The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farmed Animals by Jenny Brown & Gretchen Primack

Author:Jenny Brown & Gretchen Primack [Brown, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101588888
Publisher: Avery
Published: 2012-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Several hours later as I was leaving, I walked back to one of the pens holding the Holstein babies. No one was around, so I put my hand out over the rail. Immediately, four calves were sucking on my fingers. I knelt down to look at them eye to eye and put my fingers through the chain-links to let them suckle. I dropped my head down to my chest and closed my eyes. I heard the auctioneer inside the ring rambling: “Umbabadbadadadabumbadatwotwentyfivetwo-twentyfivetwothirty”—I could hardly understand a word. I had heard auctioneers before at the state fair, and I pictured him sitting there, busting out of his shirt and suspenders with a giant belly and cowboy hat. That seemed to be the unofficial dress code. I decided to step in to the building to check out what was happening. My vision was spot on for the auctioneer. “Umbabadbadadada bum bada…eighteen-month-old Holstein heifers from Denton Farms…We’ll start the bid at…” Young female dairy cows who have not yet had a calf, “heifers” as they are called, were being moved into the auction ring one by one with an electric prod and being sold off to the highest bidder. They were terrified.

People looked on in the audience dispassionately while a few men jotted notes and raised their bidder numbers. Groups of kids sat together in the stands, licking ice cream cones (the irony) and goofing off. I stopped for a moment and thought about how science-fiction-like the whole scene was: a species (us) buying, selling, using, abusing, then killing frightened, innocent other species, viewing and treating them as commodities. This could be a horror film somewhere on another intellectually and spiritually evolved planet—especially since there is so much scientific evidence that we do not need animal products in our diets at all, and in fact it’s making us sick and destroying our planet. And all because we’re too selfish and brainwashed to realize that giving up meat and dairy is a small sacrifice. All because we insist it’s our God-given right. How did it come to be this way? Indifference was law here, “humanity” illegal.

Or maybe our culture is just too desensitized to violence in general. I’d spent years now coming to terms with how clueless I’d been during my McDonald’s days, when I’d been completely unable to make a connection between a living animal and chicken nuggets.

When I got back in the rental car that day, I drove slowly off the property, pulled the car over, and wept. And over the next several days, I drove 2,000 miles, heading from one auction to another, filming one disgusting, enraging, horrific scene after revolting, angering, dreadful scene. In the evenings, I’d wrangle a vegan meal in yet another dusty town, usually a bean burrito “sin queso, por favor” in a Mexican joint, and stumble back to my hotel room. There, I’d crack open a beer and get on the phone. I’d call Doug, Gene, my mother, my sister, and my closest friends to cry and rant.

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