Last weekend, my dad and I saw The Men Who Stare at Goats because… well… God help me, but I love George Clooney in self-deprecating roles. Plus, the prospect of seeing Clooney tell Ewan McGregor that he used to be a Jedi warrior just tickled my geek too much to pass up. (The girl who sat next to me in the unexpectedly crowded theater evidently felt the same way; we snorted in unison and then snickered like junior high schoolers. Wherever you are, my geeky sister, it was a pleasure watching the movie in your vicinity.)
But as much as I enjoyed the movie (and I did), one particular scene has bugged me ever since. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the audience’s reaction to the scene is what’s bothering me. Or maybe it’s six of one and a half dozen of the other. Anyway, it was the goats.
I don’t mean the clip in the trailers in which Clooney’s “Jedi warrior” stops a goat’s heart with his mind, although I wasn’t too keen on that either (but the character’s long-lasting remorse over the incident went a long way to placate me). The scene that bothers me involves how the goats came to be on the Army base to begin with. McGregor’s voiceover informs us that the goats were brought to the “abandoned” Army hospital in order for medics to train on them. Each goat received a “bolt shot” to the leg, which a medic trainee then bandaged. The goats were chosen, we’re told, because it turns out that the trainees didn’t really have the stomachs to give puppies bolt shots to the leg. This revelation is accompanied by a shot of an adorable dachshund mix puppy licking the fingers of some jerk who’s about to essentially break its leg. Cue uproarious laughter and quite a few “awwws” from the audience.
But why? Why is it perfectly acceptable (to the audience, to the characters, to the writer, to the director) to deliberately inflict pain on a goat but not on a puppy? This speaks a lot less to the unlovable nature of goats than to the unloving nature of man. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that if the medic trainees had been tasked with giving human children bolt shots to the legs, any sick twist in the audience who found that laugh-out-loud hilarious would be considered to have some serious, serious problems. So what’s the difference? When it comes to pain, a child is a puppy is a goat. Our central nervous systems are similar enough that there’s no reasonable doubt that animals feel pain much as we do. Where then is the disconnect?
As Bob and Jenna Torres point out in their book Vegan Freak, nearly everyone agrees that if a man owned a dog and shocked it with an electric prod for his amusement, it would be a horrible thing. If he boiled the dog alive in order to more easily remove its hide, that would be even worse! Surely there would be a great uproar in the community! But this exact thing happens hundreds of thousands of times a day to pigs in slaughterhouses.
If we can agree that animals feel pain the way humans do (and the scientific community does agree on this), how can we justify treating a pig differently than a dog or a dog differently than a child? A child is a puppy is a piglet.
But maybe the disconnect isn’t as complete as we’d like to think. After all, numerous serial killers have been found to have tortured animals as children and teens, usually progressing through larger and larger animals and finally culminating in a human being. The correlation is so strong, in fact, that torturing animals is considered a major indicator of serious psychosis. What do they know that the rest of us don’t? That there’s no difference. Pulling the legs off a frog is skinning the neighbor’s cat is slitting a coed’s throat. Each one of these causes unimaginable pain to another breathing, living thing. (I’m not suggesting that every meat-eater is a serial killer, so please don’t be a jerk and post nasty comments to that effect. They’ll be summarily deleted.)
Why am I so sensitive, you ask? Wasn’t it just a stupid, throw-away moment in a movie? I didn’t start out this sensitive. This Thanksgiving marks the 10-year anniversary of my vegetarianism, a milestone of which I’m very proud. And while some people have been tremendously supportive of my decisions (shout-outs to Mom, Dad, Grandma E., my brothers, Shannon, and of course Chris), what I’ve learned in the past decade is that people love to poke you in your sore spots. I show up to gatherings with delicious homemade food to share so that they don’t have to worry about what to feed me, and they roll their eyes. My husband opts out of the dead animal as well, and they ask him why I don’t “let” him eat meat. And then while I’m eating, they discuss things like hunting, hitting deer with their cars, breaking their cat’s leg, dumping pets in the country when they’re tired of caring for them… I even worked with a guy who would intentionally station himself within earshot of my desk and then launch into intensely graphic explanations of how to slaughter hogs until I was so physically ill I had to walk away. I’d like to blame it on the disconnect. I’d like to believe that these people just don’t make the connection between “I don’t eat meat” and “I don’t want to talk about dead, mutilated animals, at the dinner table or anywhere else.” But I’ve made my feelings known, and nothing has changed, which leaves me with only one explanation: these people couldn’t possibly care less how I feel or what I think.
So what do I do with that?
I’m finished “grinning and bearing it” for the sake of keeping the peace. I may enjoy George Clooney’s self-deprecating characters, but I don’t want to emulate them. When someone spins a rip-roarin’ yarn detailing some poor animal being horribly maimed and/or killed and laughs until they have tears in their eyes and I say and do nothing, the message conveyed is that my opinion, which is rooted in fiercely held, passionate beliefs that I’ve spent enormous amounts of time hammering out, means nothing at all. My silence says that the ethical dilemma that I face every time I sit down to a meal, go to the grocery store, or buy a pair of shoes is worth less than keeping everyone else happy. My inaction says that the discomfort I suffer when someone blatantly disregards my beliefs is inconsequential compared to the discomfort I would cause others if I got up and walked out.
Well, I’m not that chick. I’m the chick who lives her beliefs every single day and expects you to respect them even if you don’t agree. Does that mean I’m going to storm out of the next movie depicting violence against animals and demand my money back? Probably not unless it’s particularly horrific, but it does mean I’m going to put up with a lot less in real life.
Photo by mattpotato at goteaminternet.com
