Vegetarian at heart?

Today, I experienced a very rude awakening...

Sitting in my meat science class is usually a relatively painless activity: the teacher is entertaining, I'm learning about foods, and I'm with a lot of my friends. However, today's subject was very disturbing: Animal Harvest. Just the fact that the industry calls it "harvest" makes my stomach turn. They don't think of animals as living beings, but objects they created in order to produce food. Now don't get me wrong, because I love meat. I eat chicken and turkey and cheeseburgers, but I enjoy being naive about where my meat comes from. I don't need to see the torture instruments used in slaughter houses to render the animals unconscious. I don't need to see pictures of Babe the pig being prodded and electrocuted over and over just so he could move from one end of the barn to another. And I especially don't need to hear my professor explain, with every minute detail, just how economically beneficial it is to starve animals before they are killed and how it is extremely humane to put them all in a gas chamber before sanguination.

I was crying. I excused myself from the class and went to cry. But why?? I like meat! Here's why: no one should be numb to killing a living being. I was surprised at the lack of emotion in that classroom, just like killing thousands of beings is an everyday thing. Well, unfortunately it is. But that doesn't mean that we should enjoy looking at pictures of dying hogs. I think the other reason that it was particularly difficult for me was the fact that we were learning about hog slaughtering. Chickens... kill them as far as I'm concerned. Those are dirty, nasty, mean animals and I don't like them and I'm sorry if that is heartless, but I've had some pretty bad experiences with chickens. But little piggies!? I once was woken up in Nicaragua to the sound of a pig being castrated and it gave me nightmares for weeks. It sounded like a baby who had just been trampled on by hundreds of horses or something. It was awful. So that was probably another reason for my sudden emotional breakdown. And I don't really eat pork...

Moral of my story is: show some compassion, people. And know where the line is and how it can be crossed. I eat meat, but I want to know absolutely nothing about what happens before it goes into my mouth.

Irony: I'm going to a swine packaging plant in October. Yippee.