my gawd, the bbqed a kitten!! how horrid..well, lets go to KFC...

[Guest guest]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/07/19/notes07

 

1902.DTL

Barbecued Kitten Value Menu

Where unspeakable pet abuse meets the reconstituted liquid Chicken McNugget.

Can you reconcile?

 

<A HREF= " mmorford " >By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist</A>

Friday, July 19, 2002

 

 

 

L et'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 <A

HREF= " http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/archive/ " >Morning Fix

newsletter</A>. Take Monday's heart-wrencher about the <A

HREF= " http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2002/07/16/national152\

4EDT0743.DTL " >live kitten being

barbecued for fun</A> 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? <A HREF= " mmorford " >Email him</A>. 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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[Guest guest]

Fraggle

 

Thanks for that - it's a good article to print up and leave in the coffee room at work!

 

Jo

 

 

 

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