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Savage Garden
(Published in the Sun Journal May 24, 2006)
I
was standing in the deli section at Shaw's, staring dumbly at a display case
behind the counter. There, whirling almost gracefully upon roaster spits,
the golden brown chicken bodies went up and down, up and down, like headless
riders on a strange Ferris wheel. It was a sight I'd seen dozens of times
before; hundreds, maybe. Only this day, daydreaming while others shopped for
cold cuts and cheese wheels, it occurred to me that we're a completely
barbaric society. We slaughter creatures that live among us, chop them up to
precise specifications, and then cook them in a display case for all to see.
The strangest thing about this practice is that it doesn't seem strange at
all.
Now don't get all huffy and try to beat sense into me with a drumstick because I'm not here to rustle up social awareness. I wasn't having an epiphany at Shaw's or any kind of spiritual awakening. When I am visited by thoughts such as these, it is almost always without any sort of political or moral basis. I did not feel disgust as I watched the dismembered chickens spitting grease against the glass as the flesh cooked. Not absolute disgust, anyway. I was merely provoked into strange thoughts by a very prosaic sight and I allowed that new perspective time to develop inside my cranium. The thought process went like this.
Oooooh, lookit them chickens. Damn,
those look good. Unless you're a chicken, of course. If you're a chicken,
they probably look like dead and mutilated kin. Which is kind of funny, when
you think about it, because that's what they are. We're all from same
primordial ooze, after all, and I guess that makes us cannibals when you get
right down to it. And lavish cannibals at that. I mean, not only did
somebody whack those birds on the head and then hack them into pieces, they
passed the carcasses along to somebody else who proceeded to publicly roast
them for the tantalization of the passerby. I wonder what an
extraterrestrial
visitor would make of this. They might radio back on the plasma phone and
report that butchery and public feasts of flesh are commonplace on this blue
rock close to the sun. And man, imagine if that extraterrestrial had landed
at the slaughterhouse instead of the slightly more civilized supermarket?
What would old ET have made of that? Furthermore, why the hell am I standing
here gawking at the display chickens when the game is starting and I haven't
even hit the beer cooler yet? Do they still sell Fig Newtons these days? I
haven't had a Fig Newton in decades.
And so I wandered off and held on to those freakish ideas for a while. We kill and devour just about everything on the planet. And the beasts that we hunt, in turn, hunt smaller prey. And so on, and so forth. It's one, big orgy flesh here on McEarth.
Not that I'm going vegan anytime soon. Shoot, no. Ninety five percent of that which I eat is something that had to be killed, torn apart and tossed on a skillet. Have you ever seen me go at the prime rib at Bugaboo Creek? Get too close and you could lose a finger. There IS precedence.
So,
I learned nothing from my strange fugue at the chicken counter, but I gained
a little insight. We live in a savage garden where living things tend to eat
each other with unfettered gluttony. You can boycott animal products and
condemn the cruelty of the slaughter, but the carnage will continue
unabated. Most of us wolf down cooked flesh in blissful denial. We know that
the thick steak was once a cow that was bashed in the skull with a
sledgehammer. We know that clubbing a cow is different from clubbing a baby
seal only in that you don't have to bend down as far. But we also know that
we need to feed and that eating slow-witted, tasty creatures is the way of
our species. I guess you learn to live with that or you hitch a ride with ET
as he flees, nauseated, back to his peaceful, leaf eating world.
Make mine rare and don't skimp on the au jus.
