Lambs to the slaughter

Here in Australia we’re coming up to summer. The male of the species take this season very seriously. Throughout the summer months males practise their culinary skills with Sunday BBQ in the Park, or wherever. During the cremations otherwise nice picnic spots are made uninhabitable for non-meat eaters. The smell!! Surrounded by trees and birds and all nice things the Male practises for “D” Day on January 26th (a national-pride day, when everyone gets pissed and eats lamb chops). It’s called ‘Australia Day’, or by some of us ‘Invasion Day’. It’s a day where celebrations takes the form of roasting meat over flames. This is The Great Ozzie BBQ.
A popular victim of these celebrations is the sheep. Humans’ taste for cooked young flesh means they eat the lambs of sheep. (They’re executed very young – for tender purposes!). Salivatingly, Australia Day is a day to-be-looked-forward-to. It’s celebrated by a back-to-nature fire ritual, roasting lambs over open flames. Disgusting as it may sound it’s a habit. Nobody has to think about it since it’s just the way things are done. “We’ve always done it – eaten lambs – and we like doing it and have done it so often we don’t notice what it is. And what’s more we can’t stop – we’re addicted to the taste and excited by the smell of it being cooked”.
And this is just one of the many ugly habits we have. Especially when it comes to ‘animal’ we can’t contemplate giving it 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 like us we dislike them and it’s likely we’ll come to dislike their ideas and in the end dislike the whole idea of ‘self improvement’.

But that’s not to say we don’t want any sort of self-improvement. We’d all become self-improved if it meant being rich and famous. Why waste time on being disciplined about not eating animals. Why bother, especially if it only means saving a few lambs from being executed?