Holy Cow

9 THE BOX GOD

This is what I remember the Box God said. It’s not perfect, ’cause right after, the world went spinny and warped, and I fainted, but this is what I remember it saying:

“The small farm is dead, replaced by huge industrial meat farms the size of a small town. Here, at this plant…”

And this is where I stopped hearing, ’cause what I was seeing was so shocking it rocked my world off its axis.

First, I saw chickens in cages, row upon row upon row of cages. The chickens were piled up on one another with barely room to breathe. I’m not a huge fan of chickens, but this was no way to be living. The chickens were hardly able to move, so their talons actually grew around the wire of the cages and the humans sometimes had to cut their feet off to remove them. I started to cry big wet tears, which made what I was looking at blurry and kaleidoscopic, even more surreal. Then they showed pigs, hundreds upon hundreds of them all penned in together too. That didn’t seem too bad, pigs like to hang with their own, but still, it was way crowded and filthy and sad.

“And then they showed the cows.”

And then they showed the cows.

The cows were being kept in this huge building, separated from one another by these tight metal chutes. But that’s not what was bad. Because the merciless Box God showed what happened to the cows next: a man held a metal rod up to the cow’s head, and the cow’s legs just gave way like that, and she collapsed, dead. Murdered. One after another, snuffing out life as if it were just flipping a light switch from on to off.

And then the Box God showed the lifeless carcasses of cows being hung up on big metal hooks and cut up, stripped of skin and dismembered like in a horror movie, blood everywhere, all I remember is blood. A faceless man with a hose rinsing a room of blood. And then some discussion of veal that I cannot to this day think about without throwing up and changing the subject, and I can only refer to as the “V.” Or the “V word.” And the blood. Rivers of blood. Oceans of blood. A world of blood. The blood of my kind. I emptied the contents of all four of my stomachs. And then I passed out.