I saw one today.
"Don't take Rt. 81," my Dad cautioned when we discussed my route home from Nashville. "It's a truck route. Scary as shit to be boxed in by 3 tractor trailers going 75 mph."
I considered Dad's advice. I didn't relish the idea of driving nearly 600 miles, much of it mountainous, surrounded by trucks. But the other option, driving WAY east via 64 then heading up 95, would add close to 100 miles to the trip. So at 6 am, I said a teary farewell to my aunt Beverly Ann, her husband Frank, and mutts Bailey, Sammy, and Levi, then pointed the car toward 81.
Around 1 pm, with the sun high in the sky, the day warmed. I opened the windows...and that's when I smelled it. A slaughter truck, climbing the hill in the slow lane as I approached it on the left.
I don't often travel long distances via interstate highways, so it's rare that I encounter these deathmobiles. I've seen chicken transport trucks jammed so tightly with crates of chickens that many have suffocated by the time the animals arrive at the slaughterhouse for their barbarous deaths. Long before I began the work of trying to raise awareness of these delightful beings' sentience and the depth of their suffering, I wept when I passed the trucks. Aluminum boxes on a flatbed, rows of oval holes cut into their sides for ventilation. But that's all--that's the single accommodation for the animals, and that's done only so they won't die in route to the place that will slit their throats, dip them in boiling water, rip out their feathers, neatly slice off heads and feet, clean and package what remains of their battered bodies.
Today, I did more than weep. You see, I know who these animals are now. I know that they're so much more like I am than I ever would have believed. I know that each one is individual, each one is unique, and I know that each chicken, each pig, each cow, duck, turkey that is grown and killed to feed us has an emotional range that is probably quite similar to mine.
In Where the Blind Horse Sings, I recall with delight the life and lessons of one chicken named Paulie. Paulie was the barn peacemaker, a frequent passenger in my car (I usually insisted that he ride shotgun, though my lap was always his preferred seat), a good friend to my dog Murphy, and our regular companion at lunch. There have been other chickens, too, birds so full of quirky personality and a desire to communicate that one swears they really have vocabulary if only we could understand it.
Today's truck was stuffed with pigs.
Stuffed so tightly that what I looked at through the ovals was just a solid mass of pink. No doubt snouts were jammed into rectums and sharp hooves into tender skin because the object, of course, is HARDLY to allow the animals to take this harrowing journey in comfort, but instead to smash as many bodies into the compartment as can fit--whipping them on, shocking them on, beating them--whatever it takes to get them on that truck. And friends, pigs are smart and pigs are sensitive and pigs are strong...they don't go willingly.
So I as I passed this truck, carrying animals I know to be uncannily "human," one pig caught my eye. He looked at me through the oval hole, and the look shared more than words ever could.
A wail emerged from my body. Not just tears. An uncontrollable wail--I could not stop it--coming from a deeper part of me than tears ever have, and an apology to that pig, and to all animals on behalf of my species.
I will return to CAS, where I will hug my pink pals Franklin and Police and Babe, and they will love me right back, with smiles and happy grunts and snounts rubbed into arms and cheeks, so that within a moment, I'll be happily as muddy as they. And I will wonder about my good fortune to be born a human, and not any other kind of animal.
If you've not read my book, I urge you to do so. If you still eat animals and you've not been to CAS, please come. You need to see who they are. It just might change your life...and theirs.
