The End

We have set ourselves above all. The animals with whom we came into being are now all underneath us. The one species that has no controls on it's own population has put itself to the task of controlling the numbers of every other species. (Of course, mistakes do occasionally occure, it's only human. And so we currently have to dispose of some twenty million dogs and cats in this country every year. At least they do not all go to waste. Some have a second glorious coming in the promisingly colorful pencils and gars that help make a woman look her best.) We prefer not to know what happens before and after, just that the surplus is gone, removed quietly in the night like our garbage, and disappeared, a verb used most aptly in the case of those enemies of a military regime who vanish suddently without being heard from again. It's usage here may offend, but really, what could be more appropriate when this human junta will brook no opposition, offer no recourse, to the finality of its condemnations?

Meanwhile, the memorials are eloquent in their way, if you know were to look: the cans of lubricant, the bottles of shampoo, the boxes of Jell-O and jars of pills all stand in their rows, ready to bear their testimony and to make the cupboards of our homes an appropriately poignant cemetery for these unknown millions dead.

We are happiest not knowing. Just don't tell me anything, please. It will ruin my day.

Like the website for the equine sancturary that warns visitors with weak stomachs to go no farther lest they see, by the way of some video footage, what really goes on in a horse slaughterhouse, there is a warning here. Do not proceed if you prefer not to know what happened to your reining horse after he progressed through three owners, finally to come up lame as the possession of someone who really needed to recoup some money if this was going to be it. Or what happened in September to the ponies adored all summer long by the girls at camp (Oh, my Smokey Boy...) or where the Amish's buggy horses find themselves when there is no more to be gotten out of them by those gentle, frugal people, or where all manner of damaged show horses, racehorses, backyard horses, wild horses, hack stable horses, urban carriage horses, Premarin horses, old horses, go when they go to their end.

We wouldn't eat our friends. The thought appalls us, discomforts us, disturbs us but we don't mind if others do, just as along as they stay on their foreign shores. Airplanes, right now, hold beneath the passengers feet the refrigerated remains of our most noble and exalted companion. Order your cocktail.

This is what the end looks like. Up to thirty-six hours in a trailer without food, water, or exercise. Confusion, untended injury, fear. Electric prods toward a trip through a chute from which escape is impossible but frequently tried. At some point, realization----uncanny, onlookers agree, how you know, absolutely, that they know. A bolt in the head. Maybe another, or two or three. A chain around a hind footlock, then up -------hanging by one leg, still alive technically, but soon bled to finality. The only way to became safe for the dinner plate.

"I have some serious concerns that some of the oldest herds with the real true ancestral blood have already been flushed down somebody's toilet in Europe. The colts often are not worth anything because they are so small. So they usually would just knock them in the head and throw them in the gut wagon. A mare might be just about due to foal and it didn't matter. A real difficult thing for me to talk about was the time I was in the building and I happened to look down because I heard a big ruckus in the chutes. There was this black wild stallion that they were trying to get up the chute. But he was real smart. He knew what was coming. And he reared. He turned around and tried to crawl over the top of the other horses to ge back down the cute. So they got all the crew out there. And they used electric prods on him to prod him up. They used ropes around his neck to jerk him up. And they did everthing they could. They finally got him into the chute where they could use a stun gun, which is just a bullet that goes straight down into the top of the head. And finally the guy on the kill floor came up, running upstairs, laughing. And he says, "you know that son of a bitch just didn't want to die." He said, "But we got him. He got loose on the kill floor after six shots and they had to take a rifle before they could finally kill him." And when he said that, it made me so sad to think that that kind of spirit is what we kill every day and we don't even think about it."

-Spoken by an anonymous "killer buyer" (slaughterhousebroker)

We decide who lives and who dies. The worthless die.