Nicholas D. Kristof: Future generations may look back in astonishment at how we pamper our dogs yet brutalize farm animals.
Future generations may look back in astonishment at how we pamper our dogs yet brutalize farm animals.This is the story of a 9-year-old girl and the goat she loved. But it’s also the story of hard hearts and broken hearts, of county fairs and lost innocence. Finally, because of the political power of America’s agribusiness and meat industries, it is the story of a dead goat.
E. showed Cedar at the Shasta District Fair, but the fair required 4-H members to hand over meat animals at the end of the fair for slaughter. On the last evening of the fair, E. sat in the pen on the straw beside Cedar, sobbing, as she tried to say farewell. A video taken that evening shows the girl embracing Cedar, petting him and seeming to kiss his forehead, as he nuzzles her.
So the fair apparently brought in the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, which obligingly dispatched two deputies to make a 500-mile round-trip drive to seize Cedar. When E. learned that her pet had been taken and slaughtered, she ran to her bed, pulled the covers over her head and wept. It’s a story reminiscent of E.B. White’s classic “Charlotte’s Web,” although with a conclusion still more heartbreaking.
This story moved me because I had goats on our family farm when I was roughly E.’s age, and later I showed sheep in 4-H and FFA at county and state fairs in Oregon . Perhaps because we had a herd of sheep, I never grew attached to any one of them as a “pet,” but I certainly recognized their personalities and grew fond of some of them.
This is the truth that industrial agriculture tries to hide. We accept the slaughter of livestock and poultry, sometimes inflicting great cruelty, because the animals are an unfamiliar and undifferentiated mass, “beasts” raised in barns. That is the veil that E. pierced when she fell in love not with a cat, dog or guinea pig, but with Cedar.
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