Friendly farms

1721: 

My next door neighbours had just come back from holiday. I knocked on their door to give them their mail. Their little daughter was four years old and she couldn’t stop telling me about the piglets she saw. Their holiday was in the country, and when they visited one of those ‘family-friendly farms’, she’d be allowed to play with them, in the straw.

“They weren’t very little” she said, “Guess how big they were”.

 “The size of a small dog”, I said, and she simultaneously stretched her hands out wide. “Just like Sammy” she said. “And they snuggled up to me, and grunted and pushed their noses under my arm”. Animals. She was over the moon.

         

She went on like this for some time, but while I was listening to her stories I could smell bacon and eggs frying for their breakfast. I doubt if her mum and dad will draw her attention to the link between pigs and bacon. They wouldn’t like to spoil her memory (or damage her innocence). They’d have been nervous about what I might say in the circumstances. As if I would over step the mark.

I’m not a parent. I know nothing about the dynamics of living with young people. But I do realise why the truth about animals may not be made clear to youngsters, and that parents always decide that their kids must be kept in the dark, to prevent them making too many inconvenient connections. “Yes dear, they go off to market”, much the same, no doubt, as when we go to the market on Saturday morning to buy food. Their ‘going to market’ is of course not quite the same thing, as they end up becoming food.

         

“When they’re older they’ll understand”, but understand what? Perhaps the kids will understand that a loving parent can be ultimately duplicitous, and not on a small scale like of telling fibs about Santa Claus, but on a grand scale – they never tell children the truth about Execution Day. The parent reckons that if a young child’s curiosity about animals and meat and farms and killing can be sidestepped, it’s likely the whole thing will blow over soon enough. On some level, as a child grows older, they’ll stop worrying about the animals and start salivating over how delicious crispy bacon tastes, and how tasty their breakfast googy-eggs are!