[kampsun]

> Their farm is open for visitors and you can see pigs and chickens that actually look happy. The pigs even run over to you when they smell you and you can see their cute little tails wigglin'.

That reminded me of a childhood memory. We didn't have a farm, but we had few animals (sheeps, chickens, rabbits). One year my father decided to buy a piglet from a spring fair. Me and my brothers were thrilled, it was playfull and curious (not like sheep, who were rather booring), kinda like a dog. My father also really liked to take care of it. I remember that he even applied some soothing cream on it after a rather bad sunburn. But in the end it was still bought and raised for meat. My father had always been a guy that slaughtered animals for other people in the neighborhoud, pigs also. But this one really got under his skin. He did still slaughter it, but sweared to never raise and kill a pig himself. It reportedly was kinda like killing a puppy.

[steve_adams_86]

Yes, my family raised pigs and it became unbearable. They were smarter than any dog I had met at the time. They were kind and curious animals. They loved to play and had favourite foods.

After a few years we had a bad slaughter day in which one pig survived a bullet to the head and started making some of the most horrifying movements and screams I’ve ever heard.

We were all aware that we’d killed a sentient creature that we cared for. Not much unlike killing our dogs. We talked about it several times over days and weeks, here and there over months, then not much from then on. We never got pigs again.

Somehow it took me another 15 years to stop eating animals. It blows my mind that I was able to keep it up after that day – it was so gory and brutal, and simultaneously entirely unnecessary. We ate those pigs because we liked it, not because we needed it.