Crosspost of a blog here.
1
She remembered the day he was born.
He was born, like all children are—wriggling and kicking and screaming. From the first time she set eyes on him, she knew she had birthed an angel. She marveled at how this creature—this small, delightful, adorable bundle of goodness and happiness, with his gurgles, his cries, and his laughs—had come out of her. If there are miracles, surely that is one.
She remembered the day he began to crawl. Oh how proud he was of the crawling. He’d bop around, always wanting to be wherever the action was. Propelled by his little limbs, nothing seemed to give him more joy than crawling. She often marveled at how rapidly those tiny little limbs were able to propel him.
She remembered the day he spoke his first words. His small, uncertain, little voice, uttering the word for mother. She had been happy on that day. This child, this little one of incalculable value, was beginning to grow, was converting all that food he was eating into longer limbs and greater plumpness. He was becoming like a little person—little man, she would call him, which was funny both in what was true about it and what wasn’t.
And she remembered, of course, the day he learned to walk. He’d hobble around on his little legs, barely upright, propelled, it seemed, firstly by sheer determination and secondly by his legs. Yet that day, despite its start, was not a happy day, because that was the day he got sick, the day he began coughing and spluttering and choking and howling until late into the night. He died of malaria, later that week, in her arms.
2
The first thing he noticed was that at night, he couldn’t see.
Of course, no one sees as well at night. It’s dark, after all. But it was unusual for him to be rendered completely blind in the dark. Even in conditions of mild darkness, it was as if the entire world was enveloped in a sheet of pure black.
The next thing he noticed was what was happening to his skin. It became strange and hideous and scaly. It itched and hurt. It began to peel away like he was slowly turning into a reptile. And as the other children around him grew, he did not. He remained 4 feet and 2 inches throughout the entire period between when he was eight and when he was eleven.
He also began to notice that he was coughing and wheezing more. Sickness wasn’t uncommon where he was, but his affliction became nearly constant. Almost every week, it seemed, he had some new condition—some new disease that caused him to wheeze and cough and choke until the late hours in the night, those hideous coughs that would keep those around him awake and that made him feel as if his lungs would explode.
On one of the occasions his cough began unusually bad, then got worse, then got worse, until it was accompanied by a host of other symptoms—fever, chills, and nausea—from which he did not recover, and so he died at just 11 years of age. His parents ended up losing two of their four children, but to their dying days, they would always insist that they never forgot his face or the way that he laughed.
3
He was born, as they all were, in that dark and hideous barn.
His mother, chained up. She could not move or turn around. He saw the way she tried to escape from those desolate shackles, straining with all her might, to no avail. But she fed him and nursed him, at least for a few weeks, until he was loaded onto that overcrowded truck where he could neither move nor turn around, and he never saw her again.
Being separated from his mother was very distressing—even more distressing than when those hideous alien monsters kicked and punched him while shouting in some foreign tongue, as they tried to get him onto the truck. It was, however, probably less distressing than what they did to his tail. They got those shears to slice it off, but the shears were not sharp enough, so rather than a clean cut, they used the shears to rip it off, needing multiple attempts to complete the task. Oh how he howled when they did it.
After they unloaded him from the truck, they brought him to the location with all the others. It was too crowded to do much. Filth and feces piled up around him. He, like the others, was restless. Some were driven to violence by their restlessness—some attacked him, in one case quite savagely, biting that vulnerable little stump of a tail, as well as his ears and behind. Hideous blisters protruded from his skin, caused by the filth that piled up around him.
At some point, he began to have trouble breathing, though he wasn’t sure what caused it. Breathing in those acrid fumes each day did not seem to be good for him. Then one day he was loaded onto a truck which was even more crowded than before, where several of his bones broke under the weight of his squealing brethren, before being sent for days with no food or water to some distant location. They sent him into some nightmarish chamber, where gaseous fumes burned his eyes and ears and nose and throat, where he couldn’t breathe for many minutes, until eventually all went black, and that was the end of the pig.
4
It began in that strange room—with flickering lights like an odd admixture of Costco and a horror movie. Those strange giants held him in their hands and placed him on a conveyor belt. He never knew his mother.
The conveyor belt sent him to a truck where he and all the other chickens were sent to a faraway farm. Before he reached the farm, they cut off his beak, which was the most painful thing he ever experienced. It remained sore until the day he died.
On the farm, he was kept in a tiny cage with a few others. They each grew quickly, and because the cage was small and they were big, they couldn’t move or turn around. They spent all day growing fatter and fatter, inhaling the feces of those above them, coughing and wheezing beneath the cloud of filth. Most of their time they spent lying dormant. They couldn’t move and had no reason to, and as they grew larger and their bones grew weaker, moving became a thing of the past.
On one occasion he broke his bones trying to move around to get more space to sleep. Sleeping was never a very successful endeavor beneath those strange lights, upon that metal flooring, where his obese body pressed with so much force into the metal that contained him, and where he had no room free from his cellmates. His bone mostly healed—it wasn’t as if he was very active—though it continued to hurt for quite a while, and was one of the many factors that contributed to his dormant lifestyle. One of his cellmates died after just over a week, and so he spent several weeks with a rotting corpse for a roommate.
Then, his life ended as it had begun—he was dragged on a truck to a distant and faraway place. This time, when he was loaded onto the truck, he could again barely move, and he broke the bone again that had been on the verge of healing. They brought him to a faraway place that smelled of blood and death and fear, and they hoisted him by his leg and shocked him into unconsciousness. That was his last experience on Earth, but in some sense he was lucky because one of the others they brought to that desolate place remained conscious through the stunning and missed the spinning blade, and was thus deposited, fully conscious, into the vat of boiling water. It took several minutes for his skin to fall off.
5
Please give to the charities preventing these dreadful things.
This reminds me of a post describing firsthand accounts of what starvation actually feels like, or the process of being swallowed whole that makes up a large portion of wild fish deaths. Such posts are horrific, but very important in understanding why we do what we do. They can be very motivating. Thank you for writing, I am a big fan of your work in general.
Thank you!