People keep asking me what I’m doing for Easter this weekend. I’ll tell you what I’m NOT doing — I’m not gonna eat a plate full of ham. Here’s why:
- As babies, piglets are subjected to painful mutilations without anesthesia or pain relievers. Their tails are cut off to minimize tail biting, an aberrant behavior which occurs when these highly intelligent animals are kept in deprived factory farm environments.
- At 2 to 3 weeks of age, the piglets are taken away from their mothers, by which time, approximately 15% will have died. The surviving piglets are crowded into pens with metal bars and concrete floors.
- The air in hog factories is laden with dust, dander, and noxious gases which are produced by the animals’ urine and feces … respiratory disease is rampant.
- Modern breeding sows live a continuous cycle of impregnation and birth, having more than 20 piglets per year. After being impregnated, the sows are confined in small pens or metal gestation crates which are just 2 feet wide. At the end of their 4 month pregnancy, they are transferred to farrowing crates to give birth. They barely have room to stand up and lie down, and many suffer from sores on their shoulders.
- Prior to being hung upside down by their back legs and bled to death at the slaughterhouse, pigs are supposed to be ’stunned’ and rendered unconscious. However, ’stunning’ is terribly imprecise, and this results in conscious animals hanging upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker tries to ’stick’ them in the neck with a knife. If the worker is unsuccessful, the pig will be carried to the next station on the slaughterhouse assembly line, the scalding tank, where he/she will be boiled alive.
- And more…
Watch the video below. The WHOLE thing. If you can’t stand to watch it, how can you stand to EAT it?
I’ll be honest, I hope that made you lose your appetite. I hope you look down at your plate stacked with ham on Sunday and a queasy feeling quells up inside your stomach and you opt for seconds on the pasta salad instead. This would be a good sign, it means you have feelings! It also means it’s time to examine what happens to your food before it arrives beautifully packaged on Easter Sunday. There is nothing honey-baked about the path on which your cruel and inhumane feast traveled.
If you wouldn’t get up from your computer right now and go inflict all this torture on a pig directly, why is it okay to have somebody else do it while you’re not looking?
Also, there’s every reason to believe that Jesus was a vegetarian:
The Garden of Eden, God’s perfect world, was vegetarian (Gen. 1:29-30). Immediately, God calls this ideal and non-exploitative relationship “good” (Gen. 1:31). There follow many years of fallen humanity, when people held slaves, waged war, ate animals and committed various other violent acts. But the prophets tell us that the peaceable kingdom will be nonviolent and vegetarian; even the lion will lie down with the lamb (e.g., Isaiah 11). Jesus is the Prince of Peace, who ushers in this new age of nonviolence. When Christians pray, “Your will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven,” the one prayer given to us by Jesus, this obligates us to change our lives, to make choices that are as merciful and loving as possible. There will be no factory farms and slaughterhouses in heaven.
Jesus’ message is one of love and compassion, yet there is nothing loving or compassionate about factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals live miserable lives and die violent, bloody deaths. Jesus mandates kindness, mercy, compassion, and love for all God’s creation. He would be appalled by the degree of suffering we inflict on animals to indulge our acquired taste for their flesh.
Christians have a choice. When we sit down to eat, we can add to the level of violence, misery, and death in the world, or we can respect His creation with a vegetarian diet.
The choice is up to you. I hope you choose compassion, otherwise you might be missing the point of Jesus’ teachings, in which case — should you really be celebrating Easter?
“As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal… All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return…”
- Ecclesiastes 3:18-20
P.S. Don’t even get me started on Easter eggs…
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