hour for the squealing and shrieking pig to die. So really, I have to think, maybe people don't mind. Meat on the table trumps all. I'm reminded of the issue by that thing with the fatted calf. It seems absurd and revolting to me. And also, after 50 years of not eating meat, I've become very anaemic and weak - not because of being vegetarian - it's been just fine for almost all of that time, but I have coeliac disease, and the part of the gut that absorbs iron is damaged, and it's hard for me to get enough iron. The pills don't work well. So for the last week I've been eating liver. It's bizarre. For most people, eating meat is an everyday thing. Me, I'm trying to quell the revulsion at such an everyday act, and swallow the meat like medicine. And I have to wonder, how much of this revulsion I'm trying to quell is cult programming, and how much from the earlier experiences? It's hard to unravel. So I wonder, how many fellow ex-cultists stuck with being vegetarian? And how many were glad that phase ended and got back into chomping animals? How did that work? |
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thank you!