(Okay, folks. With little over a month before Thanksgiving, it's time to talk about the turkey....)
Last week at Ulster Public Library, I read from my book Where the Blind Horse Sings to an audience whose ages ranged from 12 to 60. Hazel the piglet sat quietly by my side, silent unless I became too loud. At that point, she’d glance up and grunt her displeasure.
I read about the night that Paulie, my rooster friend, crowed incessantly until, unable to sleep, I climbed from bed, lifted my russet-colored friend, and placed him on the pillow beside my head! No, I'm not making this up. This was exactly what he wanted. The next morning, I woke before he did. He hadn’t moved an inch.
I read a chapter titled "One Cold Bitter Night," which describes the first night that I realized Rambo the sheep was…what? Words fail me when I try to label Rambo, who told me that night that we’d left two turkeys outside in the cold. Of all the experiences that I’ve had with animals, this is the one that silences me...hte one that can still stop me in my tracks. A sheep who had suffered for years had finally let go of anger. After nearly two years, he had stopped attacking us, and was willing just to be. Evidently, though, Rambo needed new ways to release the energy that had expressed itself as crazy, dangerous, explosive RAGE.
On this one night, Rambo had known our two turkeys were out in the cold, had figured out a way to tell me, had known that I would help. What really blew me away, though, was that he had cared about two animals of another species.
That single night changed forever my perception of the supposed differences between humans and other animals. It helped me understand—unequivocally—that they feel and know far more than most of us would ever believe. That they have far greater capacity than we humans, who rarely take the opportunity to interact with and observe animals, realize.
At the end of the reading, hands shot into the air. A kind gentleman asked about how Ted, the old draft horse who doted on Dino, was doing since Dino’s death. Another guest asked if I had a favorite animal, and a third about how animals came to us. No one, though I had invited such a conversation in my opening talk, wanted to know about the link between agribusiness and global warming. No one asked about diet.
Is there a way, I ask myself every single day, to encourage people—good, kind people—to look honestly at the consequences of their diets?
Each weekend when guests arrive, we try to do exactly that. Our introductory film has a two-minute section on factory farming that depicts the conditions that thinking, feeling animals endure—jammed into warehouses and feedlots, packed into transport trucks, yanked by chains, dangling by a single leg in the air as they proceed down an assembly line to be ripped wide open. If you’ve seen the film, then you know: their terror is no less than ours would be.
What would it be like to proceed, upside down and shackled by an ankle, on an assembly line toward your death? Please: hold the thought for a moment.
Like Rambo silenced me that cold, bitter night, the film silences our guests. Many of you say simply, “I had no idea.” Many of you weep.
And then we tour the farm. Rambo strides up, demanding that we scratch his rear end. The potbelly pigs roam freely, and one or two or a half-dozen wander toward us, tails wagging, wanting nothing more than to say hello. Lexie’s confident and trusting glance our way is a tiny victory for a horse whose life has been short on joy. Down the lane we stop to pick up Rocky, the twenty-pound rooster. Again, many of you cry at how he struggles—to walk, to breathe—due to industry-induced obesity. And when Babe, the 2,200-pound steer walks over, eager to greet us, you inevitably remark that you had no idea that cows were so remarkably trusting and friendly.
“This one has been loved,” is all I ever need to say.
This is messy business, this work of encouraging people to think beyond their moral outrage at intentional abuse and to look inward at their role in perpetuating the horrors of institutionalized abuse. It’s easy, after all, to point a finger at the woman who starves her animals, the man who sets a barn on fire. It’s not so easy to look at ourselves. It’s not so easy to face this one truth: these animals I eat are tortured from birth to death, and their terror and misery is probably little different than what I would feel in equivalent conditions. Again, hold that thought.
With the awareness that most change happens slowly--it sure did for me!!--and with respect for your family traditions, your uncertainty regarding how to change your diet, your emotional attachment to your food, and finally, with acknowledgement that my own journey from meat eater to almost veggie to veggie to almost vegan to vegan was filled with plenty of challenges, I invite each of you to make this year the one you take the turkey off the table.
You can do it! It's only mid-October, so you've got plenty of lead time. Simply google "vegan Thanksgiving" and you'll find hundreds of recipes on terrific websites that will excite, inspire, and educate!! And if you're local, join us on October 27, when we'll be demonstrating and tasting three wonderful holiday entrees!
If you can make this leap on this most symbolic of days, chances are you’ve got a wonderful journey toward health and compassion and shrinking the size of your footprint on our fragile planet awaiting you.
And, if you DO decide to leave the turkey off the table this holiday season, please e-mail me and share your Thanksgiving story. I'd love to hear about it!
