The 2084 Precept

by Anthony D. Thompson

  “Buffalo wings?”

  “That is what they are called. And a lot of these animals are killed to meet the requirements of human ‘eating competitions’. The ‘Buffalo Wing Eating Contest’ is one of many held annually in the U.S.A. Thousands of participants scoff as many wings as they can within a ten-minute time frame. The winner has usually managed around 1.3 kilograms and there are prizes from corporate sponsors. Truck tires for example.”

  “And you kill vast quantities of birds just for that?”

  “Well, for eating purposes in general, yes.”

  "And these birds are still alive while paralyzed?"

  "Oh, very much so. They are paralyzed, but they are fully conscious as they are moved onto the next step in the process. This next step is a rotating machine blade which cuts both carotid arteries. It is important to keep the birds alive during the slaughtering process so that their hearts will continue to work to pump out the blood. And the next stage is the so-called bleed-out tunnel—they are still hanging upside down—where they are supposed to die from blood loss after approximately 90 seconds. Unfortunately, millions of birds do not comply with this timeframe, particularly those with one or two arteries missed by the cutting machine. But dead or alive, the birds are then swept into tanks of scalding water and the live ones are scalded to death, thrashing and kicking and with their eyeballs bursting out of their heads."

  "And these birds are sentient throughout the whole process?" Jeremy asked.

  "Indeed they are," I replied. "They have a central nervous system and they have the same biological reactions as we do. They experience pain and they experience fear and they know what is happening to them. They try to get away from the killing machine, but they can't. And while they are bleeding, some of them even try to hide from you by sticking their head under the wing of the chicken next to them. But of course their muscles have been paralyzed and so that doesn't work properly. But their eyes still work. You can see their eyes. They are looking at you."

  "And there is no better way to do this?"

  "Not really, Jeremy. Death by gassing or decompression has been tried and may still be used here and there, for all I know. As for the older hens, the so-called 'spent' hens which slaughter factories don't want, they are more often than not simply buried alive in landfills. And of course, it's even easier with newborn male chicks. As I have mentioned, they don't produce eggs, and so most of them are just thrown into a shredding machine straight from the shell after birth. It's just like shredding paper in an office. Alternatively, they are simply thrown back onto the pile of discarded eggshells from which they have just emerged and disposed of with the rest of the trash. But to be fair, Germany and one or two other countries are researching methods to identify and kill the males before they are born. We can really be quite considerate when we want to be, you see."

  Jeremy did not appear to be affected one way or the other by any of this. "I see," he said. "You appear to have it all pretty well organized. Quite efficient. Mass slaughter experts. Perhaps we could move on, Peter?"

  "Certainly, Jeremy. Each year we also kill about 2.5 billion ducks, 1.5 billion pigs—we allow pigs a life of about 6 months, not too bad—1 billion rabbits, 800 million turkeys, 600 million geese, 600 million sheep, 400 million goats, 350 million cows and their children, 80 million rodents, 80 million birds, 20 million dogs, 9 million horses and donkeys, 5 million cats, and so on. Every year. In fact there is nothing we don't kill on this planet, Jeremy. We kill every living species. It is just the way we are. Every single thing that moves. We do it either on a vast scale or on a limited scale, it depends on the species. And, because there are so many of us now, we no longer have enough animals for our purposes and so we need to 'create' more, or breed more as we prefer to say, it sounds nicer. We have animal 'farms' as we call them and, for marine life, we have 'fish farms'. Actually, we have a much nicer word to describe the latter. The word is ‘Aquaculture’ and, as the U.N. ministry responsible for this activity proudly states, this now accounts for close to 50% of our total worldwide fish and seafood stocks."

  "Created in order to be killed," said Jeremy.

  "Yes. And we also love killing just as a form of entertainment, to the extent that we have created sports whose sole purpose is to allow humans to enjoy the act of slaughtering and butchering animals to death, either as killers or as spectators. Firstly, there is the 'normal' hunting sport, usually lots of males wandering around the countryside or forests looking for something to kill because it makes them feel good, allows them to experience power, makes them into real machos. In most parts of the planet, we have what we call 'hunting seasons' That sounds better than 'killing seasons'. A lot of excuses are invented to pretend that the killing is necessary for 'animal nuisance control' or 'environmental protection purposes', most of which is a load of crap, if you will pardon the expression Jeremy. The fact is that the 'killing seasons' do not exist in order to reduce the number of animals and birds. You could do that at any time. On the contrary, they exist to ensure that not too many are killed, or killed at the wrong time of the year, which would negatively affect their procreation rates. Which would mean there would not be enough of them around for us to enjoy killing the following year, or the years after that. Of course, some of the guys who enjoy performing the killing say that they don't. They say that they are forced to do it or that they are merely trying to help the human race. And it is not just the killers, oh no. The whole killing exercise is authorized by bunches of pin-striped birdbrains, sitting comfortably in their chairs in comfortable governmental offices, and who decide exactly what and how much killing should be permitted. All over the world. That is just the way it is, it's all more or less thoroughly organized. The animals don't have a chance, they don't have a say in the matter."

  "Interesting," said Jeremy. "Not very pleasant, but interesting from a psychological point of view."

  "Interesting indeed it is," I agreed. "We also have other sports involving animal deaths. We cage dogs, we starve them, and then we stage dog fights with them. To the death. You can place bets on the outcome. We do the same with cock fights and so on. We also have a sport called bull fighting which involves a bull fighting for its life—hopelessly and impossibly of course—against several human beings. Thousands of spectators watch these shows and therefore the show needs to be made to last for longer than a couple of minutes. We have invented a long, slow, agonizing death process which completely ignores the terrible suffering it causes the animal. We breed special bulls solely for this purpose. And we don't even make it a fair fight either, that would be too dangerous for the human beings. We can't have that, it would take the fun away. So before the bulls arrive at the arena, we shave their horns to reduce the risk of injury to their assassins. And once in the arena, the bulls are then tormented by humans on horses who drive spears into their necks in order to weaken the neck muscles, make their heads hang low and cause a loss of blood. We then goad them into chasing the bullfighter for as long as it takes to for them to exhaust themselves totally. The spectators love that. And finally the slaughterer kills them by driving a spear down through their hearts. Except that it doesn't always work. Last year, one of the bullfighters who had missed the heart stared down for a long while at his bull, which had sunk to its knees, blood pouring out of its ears, refusing to die just yet, and then proceeded in a rage to kick it and kick it. Which didn't work either. In the end, an assistant slaughterer had to jump into the ring and drive another spear into the animal. Which of course only wanted to die anyway, get away from the humans."

  I got up and fetched myself another bottle of water. Jeremy was looking at me in a thoughtful, perhaps disbelieving way.

  "But you kill a lot of the animals," he said, "in order to be able to eat them, isn't that so?"

  "Yes, Jeremy, that is so," I replied. “We even eat dogs. We even eat monkey brains…”

  “What?” he interrupted.

  “Live monkey brains too…in fact, a lot of live creatur
es are eaten all over Asia. We…”

  “WHAT?” he interrupted again. “DID YOU SAY LIVE MONKEY BRAINS?”

  “Mostly rhesus monkeys, Jeremy. In restaurants in China, the Philippines and so on. It’s a delicacy. They have special tables there with special fixtures to hold the horrified and screaming animals in place, allowing only their heads to poke up. The diners then watch while the kitchen chef opens up the head and they then eat the live animal’s brain.”

  “This is more than difficult to believe,” said Jeremy. “Are you sure you aren’t exaggerating, Peter?”

  “No, I am not exaggerating at all, Jeremy. You are paying me a lot of money and I am replying to your information requests with facts. Like many things nowadays, you can probably just google it. Or maybe there is even a YouTube video of one of these screaming animals being restrained at the restaurant table, opened up, and the live brains being scooped out of its skull. You can also probably watch us eating other live creatures. Have fun.”

  Jeremy was sitting there without moving. He was possibly sitting there thinking about the human species. And possibly about the fact that I am a member of that particular species. Who knows?

  But, true to form, he spoke quietly and politely. “I apologize, Peter. I didn’t mean it in that way.” There was a pause, quite a long one, and then he said “Please do continue.”

  “But we also kill them for a lot of other reasons as well," I said.

  "We do? Such as?"

  "Such as because we like their skins. Such as because we like their fur. Such as because we like to use them to test for possible deadly effects of new medications. Such as because we like to give them cancer and perform cancer tests. Such as because we like to test newly researched cosmetics. And the law requires that we test new household products. And so on. We have a lot of reasons, you name it. And we justify all of this by saying that God put the animals here for us to do what the hell we feel like with them. And so that is exactly what we do."

  What a depressing subject. Particularly if, like me, you are not convinced of the existence of a God. Or of any of our gods, take your pick.

  "Let me tell you about the baby seals, Jeremy," I continued. "Baby ones. We love to kill baby seals also. We do it year in, year out, non-stop. As usual, on the one hand you have the suit and tie brigade, the politicians, the birdbrains, who authorize it, flap, flap, and on the other hand you have the killers themselves who lovingly perform the job. The latter are not a problem to find, there are plenty of human killers available no matter where you go. They are not forced to do it, on the contrary they are very happy to do it, often just for the money. Now, these birdbrains authorize the slaughter of around a quarter of a million of these baby animals each and every year, on average. But birdbrains in general rarely know how to enforce any of the decisions they manage to take, it's too difficult for them to figure out, they have created too many holes and gaps and there is no exception to that maxim on this occasion either. The death ‘quotas’ are consequently exceeded by an average of 40% each year. The favored killing weapon is also authorized by the sit-on-your-pinstriped-ass brigade, to use another of my friend Steve's nomenclatures. This is called a hakapik, and it is a heavy wooden club with a hammer head and a curved metal hook on the end. This is the last thing the babies see, or feel, before being dispatched back into non-existence. Those that are lucky that is, investigations show that 42% of the babies are skinned alive and this is also condoned by the aforementioned brigade, whether willingly, because of incompetence, or simply due to inertia, I am not in a position to know. And of course, thanks to certain other activities of the human race, the poor seal mothers nowadays have difficulty in finding enough ice floes to give birth on in the first place. And the reward for those which achieve it is to witness the appearance of the human being and his clubs, and the subsequent slaughter of their babies."

  "Extraordinary," said Jeremy. "Your species is certainly an unusual one. Quite brutal. And it doesn't sound to me as if you yourself are much in favor of some of these activities. Terribly ruthless ones, I must say."

  "Jeremy, I am just stating facts, those few facts of which I am aware. Whether I consider the way we deal with animals to be a laugh, a great piece of fun, a necessity, or whether it disgusts me to the core, is unimportant. It is unimportant because I cannot change the human race. If the human race is a cruel race, and if it commits abominable crimes against the other defenseless cohabitants of its planet, I just accept that that is the way it is, that that is the way we are. I am neutral on the subject. I am just providing you with the facts, the ones I know, anyway."

  "But do you kill all of the other species or just selected ones?"

  "More or less all of them as far as I am aware. As I said before, if it moves, we kill it. Legally or illegally, it doesn't matter. There may be some exceptions but I can't think of any at the moment. We even kill species we don't know about yet."

  "Really? And how do you manage that may I ask?"

  "Marine fishing," I said. "We fish heavily using a method called bottom-trawling. This is done using a trawl, basically a heavy fishing net which is dragged along the ocean floor. It functions as a plough, stirring up the seabed itself and scaring the fish toward the mouth of the net. In fact, it is like fishing with a bulldozer. These nets catch or crush everything in their path, including exotic squid, sea spiders, crustaceans and many of the estimated two million marine species we have not yet discovered, or not yet catalogued."

  "And this is also an authorized activity?"

  "Yes, Jeremy, authorized by the same elected clowns—more of my friend's terminology—whom I mentioned before, and implemented by those for whom killing is a profession for which they get paid."

  "And nobody tries to stop it?" he asked.

  "Oh yes," I replied, "but unsuccessfully of course. Typical of the human race, always arguing with itself. There have been many proposals to the U.N. in recent years for a global ban on deep sea trawling but, you guessed it, they have all been blocked by those U.N. members who prefer to continue with the destruction."

  I stretched myself, drank some more water.

  "Anything that moves, Jeremy, anything that moves. Even the raccoons in Germany."

  "There are raccoons in Germany?"

  "There are indeed, thanks to us. Raccoons were imported into Europe in the middle of the 20th century so that we could breed them and then kill them for their fur. We created cleverly designed death factories for this purpose. Of course, some escaped, reproduced and became a nuisance. How dare they bother the human race like this? Who do they think they are? And so we do what we have always done with things which bother us, we kill them, 70,000 last year in Germany alone. Appropriately approved by the birdbrains, flap, flap, the killers appropriately paid, thank you very much, and everything quite as it should be.

  "Hmm. O.K. Fair enough. I think I can say that I've had my fill on what appears to be your species' congenital predilection for killing. But you also mentioned that you torture millions of animals as well. Now I find that equally as interesting. Why would you want to do something like that? Isn't killing them enough? What exactly is it that you do, and what for?"

  Boy, is this a heavy session. I am not exactly enjoying it to tell the truth. It is depressing. It is also really weird to be explaining to a deranged person what it is that actually occurs on his own planet. But in for a penny, in for a pound, as the geiatrics still say. I looked out of the window again. Hey, no rain! And sunshine! Intermittent, but it's certainly a bonus, sunshine always cheers me up, you too presumably.

  I took a deep breath, drank some more water, and got back to the job at hand.

  "This is an unpleasant meeting Jeremy, not your fault, the subject matter is not very gratifying, that is all. It is unpleasant because you have to understand to begin with that the human race is a harsh, merciless, unpitying race. To be able to properly understand our species' capability for unrelenting and endless cruelty, not only toward the other more
helpless inhabitants of our planet, but also—you better believe it—toward ourselves, you would literally need to be clinically insane."

  "Which you still think I am, Peter," interrupted Jeremy, a broad grin spread across his wide round face.

  What a blunder, stupid of me. But deranged or not, he is no fool, obviously not, he knows what I'm thinking.

  "Well, I wouldn't quite say that," I said, politeness to the fore, smiling back, keep this meeting on an even keel for goodness' sake, "otherwise you would be able to understand what I am about to explain, which I don't think you will." I got out of that one quite nicely, I think.

  "I'll start off the easy way," I continued, "with something that most of human beings do not in fact consider to be torture. Zoos."

  "Zoos?"

  "Yes. What happens is that we kidnap, capture is a more tender word, large numbers of land animals, birds and fish, we place them in cages or water containers, and we transport them away from their own natural habitats—the few remaining ones they have—to our own world; our own soulless concrete world, thousands of kilometers away from their homes, different temperatures, different smells, different everything, and we put them into prisons, often concrete ones, for the remainder of their natural lives. They lead a cold, artificial and lonely existence. There is nothing for them to do and there is nothing for them to eat except what we humans give them. And then they die. Actually, we also kill them. The slaughtering of—for example—healthy young imprisoned giraffes and the feeding of them to the equally imprisoned lions is a cost-effective nutrition method used by some zoos. The international press was recently heavily criticizing a zoo in Denmark for doing this."