"Walking Dead" made me realize what a low threshold of tolerance I have to animal cruelty.
I watched the all-day marathon yesterday on AMC. I haven't had cable for several years, and it's only been in the last few months that I've had "expanded basic" again. So this was the first time I'd seen the show, but I certainly had seen and heard all of the hype.
There is one scene where one of the characters has a wheelbarrow and a burlap sack. She picks up a chicken, holds it, and breaks its legs. The chicken screams and panics and she stuffs it in the bag and you think "What the FUCK" and then you realize she's taking the wheelbarrow to the barn, which is filled with "Walkers," and she was breaking the chickens' legs so she could climb up to the hayloft and empty the sack into the middle of the "Walkers" and the chickens couldn't run away from them if their legs were broken.
The scene really bothered me...I found it was unnecessarily cruel, and maybe it was an odd reaction in the midst of a series about people eating each other. I watched all of the blood-filled scenes that followed...which didn't seem real to me, because of course, they were not...but the chicken scene continued to bother me, because even if they faked the scene, the image was still firmly planted in my brain.
But I've seen the video clips of the chickens raised for KFC (Google "Kentucky Fried Cruelty"
...they have a little metal device, kind of like a guillotine mounted on a post. They pick up a chicken, hold it firm, stick its beak inside, bring down the lever, and it chops off the front part of their beak. They do it so the birds won't peck each other, but when you see them do it to one of the birds and see teh reaction and know they are in pain it kind of makes you furious.
And yes, I am a carnivore, and yes, I eat chicken, but like the overwhelming majority of people who do the same, I tend to eat it without spending too much time dwelling on how it got to my table.
OK, that's it, end of mini-rant.
= new reply since forum marked as read
We have the luxury of being able to compartmentalize what we are really doing when we eat meat--the industry we are fueling. So, yes, I'm part of that hypocrisy because I still eat meat--though a lot less than before and I do try to get grass-fed meat and cage-free eggs. But, I can not bear seeing an animal harmed in any way. Then again, I consider myself to be non-violent, a life-time opponent of the death penalty, our revisionist history on the use of torture, and I opposed war in Iraq. Yet, I still support Obama, who likewise is inconsistent on these issues. And if I saw a helpless animal or child or elderly person being willfully injured, I could very easily fight back--even to the point of severely harming the assailant.
So there you go...
I don't think I'm alone.
