I’ll always ruin dinner

There are dragonfly-like creatures printed on my old dress, and their butterfly cousins were carousing around my tummy like it was a pollinator meadow.

I still get nervous speaking in public, but I will never turn down the opportunity to advocate for veganism. Speaking up for animals is always right and, sometimes, it can get a little weird.

The air was too close to my face and my face too much on display as I took my seat with the other panelists at the front of the room. It was last month in a little art gallery, a collective in a small desert town, and the discussion was an extension of the community show called “Like A Dog: A Look at Selective Compassion.”

I know you’ve felt this, the sensation of “butterflies in your stomach.” I’m wondering about something else. Do you have visceral reactions when you see animals suffering because of humans?

I do. I really do.

Do you have visceral reactions when you see people suffering because of other people?

I do not.

And it’s not because I don’t care. Let’s try to get to the bottom of it.

The evening started like this: One of my fellow panelists is an advocate for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Early on, she described a specific motivation for her activism. A girl was raped at three months old.

WTF?

I couldn't comprehend an infant rape, had no neural connection. Bridging the synapse, I found horror, repulsion, disbelief, outrage and grief, but I felt none of it resounding in my own body, even though I cared. I cared a lot.

Then, about an hour into the program, an audience member described one summer she spent as a young woman harvesting five acres of carrots:

“About the second acre in, I was on my knees, moving fast, getting really good at it, and I started to hear this loud roar, and I couldn't understand what was occupying my head. What I realized was that it was the sound of roots ripping out of the ground. It kept getting louder and louder and louder. And I realized I was holding this carrot, and a second ago it was alive, and now it was dead … I was participating in killing something to eat.”

And unlike hearing about the atrocity committed on the infant – for which I had no physical reaction – I experienced the felt sense of a carrot being harvested, hands uprooting it from its source, ripping it up and through its death canal. My brain recalled a line from the most bizarre Tool song ever, something about the cries of the carrots!

It was close to my visceral response to the pain I see in photos of animal exploitation. There’s a taking over of my abdomen, a twisting and smashing. And a piercing, the wound deflating my heart, bleeding out.

Do I belong in the animal world rather than this one? I was considering this in earnest as pushback gathered in the room.

In the audience, a woman shared a story of her friend who was dying and apparently required the kind of iron that only animal bodies hold. The tone felt accusatory. Her sadness and loss landed like anger directed at me and my veganism.

I actually stood up. I felt compelled to say that the woman’s friend had been my friend, too. (I told you this is a small town.) That she had in fact fifteen years ago given me the very dress I was wearing, the one with the dragonflies.

Looking back, I am embarrassed. I think I was trying to save my place within the tribe of the room, to claim my belonging in spite of all my differing opinions. Luckily, resolve replaced my temporary desire for acceptance.

I choose to spend my not-infinite energy advocating for the rights of animals and not humans. Maybe because that one terror-filled eye pleading from the depths of the sweltering slaughterhouse transport truck represents crimes committed at least three times a day, by about 8.25 billion people. Maybe because the animal ag system is built on sadistic harm and perpetuated by lies.

Just what do you call a genocide you can indefinitely repeat by breeding?

Back in the gallery, the topic for the panel was “selective compassion.” I went in thinking that had something to do with choice. But what if it is the involuntary embodiment – the somatic empathy – that makes the selection for you? Animal suffering hurts my whole body. Does it hurt yours?

When the activist told us about the rape, the whole room had somewhere to put it. We could feel the emotions together, name them, hold them collectively. There's a whole social ritual for that: you condemn an injustice, and you grieve with the person telling you about it.

The social ritual concerning the animal suffering and exploitation of carnism, on the other hand, is simply eating dinner.

And I’ll always ruin dinner.

Note: If you're interested, you can see the dress and, more importantly, hear the full discussion here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vciBhTURaFo. I've also written about this panel before — the decision to say yes to it here: www.goveganwithme.com/i-said-no-to-the-panel-then-i-kicked-myself-in-the-ass — and a related thought experiment from the same show here: www.goveganwithme.com/two-envelopes-one-question.