Slaughterhouse Humanity

Olga Tokarczuk on animal liberation, collective crime, and guilt-free mass murder.

Today I want to do something a little different. I want to recite a passage from a book that deeply moved me. I’m not afraid of admitting to tears in my eyes. It’s only natural.

So, recently I read Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead (in the translation of Antonia Lloyd-Jones). It’s a captivating novel about an elderly woman who lives in a remote Polish village all by herself. This eccentric woman has some supposedly radical views, namely that animals are equal to us. That the surrounding life is just as important and valuable as any human that treads this earth.

Around the middle of the novel, the main character holds a captivating monologue (to inattentive listeners), which I now, without any further commentary, for you can come to your own conclusions, want to recount here:

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‘Just look at the way those pulpits work. It’s evil — you have to call it by its proper name: it’s cunning, treacherous, sophisticated evil — they build hay racks, scatter fresh apples and wheat to lure Animals there, and once the Creatures have become habituated, they shoot them in the head from their hiding place, from a pulpit.

I wish I knew animal script. Signs in which I could write warnings for them: ‘Don’t go over there’, ‘That food is lethal’, ‘Keep away from the pulpits, they won’t preach the gospel to you from there, they won’t promise you salvation after death, they won’t take pity on your poor souls, for they say you haven’t got souls. They don’t see their brethren in you, they won’t give you their blessing. The nastiest criminal has a soul, but not you, beautiful Deer, nor you, Boar, nor you, wild Goose, nor you, Pig, nor you, Dog.

Killing has become exempt from punishment. And as it goes unpunished, nobody notices it any more. And as nobody notices it, it doesn’t exist.

When you walk past a shop window where large red chunks of butchered bodies are hanging on display, do you stop to wonder what it really is? You never think twice about it, do you? Or when you order a kebab or a chop — what are you actually getting? There’s nothing shocking about it. Crime has come to be regarded as normal, everyday activity. Everyone commits it. That’s just how the world would look if concentration camps became the norm. Nobody would see anything wrong with them.

In fact, Man has great responsibility towards wild Animals — to help them live their lives, and it’s his duty towards domesticated Animals to return their love and affection, for they give us far more than they receive from us. And they need to be able to live their lives with dignity, to be able to settle their Accounts and register their semester in the karmic index — I was an Animal, I lived and I ate; I grazed in green pastures, I bore Young, I kept them warm with my body; I built nests, I performed my duty. When you kill them, and they die in Fear and Terror — like that Boar whose body lay before me yesterday, and is still lying there, defiled, muddied and smeared with blood, reduced to carrion — you doom them to hell, and the whole world changes into hell.

Can’t people see that? Are their minds incapable of reaching beyond petty, selfish pleasure?

People have a duty towards Animals to lead them — in successive lives — to Liberation. We’re all travelling in the same direction, from dependence to freedom, from ritual to free choice.

You’ll say it’s just one Boar. But what about the deluge of butchered meat that falls on our cities day by day like never-ending apocalyptic rain? This rain heralds slaughter, disease, collective madness, the obfuscation and contamination of the Mind. For no human heart is capable of bearing so much pain. The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter. The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others.

Do you hear me?

What sort of a world is this?

Someone’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth… Shoes, sofas, a shoulder bag made of someone’s belly, keeping warm with someone else’s fur, eating someone’s body, cutting it into bits and frying it in oil… Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening? This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience, without the slightest pause for thought, though plenty of thought is applied to ingenious philosophies and theologies.

What sort of world is this, where killing and pain are the norm?

What on earth is wrong with us?’

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What say you? Has this moved you? Has it changed your views?

Probably not, and I do not fault you. Each of us treads our own path in life, and must decide what is important. To me, the crime and animal mass murder we collectively commit on a daily basis will, one distant day, be viewed as the most abominable thing we have ever done — and there is a lot to choose from. In my opinion, if you want to do one good thing in your life, one small change that will actually make the world slightly better, then stop eating meat. I come from the most meat-centered culture on this planet (the Balkans), and I managed not to eat any meat for almost two years now. It’s not difficult, and you won’t miss anything. I promise.

Anyway, don’t forget to read Olga Tokarczuk’s book, it’s really good (she won the Nobel Prize in literature). And if you want to support my humble work, please become a paid subscriber here on Substack or over on Patreon. You’ll immediately get access to the full, vast archive of my writings. If monthly contributions are not your thing, you can also leave me a tip or some coffee money over on PayPal.

We’re all just trying to survive, after all. Have a fantastic day!