Houston, We Have a Transference Problem
Susie and Hazel snuggle
A farmer in Washington performed CPR on a crushed piglet, reviving her. Let me repeat, a man who profits off the slaughter of pigs gave mouth-to-snout to save a pig. The piglet’s mother died from an untreated, unknown illness as did all her siblings. Piglet will now grow up to be a pig and, get this, won’t be slaughtered.
I call this story optimistically frustrating.
Irksome for obvious reasons – hello, farmer-person, the piglet you saved is no different in her capacity to suffer, experience joy or make friends than any other pig on your farm, including the ones you send to slaughter.
Optimistic in that a farmer-person bonded with a sensitive, intelligent, preciously adorable piglet and didn’t immediately want to eat her.
There’s a transference problem lurking. We have a person who has no problem sending pigs to their deaths but will bend over backwards to save one from a premature death. Why can’t he transfer his feelings about this one piglet to all the other piglets whom he castrates without pain relief, separates from their mothers, and sends to slaughter?
It’s a real problem, this whole inability to transfer, to translate the specific to the general. I face it when running tours at the sanctuary. People love the animals they meet. I mean it when I say love. Most of these people aren’t vegan or vegetarian. They don’t mind getting down in the straw and rubbing the belly of a snoring pig. They have no qualms about scratching the large rump of a 2,200 lb steer. Feeding grapes to the chickens brings a smile to their faces. They coo to the potbellied pigs, awww over the rabbits, laugh at the goats, and try to find the skin underneath the wool of the sheep. In short, they relate to each and every individual animal at the sanctuary on an emotional level.
But, and this is important, I often have to translate for them. That is, I have to explain how Susie the pig is no different from Pig No. 1218 sitting in a gestation crate. I have to transfer their emotional bond from Howie the steer to the 60,000 steers sitting on a feedlot at Harris Ranch in Southern California. I have to force them to relate to the 9.3 billion chickens slaughtered in this country through their one experience with a few chickens at the sanctuary. Because they just don’t always get it. They don’t always make the leap of faith that the 10 billion animals languishing on farms in the United States are no different than the small number of ambassador animals on sanctuaries. And they do not always get that the most logical, rational course of action to help these animals is to not eat their flesh, drink their milk or eat their eggs.
I’m not saying everyone is like that. Some people get it right off the bat. I don’t have to nudge them in any particular direction, they just take the path of least resistance and come to the conclusion many of us have come to, that we don’t need to eat animals to survive.
So what holds others back? Is it cognitive dissonance? A disconnect? A coping mechanism?
Maybe it’s all those things and more. It’s culture and habit and normal, this exploiting of animals. Overcoming that is an incredible struggle. And we are challenged to help others transfer and translate and come to the conclusion that, hey, Hazel the pig is pretty freaking awesome, so why am I eating her brother?
Stephanie Ernst
Marji
Kelly G.
Deb
Mary Martin
I totally understand what you mean. I think it comes down to the fact that very few people remember/know that the pre-packaged plastic wrapped cut of meat is an animal–weird, especially for we vegans–but it is work to force yourself to look at meat as an animal with a face. We’re taught at an early age that farm animals are cute, cuddly happy things that gladly “give” their milk, eggs, and flesh to us to eat (and no mention of the byproducts like glycerin.)
Similarly, when you explain to some omni that “no thanks, I don’t want to eat dead flesh,” often they pull back, appalled that you would call it by what it actually is. Grrrrrrrr…
When I see whole dead bodies of animals, I often inadvertently say “Ew.” Most of the time someone asks me why, and I say “Because it’s a corpse.” More often than not, people argue. It amazes me. They realize that they’re eating a dead animal, but they don’t really connect that they’re eating a dead body, and that difference in language makes all the difference in how people see the food on their plate.
He should at first never to kill an animal. I was so moved by the tittle, but turns out he must cared about the money he was loosing, by loosing one pig.
Hate people who kill animals, they should die too.
That’s just ridiculous, May. If anything, people who kill animals are less morally culpable than those who eat animals. There is absolutely no reason to eat animals. At least the person killing animals has the reason of earning a living (I know a guy who was born into a family of ranchers and became a rancher as an adult … you’re telling me he should die because of the family he was born into?).
I don’t defend either the killing of eating of animals or animal products, of course. I’m an abolitionist vegan and want to see all animal use end as soon as possible. I just wanted to point out that your comment is hostile, a little scary and morally confused.
Well written, now if we could get those who need to read this on board….well, wouldn’t that be amazing.
It’s very frustrating indeed, Marji. And then the next frustrating moment is when they finally get it, but don’t change anything about their behavior.
On one level, I’ve really no idea what could be going on in farmer dude’s brain. One of the reasons I went vegetarian initially is because I transferred all those loving and compassionate feelings I had towards the “pet” animals in my life – dogs, cats, rabbits, birds – onto “food” animals. That metaphorical light bulb sudden flicked on in my head and I my a-ha! moment: this “pork” could be Bucky or Cap or Shannon or Shana. In fact, this pig was someone’s sister, daughter, mother. “Meat” consumption was no longer an option.
Then again, it took me 18 years to get there. Why did it take me so long?!
Bah. “I had my a-ha! moment.”
@bespectacled & Billie: Rarely can I be honest with, say, visitors about what exactly it is people eat – carcass, corpse, dead flesh. Because, as you pointed out, people are incredibly defensive about the inculturated belief that eating meat is absolutely normal and acceptable.
@hyena howl: That would be nice!
@Mary: That is indeed frustrating. But I think the seed has been planted. Sometimes the knowledge is too overwhelming, too much for immediate behavior change to occur. And sometimes it’s not. I love it when people email me after tours and say, hey, meeting Sadie changed my life and now I’m vegan. Makes it all worth it.
@Kelly: I hear you! I gave up meat when I was 13, but it wasn’t until an incredibly provocative, painful separation of cow and calf that I finally had my big a-ha moment and became vegan. I was 22 and I still regret I didn’t make that connection sooner. But hey, we did it, right? It doesn’t matter much when to the animals…I mean, the sooner, the better.
it’s easier for y’all vegans to convince folks that eating meat means eating somebody’s dead body, than it is for us paleos to convince folks (including vegans) that gluten-bearing grains for are a slow-acting poison for all mammals. They tell us that eating grains is “normal”.
And of course, it _is_ normal. Which doesn’t make it less poisonous.
Then there’s those vegans who want to deny the fact; because of their religious belief that non-nonhuman suffering is less important than nonhuman suffering.