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A Vegetarian and Two Slaughterhouses
Never in my life would I have expected to find myself at a slaughterhouse. But there I was, trying not to step in blood or count the number of hooved limbs I saw lying on the ground.
“I want to show you something in the back,” my friend told me. An ominous thing to say to someone standing in front of a slaughterhouse. John is a lamb rancher in Oregon, a man who’s done everything from cleaning the Golden Gate Bridge to now running a community development nonprofit in Kenya.
We were in Elburgon to tour a condemned slaughterhouse and the new facility our Rotary club would be funding.
I’d been a vegetarian since I was a tween, back when the word ‘tween’ didn’t exist yet and few knew what a vegetarian was exactly. I wasn’t sure I could handle what I knew I would see behind the proverbial woodshed. But I felt like I owed it to the animals since I had agreed to be a signatory on the grant that would finish the construction of the new abattoir — a bigger facility with electricity, drainage, and a wastewater system. And I was ready to dissociate from my deep feelings so I wouldn’t cry or faint and be a liability to the two nonprofits I was accompanying.
I took a deep breath and followed John behind the slaughterhouse, an open-air stone building with cement floors. Animal carcasses hung from meat hooks running down…
