We love our pets. We weep over roadkill. We pine for beached whales and wounded birds. But there’s something about an out of sight, out of mind animal whose meat we habitually eat and hides we wear that makes our consciences go as numb as a sesame seed bun.

Every year some 650 million cows, hogs, chickens and other  animals are slaughtered for food in Canada. Most have lived short, brutish lives in the industrialized production facilities formerly known as farms and died squalid, sometimes heartbreakingly brutal deaths (if exposés south of the border are any indication) on today’s fast and furiously dangerous killing floors. 

The American Dietetic Association and the Dietitians of Canada have declared that we do not need meat, fish, eggs, or dairy to live long healthy lives, if we plan our diets well. Certainly none of us needs nearly as much, or as inhumanely obtained, animal meat and produce as most Canadians still eat. Neither does the environment, nor even our rural communities where the ingress of industrialized farming destroys more air, land, water, and decent employment than it contributes.

It’s high time we woke up and smelled the humanitarian catastrophe that litters our countrysides and stains our killing floors. BSE or not, modern animal agriculture is dying of a wasting disease of the heart and soul, and we must heal it, beginning with what we ourselves eat.