Sometimes, before sleeping......

Many nights before sleeping I think about the animals that are at that moment facing death in a slaughterhouse or about the cows standing in their own feces and breathing ammonia and dust in the feedlots.  I cringe inside at what we humans are doing in pursuit of such trivialities as taste and profit.

I imagine the anguish the mother cow is feeling at the dairy, where her child has been taken from her, after she was forcibly impregnated.  Her baby is taken so all the milk the mother cow produces can go into yogurt, butter, ice cream and profit.  The milk was for her baby not for humans.  I think about how she must feel, about how any parent feels when they cannot care for their child.  The pain and misery make the ice cream not so attractive.

I sometimes think of the chickens trapped in cages, with no room to turn or spread their wings and that have been there all the day long while I was going about my life.  I think about their having been there the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, sometimes for up to 2 years.  This is their whole life, then they are thrown into another cage, trucked to a slaughterhouse and brutally killed.  For an omelet, for an easter egg, for a "nugget", for money.

I do this and sometimes then cannot sleep.  It is not that I couldn't not do it, most of us have developed strategies to avoid thinking uncomfortable thoughts, I do it because I believe it to be respectful to do so.  To be abused, oppressed, tortured and then killed is horrific but for such a thing to occur and no one to think about it and feel bad about it is.....beyond words.

My thoughts are nothing to those beings enduring the obscene treatment being forced upon them by my species but for me to not think those thoughts, for me to push them away and not allow myself to feel pained and sorrowful...........then I too would somehow be a participant in the silent animal holocaust that continues every moment of every day.

It might be that if we humans would allow ourselves to think all the thoughts and feel all the feelings associated with what we do,  some of these horrors might not occur.  In any event what is being done is bad enough, I must not be complicit in it by ignoring my thoughts and avoiding the feelings these disgusting activities elicit.  Even if I sometimes can't sleep.