SF Gate: Barbecued Kitten Value Menu/Where unspeakable pet abuse meets the reconstituted liquid Chicken McNugget. Can you reconcile?

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(On the front page of SF Gate today)

 

Friday, July 19, 2002

 

Barbecued Kitten Value Menu/Where unspeakable pet abuse meets the

reconstituted liquid Chicken McNugget. Can you reconcile?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

 

 

Let's say I were to look out my window right this very moment and see a

very unpleasant and probably quite hideous personage kicking his

whimpering dog or smashing the head of her mewling kitten with a brick or

yanking the wings off a pretty chirping bird. Let's just say.

 

I would of course want what most anyone with any sense of heart or soul

or indignation would want at that moment: for the abusive slug-bait of a

person to be immediately gored by God's own rusty butter knife and then

strung up by their tonsils and made to listen to Celine Dion techno

remixes on infinite loop while slowly being eaten alive by rabid fire

ants. And then I'd want them tortured.

 

But let's say I look out that very same window and witness the neighbors

casually slicing the throat of a live chicken for dinner or maybe conking

out the family pig for bacon and chops. I would of course cringe and turn

away and contemplate the meanings of life and death and vegetarianism,

until the smell of the barbecue hit and I'd begin to wish they'd invite me

over for chicken kebabs and free-range porkchops and organic salad and

wine.

 

This is a moral problem. This is the odd dilemma, a strange conundrum

illumined by way of the handful of pained and pleading emails I invariably

receive whenever I run a particularly appalling pet-abuse story in my very

skewed Morning Fix newsletter.

 

Take Monday's heart-wrencher about the live kitten being barbecued for

fun by some knuckle-dragging troglodytes on the courtyard grill in some

podunk Missouri town, a good dozen bystanders standing by and grunting and

snickering and saying 'meow meow' as Charles C. Benoit, 24, of Liberty,

MO, pokes the charred animal with a stick and laughs.

 

Let the spitting hellfires of demonic pain and excruciating genital warts

rain down upon their pathetic souls for all eternity, absolutely. But

there's a snag.

 

It strikes me as incredibly odd and telling that, while a rabid level of

outrage at this event is understandable and right, the same type of

response is virtually nonexistent when it comes to other innocent animals.

 

When it comes to, say, equally faultless and often terribly cute little

fuzzy creatures tortured and abused and chemically injected and

slaughtered by the millions in massive reeking rural factories so bloody

and industrialized and stygian they only build them in horribly depressing

remote rural towns with names that sound like kidney polyps.

 

In a way, the kitten story points up just how bizarrely divorced we have

become from our food sources in this culture, and hence, unlike the

starved dogs or roasted kittens appearing like painful reminders in the

news, we have no true emotional connection to the animals that provide us

meat and cheese and protein-injected taco filling. It's simply a different

set of mental equations and justifications.

 

So when we hear of enormous stainless steel vats of pureed pulverized

reconstituted chemically blasted chicken organs molded into a billion

McNuggets, or of brutally factory-farmed poultry or hormone-injected

beef-fed beef, and then see that nice bag of frozen Foster Farms chicken

parts at Safeway, there is no connection. We feel nothing. It makes no

kitten-like impact. And it's by design.

 

We are purposefully kept far from the source. We are simply not allowed

to witness or care about -- much less partake in -- exactly what happens to

our heavily processed foods, the absolutely ghastly mechanized horrors of,

say, the average industrialized chicken farm, the slaughterhouse, the meat

packing plant.

 

Places where untold thousands of, say, cute fluffy chirping yellow

puffball baby chicks have their beaks sawed off and their feet chopped off

by machines every day, before being hurled like spinning dazed cotton

balls down a huge steel funnel into impossibly cramped pens where they are

injected and force-fed and speed-grown before being slaughtered en masse

six weeks later to become KFC Extra Krispy. Yum.

 

It is heartless mechanized abuse on a staggering scale. It is a million

barbecued kittens a year to feed our massive gluttonous craving for crispy

reconstituted McNuggets and genetically modified hamburger meat. Ask any

FDA meat inspector. Vegetarians, all.

 

The kitten response highlights just how detached we have become, and the

amazing dichotomy of our emotional connections; because if we knew,

firsthand, just what happens to our innocent gentle fluffy non-free-range

animals in those very farms, we'd never stand for it.

 

We would begin to care, to realize the casual mass-hypocrisy of our

cultural equivocations, maybe begin to respond with some bbq kitten-type

outrage. And the meat industry simply cannot stand for that.

 

Please pay no heed, they say, and enjoy your routinely tortured heavily

processed cancer-causing 15-percent-actual-meat product as you rage, rage

against the dying of the kitten. There there now. Isn't that tasty?

 

Thoughts for the author? Email him.

 

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday

on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never

does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly email

column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters/

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