You Wouldn’t Eat a Baby … Right?

This is a combination/slight reworking of two posts originally published at The Previous Blog in August and October 2009; republication was inspired by a remark from Herbivore‘s Josh Hooten: “People get freaked out and don’t eat veal because it’s a baby. But non-veal cows are killed at 14 to 16 months. That’s still a baby.” Yup.

We Eat Babies

First, a video from friend Glenn of Liberation BC, to which I’ll add just one clarification: The question that starts off the video is about “factory farmed” animals, but the answer covers all animal ag; it’s not as if only the large industrial operations kill animals who are still essentially babies, toddlers, and adolescents, and the smaller ones let them live out long, natural lives. That’s not how it works. The animals are killed at these young ages regardless of where they’re killed and by whom.

That “Hog” Over the Fire Is a Baby Piglet

And though pigs don’t come up in Glenn’s interview, pigs are still babes when we slit open their throats too–at several months old, they’re at the equivalent of the toddler stage of life (the calves killed by the dairy-veal industry are, it goes without saying, infants too). Many people assume, without ever really thinking about it, that the animals they’re eating were killed as adults. But just like most of our assumptions about nonhuman animals — from their capacities for thought and emotion and the bonds they build to how they live, suffer, and die on farms, in slaughterhouses, in labs, and elsewhere — this assumption too is wrong. As Glenn said, we eat babies.

But we don’t use language that reflects this. One example that always gets to me is the word “hog,” which most seem to associate with adult pigs. But whether a pig is defined as a “hog” has nothing to do with his or her age — it’s about weight. A pig becomes a hog in the industry as soon as he or she has been fattened up enough to be “slaughter/market weight.” The truth is that pigs are generally slaughtered when they are between just 4 and 9 months old. In other words, with respect to their natural life span, they’re toddlers.

And the animals whose bodies and faces people even see being cooked at pig/hog roasts? Pigs killed for those purposes are among the youngest. That “suckling” pig whose carcass a friend or neighbor was excited to buy and roast for his backyard barbecue this summer? Maybe 2 months old, maybe 6 weeks. An “older” roaster pig may be just 3-4 months old.

Baby pigs’ flesh — like human babies’ — is more “tender,” and it’s not cost-effective to let pigs grow to full-size and adulthood anyway (and this is true for all types of pig farming, not just “factory farming”), so we just kill and eat the babies and call them “pork,” “bacon,” and “ham.”

Entire species whose members are never allowed to live out an even halfway normal life span (unless they are among the rarest of the rare who are rescued and taken to sanctuary) — a whole industry and diet and world of menus based on killing babies: on turning mothers into baby-producing machines, ripping apart mothers and children, and killing babies. Time to make some changes, don’t you think?