At the screening, I sat on a hard metal chair with my ankles crossed. Just as I started to wonder where the nearest location of Smoochies was, the lights dimmed and dramatic music ensued. I decided to pick up the Smoochies conversation I was having with myself again later on.
It quickly became apparent that this film was not going to be the angst-ridden coming-of-age indie flick that I usually fancied—the only coming-of-age story here would be my own.
I watched as a former cattle rancher came clean about the horror he had repeatedly witnessed, the cruelty inflicted on animals as part of their standard, routine treatment—the horns, beaks, tails, and toes seared off, regularly, without anesthesia, in order to keep animal agriculture as “efficient” as possible. I stared in disbelief at the tiny spaces that animals were crammed into to live their entire, albeit incredibly short, lives.
Sinking farther down into my chair, I bit my lip hard as I learned that dairy cows need to be kept on a constant cycle of forcible insemination, then pregnancy and birth, in order to produce milk as continually as possible. It seemed so obvious to me in that moment that, like humans, and like every other mammal on earth, cows need to have just given birth in order to produce milk. I felt so stupid in that instant, as I half covered my face with my hand, wondering if others in the audience were also realizing this same obvious fact for the first time. I wondered, when was it that so-called efficiency had come to override basic humanity?
An image of my own mother came into my head—the bond we had when I was a little girl was still palpable for me. Despite our issues, we had always been close, and rounding that out, of course, was the very profound and meaningful relationship we each had with my grandmother, Mom’s mother. The mother-child/grandmother-child relationship is a force to be reckoned with, and I saw no reason to believe that that wasn’t true among other species. Who was I to decide, or simply ignore, what other species felt or didn’t feel, thought or didn’t think?
And so, when the screen in front of me showed footage of a dairy cow giving birth to her baby, and then having the baby immediately taken away from her, I felt my stomach begin to ache. This baby was off to face an uncertain future: Possibly this baby would become one of the millions of veal calves who are intentionally made anemic, often penned up constrictingly, and killed while still babies. Or maybe this baby would be allowed to live longer, in a miserable feedlot, to become beef. If the baby was a girl, maybe she would follow her mother into the nightmare of dairy production until, after about four years, her milk production waned and she would be killed to become fast-food burgers.
As I watched the film, right before my eyes I saw the mother cow bellow—she screamed—as her baby was dragged across the floor by his back legs. The mother’s powerful instinct to care for her baby was completely squelched, and the baby’s first experience was being painfully dragged away into a world of commodification and cruelty.
I had always thought that if you didn’t milk a cow, she would die. I’m not sure where I concocted that silly notion, but I’ve since learned that it’s pretty commonly believed to be true. As I grasped the jacket in my lap as if it were my own baby, I let go of the denial that had allowed me not to see the fact, now obvious to me, that the milk this dairy cow made was intended for her baby. And, unfortunately for cows, unlike humans, they can still produce milk while they’re pregnant, so they can be forcibly inseminated immediately after birth and still be “productive.” That means they are pretty much nonstop milk machines.
Milk had always been sold to us as kids as the most natural food on the planet. Ironically, however, humans are the only species to consume milk into adulthood and the only species to consume the milk of another species—a fact that, now that I was actually thinking about it, completely grossed me out (and it still does). As I sat there, it all seemed so surreal suddenly, and I briefly wondered if anyone would notice if I quietly exited this screening, this city, this state of heightened emotion, this world that no longer made sense to me. I desperately craved an out.
But just then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Marisa—dressed nicely in a skirt suit, a fierce determination in her perfect posture, her grounded stance. She must have felt my stare, because she looked over at me and our eyes met, illuminated by the flickering blue-green lights of the movie screen. We let a second go by with our eyes locked like that, and then she offered me a simple, single nod, which seemed to say, “I get it, I get you, and I’ve got you.” I returned her gesture with a sad smile, and I let the new reality sink in for me that there was, in fact, no going back.
My thoughts lingered on the dairy cow. Though it was all disturbing, there was one thing in particular that I was thinking about obsessively—and that was that in order to produce milk, she is forcibly, repeatedly inseminated. Forcibly inseminated . . .
Intrusive images of Richard and that rainy night in New Brunswick came flooding back. I had told him no—my body was mine. But he was bigger, stronger, more powerful. And so he raped—forcibly inseminated—me. Over the years I’d thought about that evening, and I wondered if slapping the word “rape” on it was too strong. I had, after all, put myself in that position. But I did not give him permission to penetrate my body, and he did so anyway. In that moment with Richard, I had been there solely for his pleasure, and for him to act out his fantasies of power. What he did to me was an act of violence. I was a nonentity to him—a body, an underling, a vagina.
How was what he did to me different from what animals were forced to undergo? Images on the screen flashed before my eyes with the same mix of clarity and confusion as the images that flashed through my mind. Even though I was sitting, my legs trembled beneath me.
My reaction that night wasn’t based on any intellectual understanding of exploitation and commodification of female reproductivity, both human and animal, although I would go on to read extensively about this connection in the years to come. It was entirely visceral. This was just wrong. At one point during the film screening, I surprised myself by standing up—jolting up, really—and then immediately upon realizing that I was standing, sitting back down. I honestly don’t know why I stood up, except perhaps because there was so much wild and furious energy circulating inside of me that it was almost instinctual. The animals on the screen in front of me made me question everything I thought I knew about the way the world worked—the pigs in gestation crates so small that they couldn’t turn around; the multiple chickens crammed into tiny battery cages where their feet would literally grow around the wires they stood on; the baby male chicks who were of no “use” in the egg industry so were suffocated in plastic bags, or ground up alive for pet food or fertilizer; the “beef cattle” hanging upside down, by one foot, after they were supposedly stunned, though their bodies continued to wriggle with life and their last bit of protest as they bled to death. Each of these things—and more—was completely routine. It was simply where animal products came from.
Any hopes that I clung to that there was a way to buy my way out of this at some cute stand at the farmers’ market boasting happy animals and idyllic conditions were quickly squelched as I learned that even in the most seemingly benign circumstances, inherent cruelty is present. I learned that animals are never treated “humanely,” not by any normal person’s definition of that word, when they are commodities. The entire operation, the way they are bred, born, and killed as babies, is simply not possible without breaking up families. After all, virtually all farmed animals, not just veal calves, are killed after lives that are far shorter than their natural life spans—their lives are measured in months or even weeks. None of this is possible without forcible insemination (which is also pretty gruesome for the male animals whose semen is extracted), nor is it possible without killing the animals who are born with no “use” to their industry, such as male chicks born into the egg industry. It is not possible to create animal by-products such as dairy and eggs without also killing those animals who
are considered “spent,” like hens whose egg production is not at peak level, or dairy cows whose bodies are no longer able to produce milk fast enough. There is no reason to keep them alive once their peak is past—there is a constant supply of replacements, and their flesh can still be used for meat, though, of course, they don’t fetch top dollar since their bodies are, by this point, tattered and torn.
My brain lingered once again—this time on the concept of families being torn apart. I thought of my own childhood, and my rotating family. I remembered how deeply I had loved my stepfather Brock, and how, one day, he was just gone—poof.
Still, despite my somewhat broken home, at the end of the day, I had a core group that I called my family. What would it mean not to have that? What would it mean to be born into a system where every one of your natural instincts and emotions are ignored and suppressed? These thoughts made me shudder.
It wasn’t as though I didn’t know that animals were killed for our lunches, our shoes, or so many other things that I didn’t even think about. Dead animals were woven into every aspect of our lives. But the full picture and startling reality that was now staring back at me as I sat on my hands, trying to keep myself from jumping out of my skin, was life altering. Over and over again in my head loomed the question: How could I not have known?
Years prior, I had become a vegetarian because I was seeking an identity and because I had a visceral reaction to meat—it was gross, and that was that. I would no longer eat it. But I didn’t think about the ramifications of the dairy and eggs that I consumed with clockwork consistency—making up the bulk of each meal and each snack I enjoyed. Until watching this film, it didn’t occur to me that even aside from the inherent cruelty of dairy—the fact that the veal industry wouldn’t exist without the dairy industry and vice versa—and of eggs—the fact that the boy chicks are killed at birth since they obviously can’t go on to lay eggs themselves—the animals whose by-products I was consuming would eventually themselves be rendered “useless” and killed for low-grade meat. I glanced back at Marisa, and, in that moment, I kind of wished she’d never entered my life and turned it upside down. Goddamn pretty girls . . .
But there was joy, too, in the film I was watching—and, refreshingly, there was unmistakable hope. There was the underlying message that this nightmare didn’t have to exist and that each of us could actually do something about it by changing what we eat. And, in footage that bypassed the brain and went straight to the heart, there was evidence that, for a few of these animals, change was occurring right then. They were getting out. Juxtaposed with the horror show were images of rescued farmed animals frolicking at a sanctuary, living out the rest of their lives peacefully and with dignity. This was their refuge, and watching the film, it became mine, too. Throughout the coming years, I myself would escape to sanctuaries for a bit of respite and soul lifting, reinvigorating my activism and reclaiming my own positivity.
—
Several years into my veganism, I met Rudy the Rooster at Coming Home Sanctuary in upstate New York—a small sanctuary for rescued farmed animals, formerly abused and abandoned, who were being given a second chance. It is operated by Laura George, a fiery and quirky veterinarian with a big heart, who splits her practice and her time between New York City and this incredibly rural area near the Finger Lakes.
When I first spotted Rudy among his flock of stunning hens, I honestly thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. “Why is that rooster wearing socks?” I asked Laura, who, I quickly learned, is the embodiment of imperturbable—thanks, I’m sure, to the mix of heartache and beauty she sees on a daily basis. Turned out it wasn’t socks that Rudy was sporting—they were booties that acted as prosthetic feet. Beneath them, Rudy had stumps.
“Do you want to see how Rudy treats his ladies?” Laura asked. She grabbed a handful of blueberries from a small bag in her coat pocket, and Rudy, his jet-black and reddish-orange feathers glistening brightly, ran right over. Laura knelt down and placed a blueberry in his mouth, but rather than eating it himself, he gingerly fed it—beak to beak—to one of the hens. The hen ran away, pleased. Laura gave Rudy another blueberry, and he then passed it on to the second hen. This went on until all the hens were taken care of. “Sometimes it’s hard to get him to eat,” Laura confided. “He wants to make sure his girls are fed.”
Rudy was rescued from a horrific cruelty case. He had been left abandoned, starving, bloody, and frostbitten. Laura took him in, carefully removed the caked-on fecal matter from his legs, and gently bathed him. That was when she discovered that beneath the debris, Rudy had only stumps—no feet. There were fragmented, fractured pieces of his toe bones embedded in his legs. He was broken. So she did her best to fix him, not knowing whether it would work.
Despite his injuries, Rudy took to his new home immediately—making sweet and sometimes piercingly loud rooster noises, nesting, protecting his flock, and charming anyone, human or not, who crossed his path. Me included.
When I think of the pain and terror that so many animals endure—animals just as vibrant and alive as Rudy—it can feel debilitating, as it had for me when I first learned what goes on for animals behind closed and bolted doors. Visiting Coming Home Sanctuary was a much-needed jolt of reality and inspiration. If sweet, chivalrous Rudy could rise above the system that almost destroyed him, anyone could.
—
I wanted to go vegan—there was really no other option for me, now that I knew what went on with dairy and eggs. You would think, given my lifelong addiction to cheese, that that would have felt like the stumbling block. But no, I was ready to let it all go—the cheese omelets, the Cheez-Its, even the cheese pizza. Surprisingly, it was my emotional attachment to my Smoochies that caused me to become momentarily paralyzed by my own indecision. It wasn’t even so much the actual frozen yogurt product that I so enjoyed; it was the promise of consuming something that was purported to be so low in calories, while also tasting like such a decadent treat. I had come to rely on Smoochies for entire meals (now there’s a well-balanced diet . . .), and it scared me to think about giving up that sense of security.
A few days after the screening, Marisa invited me to perform with her sketch comedy troupe. At the first rehearsal, knowing the emotional agony I was in about what I had been eating, she logically assumed I was going to do something about it and introduced me to her friends as a “new vegan,” which stopped me dead in my tracks. For several years, I had been used to saying, “I’m vegetarian, but not the mean kind.” And by “mean kind” (an interesting play on words, if you think about it), I clearly meant “not vegan,” or, “not the kind of person who will make you feel bad about your lunch simply by existing.” Was I becoming the mean kind after all? Now that Marisa had just thrown that label out there for all to see, what exactly did it mean about my life? Did being labeled a vegan mean that I had to grow out my armpit hair and wear patchouli? I was terrified at the permanence of it. I assumed that it was the kind of pedestal you fleetingly put yourself on, from which you would eventually fall. I was uninterested in failing at something so major, while everyone was watching, no less. Plus, what about my Smoochies?
(Speaking of Smoochies, there was a moment there at the beginning when I actually considered going vegan except for my Smoochies. And though that’s laughable to me now, I have to hand it to myself for not letting my obsession with this frozen treat leave the door open to all dairy and eggs, during those first few days when I considered veganism.)
But Marisa mentored me, and within days I realized that 99 percent of my trepidation was unfounded and veganism was a lot easier than I thought it would be. One key factor for me was that I was immediately thrust into a community of like-minded folks who also cared passionately about their veganism and their advocacy.
For the first time in my life—and this was Herculean—I started to see food as something that was about more than just me. As soon as I learned what was happening with farm
ed animals—this bloody truth that animal agriculture will stop at nothing to hide—eating was no longer about my caloric intake. It was, I realized, the most personal political issue, allowing me the ability to vote with my dollars and my fork, to choose to either support or shun an industry that was reliant on my ignorance and my willingness to go along with the status quo, even though that status quo was destroying the planet and billions of individual lives in the process. I felt so stupid for having been so blind.
I also started to see animal rights as rooted in ideas that I wanted to have as the basis of my life—I saw it as an issue of fundamental decency and mercy. I have never described myself as an “animal person” and—except for my fond memories of Rocky and my firm adoration for my incredible dog—I would still not describe myself that way. I respect and admire animals but I don’t have that thing that some people have that draws them to animals on an instant emotional level. My newfound veganism and animal rights activism was more about extending my bottom line of respect and dignity to the true underdogs: farmed animals. It wasn’t so much about wanting to hug a pig as it was about wanting that pig to live her life free of oppression, and free from the machine that dictated when and where and in how much utter misery she would eat, sleep, shit, and die. Food, I learned, was so much more than just my own private battleground where I played out my daily struggle between desire and guilt. The idea that food was about so much more than me permanently altered the way I thought about it.
Always Too Much and Never Enough Page 15