Home on the Range

There are good reasons, both health and  humane, to be a vegetarian.  We might all be better off and I'm sure the animals would be better off if we didn't eat meat.  I guess we all rationalize our carnivorous appetites in various ways. My wife and I ate at a marvelous restaurant in Santa Rosa, California three years ago. Although they served delicious meat dishes, especially pork, the owner/chef was a staunch vegetarian.  They even had their own pig farm.  We asked her how she dealt with that.  She said, "The way I see it, I give those pigs a really good life.  And one very bad day."

We would also reconsider our eating habits if we knew how animals were raised, transported and slaughtered.  I know very little about that and I've never bothered to find out.  And how do I rationalize all that?  My thought processes are along the lines of  "If we didn't eat beef, pork and chicken then the cattle, pigs and chickens wouldn't have been alive in the first place.   The animals are born and bred for consumption."

But to all of us who consume meat,, we shouldn't kid ourselves about the awful conditions these animals endure from birth to a sometimes gruesome death,  I was reading about so called"free-range chickens" and "cage-free chickens."  If you want to know the gory details read Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry by Karen Davis PhD. If you want to know just enough just Google it.  You'll find out more than you want to know, like I just did. But if you don't even want to do that I'll tell you this much. The only restriction the USDA makes to call a chicken a "free-range chicken" is that a door gets opened and they have access to the outside. They do not tell the farmer either how long the chicken has to stay "outside" or what "outside" is supposed to look like.  It could five minutes in  a slightly larger pen. Just get over your image of a pristine meadow full of chickens roaming free.

So you're thinking that I'm headed toward some New Year's Resolution of dramatic dietary proportions. No not today. Another way I rationalize my diet is what I read a while back, "If God wanted us to be vegetarians, why did He create so many animals with so much meat?" I've said all this to tell a personal story.  Today, as happens from time to time, I got behind a chicken truck.  I guess you call it a chicken truck. That's what I call it anyway.  It's one of those flat-bed eighteen wheelers with hundreds of cages full of chickens headed to their final resting place, then to the grocery stores and eventually to our tables. What I'm going to say about this truck you may find to be horrendous considering all that I have alluded to above.  I know that  they have not had a pleasant life and it's not about to get any better for them.  But that truck fills me with an indescribable joy that bubbles up from deep within me.

You see I had a relationship with that truck long before I had any reason to think bad things about it.  My mother gave me a chicken truck for my fifth birthday. This metal eighteen wheeler was about a foot and a half long.  It had a cab and a detachable flat-bed trailer.  On that trailer were dozens of separate plastic cages, each containing a plastic chicken.  I could remove and replace each of those chickens and each of those cages as often as I wanted.  Then I could push that truck load of chickens all around the house delivering them to my family.  I did all of that for many wonderful hours and many happy  miles over a period of years inside 102 Glenn Street. That's all I've got to say about that truck.

But I do wonder if there's a lesson here?  I think there is, but frankly I can't come up with it. The lesson has something to do with the Bible verse "Happy is the man who does not condemn himself in the thing he allows himself to do." Romans 14:22.  Except for the chicken truck of my childhood, I'm quite sure that my visceral reaction to that truck I got behind today would be quite different.  But because of that experience from such a completely innocent age, my psyche reacts before my analytical mind can form an opinion.  So the lesson I can't quite come up with involves "are there other things that bother us, we think for good reasons, that we shouldn't let bother us at all?  For that matter is it possible that this thing that we let bother us could actually bring great joy?"  But my analytical brain is shouting, "No! No!  It should bother you that you eat chicken when you get behind all those hundreds of cooped up chickens on their way to be slaughtered ! You should never eat a chicken or a cow or a pig."

For today I'm not making that decision.  That's for another day.   For today I'm  going to keep wrestling with that lesson I'm trying to formulate.  Once I understand it I think my road to happiness will be quite a bit shorter.