Connections: Of Mankind and Meat

Because I am a doubting Thomasina, I went to Google to check out a statement in Tony Prohaska’s “The White Fence,” a memoir that was the subject of last week’s “Connections.” Tony reported that Jackson Pollock had a pet crow. The Internet is wonderful; I not only found references to the crow but also saw images of it taken with the artist in 1947. It was named Caw Caw.

I once had a pet rooster. I’m not sure about the pecking order — ha! — in a lineup of crows and roosters, but my pet liked to do what Caw Caw did: sit on my shoulder and follow me around my grandparents’ farm.

We left the farm that summer to spend a month at a nearby farm that took in boarders. I was 11 or 12, and I cried when I wasn’t allowed to keep my rooster. He was put in a big open field with 50 or 100 other birds, and, though I went there every day, he never showed himself. I didn’t eat chicken for a long time.

I got to thinking about that rooster this week after reading a horrendous account in The New York Times of the disregard for the basic health of pigs, cows, and sheep (as well as cruel experimentation on them) by researchers and administrators at a United States Department of Agriculture center in Nebraska. If you haven’t read the story and both care about animals and eat meat, I recommend that you don’t.

I suppose that children who grow up on picture-book farms come to terms early with the fact that most of the animals they see every day are destined for the table. Wilbur the Pig is saved in “Charlotte’s Web,” but that’s just a nice story. A family I know who raised children here always kept a pig or two; the adults made up stories about where the chops for dinner had come from.

Laura Donnelly, The Star’s food and restaurant writer, devoted a column to the production of chickens about a year ago, and I’ve been careful about what poultry I buy ever since. I’m not sure I am disciplined enough to become a vegan or vegetarian, although I think those who don’t eat animals are admirable. I hope something will come of The Times’s exposé about the Department of Agriculture’s misbegotten effort to help the meat industry develop more and more tender meats at lower cost, and if a petition were available demanding that taxpayer dollars be taken away from the department, I would sign it.

The overriding issue, however, is the humanity, and inhumanity, of homo sapiens. Day after day we learn of brutality and killings in the name of God, that red, white, and blue Americans are fighting and killing in the name of democracy and have subjected suspects to tortures in the war against terror. What hope can there be for animals?