This Little Piggie Went to Market . . .

As I was driving my 13-year old son to his soccer game in Charlotte yesterday, we passed a truck filled with hogs. My boy examined the truck, looked at me, and said, “Mmmm, pork.” I then began to tell him where those pigs were headed, and more significantly, where they likely came from. I explained to him that the pigs led a life in which they didn’t run around, were confined to a 6 square foot space of concrete floor, where the pigs’ feces are pumped to huge lagoons, fouling the air for miles around. I told him that this process makes the pork that he eats reasonably affordable, but at the expense of any semblance of humane treatment. I thought that he needed to know these things. He didn’t really respond, but he gazed at me with a perplexed look, and then said, “That’s not right.”

I am a hypocrite. I don’t really want to know first-hand how bad our food-animals have it. I don’t need to see the stockyards where cattle are raised, the hog farms where thousands of pigs are cramped together, how female chickens are pumped with antibiotics and raised in one-third of the time they used to take to get to market-size. If I saw those things, I might stop eating the wondrous flesh these animals provide.