Cows Are Not Corn. Stop Saying "Harvest."

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-04-16 14:44:00 UTC
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The word is kill.

We harvest wheat from fields. We harvest vegetables from the garden.

We kill animals, unnecessarily, in torturous ways, and usually when they're just adolescents. The killing of our fellow sentient animals for food, for sport, for the "protection" of livestock, and more--the actual act, as well as the (lack of) reasoning for it--has far more in common with the ways humans senselessly kill each other than it does with the way humans collect crops. Euphemisms used to distance ourselves from the killing do not change what it is.

Until someone can prove to me that a chicken has more in common with a stalk of wheat than with a child, that the bloody, violent killing of a struggling cow has more in common with the collection of corn than it does with one disturbed human slitting the throat of another and hanging her up to bleed--until someone can look into the face, into the soulful eyes, of a pig and explain how that pig has more in common with spinach than he does with me or the family dog--stop saying "harvest."

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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