I became vegetarian because I didn’t want to kill anymore. I hadn’t read any animal rights philosophy, and I didn’t see any factory farm footage. I was just sick of killing. It’s a long story — longer than it should have been — but here’s a summary: I slaughtered a pig with my friends late in high school, tried to justify it to myself for months, failed, and then swore off meat as soon as I moved out of my childhood home.
The pig we killed was more “free-range” and “organic” than any you can buy in America. He still screamed as he died. The other pigs watching screamed right along with him. They sounded like children. I cut his arm off with a machete. I heard that his body would taste better since we killed him ourselves, but his flesh tasted like that of any other dead animal. I tried to pet the other pigs afterward, but they ran to the opposite corner of their pen, climbing atop one another to get as far from the monster as possible.
I realized, slowly, that I murdered every single pig I ate. Most of the time, I just hired a hitman to do the work for me. Some days, I’d try to talk to others about what we’d done. They’d say, between bites of their BLT: “I could never do that to an animal.” Some nights, I stared up at the ceiling, wondering: “Could I have done that to a human?”
Giving up meat felt purifying. For all my life, I had thoughtlessly consumed flesh multiple times a day. Skin, ligaments, fat, muscles, tendons, tumors, shrink-wrapped and labeled “meat” for my consumption. I paid for a monthly subscription box of beef jerky. I ordered my steaks blue because I loved the taste of blood. Some afternoons, I’d come home after boxing and eat an entire rotisserie chicken solo — another soul consumed. Once I started seeing animals on my plate where meat had once been, giving up these habits didn’t feel like a sacrifice. I hadn’t sacrificed meat; I’d stopped sacrificing animals.
When you buy milk and eggs, you’re buying from a farmer who raises their animals with an expiration date; they aren’t his friends, they’re his machines, and if they stop working, they get disassembled and thrown away.
