okieinexile
Well-Known Member
By Bobby Neal Winters
My friend Mike was driving Lloyd and me up to an "all you can eat" place a cold weekend a couple of weeks ago in his SUV when Lloyd requested Mike turn back so that we could get a closer look at something. Lloyd's sharp eye had caught sight of something in the back of a pickup truck in a sporting goods store parking lot.
"In the bed of that truck," he said. "In the bed of that red truck."
Mike pulled his vehicle up to the back of the truck as Lloyd had instructed, and we looked at the contents. It was such a strange sight that it took our brains a while to process it. They were dead. That was sure, but dead what? There were two of them, each covered with brown fur.
Mike, who was not in the best position to see but is never at a loss for words, was the first to speak. His tone was tentative, "Bears?"
They were big and furry enough to be brown bears, but they had snouts and tusks.
"Boars," came the answer. And it was true. Two huge wild boars lay before us, freshly dead with steam rising into the cold air from the hot blood of the wounds in their sides.
Our curiosity thus sated, we continued to the buffet, and I must say that the Sweet-and-Sour Pork with the red sauce never tasted better.
Seeing the dead wild boars reminded me of the days when hunting and killing was required to live. Most of us are separated from the things such as that make our way of life possible. If you eat a steak or a hamburger, then someone has had to raise a cow and kill it. Those of us who eat meat, like I do, live from the death of other animals. This should make us pause.
In doing some research the other day for a talk that I gave to a women's group at my church, I looked back at my favorite Bible story, that of Adam and Eve. There had been no death in the world until Adam and Eve sinned, and the first death was that of animals that were killed to cover their nakedness. From the Biblical point-of-view, we can't just say that God created animals for us to eat, because it was Man's sin that necessitated the first animal death.
There are religions that teach vegetarianism, and there are others that teach abstaining from meat on certain holy days. On the other hand, there are animal rights groups whose devotion to the cause borders on religious. Where PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, stands along this continuum, is not for me to say. However, I've been hearing things about PETA bubbling up from my native Oklahoma.
The first bubble came from my brother. He told me, "Those folks at PETA are trying to get them to change the name of Slaughterville."
For those of you who don't know, Slaughterville is a little town south of Norman, Oklahoma. In the course of the research I did for this story, I discovered it was named after Bill Slaughter, who was a prominent early day resident. This surprised me because everything we drove through it when I was growing up, Dad told about a horrible highway accident that had happened there, and I always thought that had something to do with the name.
The folks at PETA offered the good citizens of Slaughterville $20000 in veggie burgers for their school as an enticement to change the name to Veggieville. As near as I can understand the Okie mind, I suspect the folks in Slaughterville contemplated this offer seriously for 3.5 seconds before turning it down. That’s just as well. It could be that the school children in Slaughterville are more enlightened in their tastes that I was at that age, but it is likely that the veggie burgers would have wound up being used as Frisbees, and that is a lot of Frisbees.
This story has been widely reported, and widely ridiculed, perhaps deservedly. I know I've laughed a lot, and plan to laugh more.
However, maybe we should think. We live in a world where we don't raise our own food, weave our own cloth, make our own clothes, and where we are becoming increasingly separated from nature. Perhaps we should pause as we take our next bite of meat that something has had to die for us to enjoy it. Perhaps a little reverence is called for as we decide between the chicken and the pork at the buffet.
My friend Mike was driving Lloyd and me up to an "all you can eat" place a cold weekend a couple of weeks ago in his SUV when Lloyd requested Mike turn back so that we could get a closer look at something. Lloyd's sharp eye had caught sight of something in the back of a pickup truck in a sporting goods store parking lot.
"In the bed of that truck," he said. "In the bed of that red truck."
Mike pulled his vehicle up to the back of the truck as Lloyd had instructed, and we looked at the contents. It was such a strange sight that it took our brains a while to process it. They were dead. That was sure, but dead what? There were two of them, each covered with brown fur.
Mike, who was not in the best position to see but is never at a loss for words, was the first to speak. His tone was tentative, "Bears?"
They were big and furry enough to be brown bears, but they had snouts and tusks.
"Boars," came the answer. And it was true. Two huge wild boars lay before us, freshly dead with steam rising into the cold air from the hot blood of the wounds in their sides.
Our curiosity thus sated, we continued to the buffet, and I must say that the Sweet-and-Sour Pork with the red sauce never tasted better.
Seeing the dead wild boars reminded me of the days when hunting and killing was required to live. Most of us are separated from the things such as that make our way of life possible. If you eat a steak or a hamburger, then someone has had to raise a cow and kill it. Those of us who eat meat, like I do, live from the death of other animals. This should make us pause.
In doing some research the other day for a talk that I gave to a women's group at my church, I looked back at my favorite Bible story, that of Adam and Eve. There had been no death in the world until Adam and Eve sinned, and the first death was that of animals that were killed to cover their nakedness. From the Biblical point-of-view, we can't just say that God created animals for us to eat, because it was Man's sin that necessitated the first animal death.
There are religions that teach vegetarianism, and there are others that teach abstaining from meat on certain holy days. On the other hand, there are animal rights groups whose devotion to the cause borders on religious. Where PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, stands along this continuum, is not for me to say. However, I've been hearing things about PETA bubbling up from my native Oklahoma.
The first bubble came from my brother. He told me, "Those folks at PETA are trying to get them to change the name of Slaughterville."
For those of you who don't know, Slaughterville is a little town south of Norman, Oklahoma. In the course of the research I did for this story, I discovered it was named after Bill Slaughter, who was a prominent early day resident. This surprised me because everything we drove through it when I was growing up, Dad told about a horrible highway accident that had happened there, and I always thought that had something to do with the name.
The folks at PETA offered the good citizens of Slaughterville $20000 in veggie burgers for their school as an enticement to change the name to Veggieville. As near as I can understand the Okie mind, I suspect the folks in Slaughterville contemplated this offer seriously for 3.5 seconds before turning it down. That’s just as well. It could be that the school children in Slaughterville are more enlightened in their tastes that I was at that age, but it is likely that the veggie burgers would have wound up being used as Frisbees, and that is a lot of Frisbees.
This story has been widely reported, and widely ridiculed, perhaps deservedly. I know I've laughed a lot, and plan to laugh more.
However, maybe we should think. We live in a world where we don't raise our own food, weave our own cloth, make our own clothes, and where we are becoming increasingly separated from nature. Perhaps we should pause as we take our next bite of meat that something has had to die for us to enjoy it. Perhaps a little reverence is called for as we decide between the chicken and the pork at the buffet.
