Lambs to the slaughter

Today is Australia Day or Invasion Day, call it what you will. It’s a day where celebrations often take the form of roasting meat over flames in the tradition of the Great Ozzie BBQ. A popular victim of these celebrations is sheep meat (well, in fact a lamb that has been executed at a very young age because it’s flesh is tender when cooked) and humans like the taste of cooked young flesh. This very salivating thought makes Australia Day a day to-be-looked-forward-to.

Australia Day is celebrated by a back-to-nature fire ritual, roasting lambs over open flames. It’s a disgusting habit but ‘everybody does it’. ‘Nobody’ has to think about it, since they’ve always done it – eaten lambs and other baby animals – and they like doing it, and have done it so often they can’t stop. They’re addicted to the taste and excited by the smell of it cooking.

And this is just one of the many ugly habits that have become part of our life, which now we can’t contemplate giving up.

What troubles some of us is our own lack of self-discipline. We can’t give up smoking, can’t kick the bottle, can’t stop eating those cutlets, and if we meet people who’ve kicked their addictions it makes us feel twice as bad. We might call them ‘the self-improved’, and when ‘they’ don’t seem likeable as people, we dislike them and it’s likely we’ll come to dislike the whole idea of ‘self improvement’.

But that’s not to say we don’t want any sort of self-improvement - improving our circumstances brings certain advantages. We’d all become self-improved if it meant becoming famous, rich or well thought of. But why waste time on being disciplined about not eating animals, especially if it only means saving lambs from being executed!