AGN VEG GLOBAL: SENTIENT SACRED PIGS and VEGAN BACON

SENTIENT PIGS and VEGAN BACON

““The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where hogs are killed] for any period of time—that let’s [sic] you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around in the blood pit with you and think, ‘God, that really isn’t a bad looking animal.’ You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them. … I can’t care.”

~ Former slaughterhouse worker, “Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry”

“Domestic”pig

Archaeological evidence suggests that pigs were domesticated from wild boar as early as 13,000–12,700 BC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_pig

Below, the most conscious altering real experience of an ex pig farmer

“The pigs were glowing deep gold”: The amazing experience that ended my life as a pig farmer.

Off the beaten path the snow was deep, so I was looking down at my feet as I walked to keep from accidentally straying off the path into the knee-high snow. When I got to the edge of the pigs’ fence, I looked up at the pigs, and was swept up immediately into the experience.

The pigs and the space around them were glowing deep gold. Waves of what I perceived to be energy were emanating out from them in all directions. When the waves reached me, I was wiped clean as they flowed over me. The particulars of my life vanished instantly, followed immediately by my identity. I no longer had any sense of myself as an individual standing in a frozen field surrounded by 30 pigs. I found myself nowhere and everywhere. I felt what I can only call my “energy body” begin to stir. Then I felt — and even saw in the waves — my energy body, which I believed to be my very being, move away from me and merge with the energy bodies — the very being — of the pigs. I felt, saw and knew in that instant that the pigs and I — despite our radical difference, our complete alterity — were interconnected, so deeply interconnected that we were one continuous being. I felt a momentary, intense vibration as this all sunk in. And then, with much less fanfare than one might expect given the intensity of the experience, it simply ended, as if a light switch had been flipped. I found myself standing inside of the pigs’ paddock, surrounded by 30 pigs jostling around me, eager for their food, with those just underfoot biting at my boots. The pigs weren’t glowing. There were no waves of energy. I was I. And the pigs were the pigs.

And yet, while apparently nothing had changed, in fact, everything had. I could no longer feel it or see it, but I could remember what it looked like and how it had felt, and more important, I understood clearly “the message” as I have come to think of it.

Pigs, the things that I had been having more or less casually killed for nearly 10 years, were not things at all, they were beings, as richly and profoundly as I myself am a being. As beings, we were equals, more than equals. Their being and my being — all being — was continuous. My being did not end and the pigs’ being begin. My being was always already the pigs’ being and the pigs’ being mine.

The implications of the message drilled down easily to the deepest reaches of my understanding. I resolved on the spot, without a moment’s deliberation, to quit pig farming and stop eating meat of any kind (a year later I also gave up dairy and eggs, becoming a vegan).

I have always been an open-minded person, but only on the rarest of occasions have I ever been a spiritual one. I have never found questions of spiritual being terribly interesting. Today, however, that has all changed. Spiritual being is not anymore a question that might or might not be of intellectual interest or curiosity because it is no longer a question at all. I had, no matter how fleeting, a direct, lived experience of unmediated spiritual being, and the resonant power of that experience blew me wide open: In the merging of my energy body with the energy body of the pigs, I felt and saw the motive force of the universe in the radiant flash of a microsecond. I felt and saw unconditional love pulsing — waving — through an infinite complex of pathways interconnecting a universe of beings.

Until that experience I had been living quite contentedly in a world where small farmers like I raised happy pigs outside where they grazed and played on verdant fields. And, in that world, on every happy pig’s fateful day, they were killed expertly in a small-scale, slow-paced slaughterhouse where I think one can rightly believe that they had no experience of dying.

However, when I returned from that mystical experience I found myself face to face with an incredibly powerful idea that I could not rationalize away, that I could not scoot around with mental gymnastics as I had all of those previous crises of conscience, that I simply had to acquiesce to: Happy pigs are indeed real — there are many thousands, tens of thousands of them out there — but happy meat, the fundamental tenet of conscientious omnivorism, is a total myth.

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/28/the_pigs_and_the_space_around_them_were_glowing_deep_gold_the_mind_blowing_experience_that_ended_my_life_as_a_pig_farmer/