Many years ago, when I lived in California, I often made the drive from San Francisco to the Central Valley over a route known as the Altamont Pass. There were sheep grazing on the hillsides in those days, and one spring day I was delighted to discover a host of tiny lambs among them. The lambs were the embodiment of happiness. They kicked and leapt playfully in the sun, and when they nursed from their mothers, their tufty little tails would wag in sheer pleasure. The sight made an otherwise tedious drive a joy, and I started looking forward to going over the pass to get a glimpse of the lambs.
Then one day, they were gone. I drove past the hills disappointed, missing my little friends. And then my disappointment turned to horror as I realized why they were gone. It was the week before Easter and Passover—holidays in which the bodies of lambs are traditionally eaten. The playful, tail-wagging creatures I had watched had no doubt been killed—probably in a way that was painful and frightening, by someone who hadn’t given a flicker of thought to the lives they were taking. The lambs little bodies had been cut up and sold to others, who would, without remorse, remark on the succulence of the meat.
It is strange how something you already know can become, in an instant, something you know in a different way. Of course, I realized that lambs are slaughtered and butchered for meat. I’d been told as a child that the food we called “lamb” came from the animal of the same name. I had eaten many lambs in my lifetime. But in that convenient way we humans have of blissfully blinding ourselves to anything guilt-inducing or horrifying, I had chosen not to think about it. And now, at once, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I couldn’t pretend that the lambs I’d seen playing on the hillside were mindless, emotionless objects. Anyone who has lived with a cat or a dog knows that animals are thinking, feeling individuals. I could not force myself to believe lambs did not experience pleasure in the warmth of the sun. That they didn’t feel safe lying next to their mothers. That they didn’t love their lives. In the past, I’d always thought of vegetarians as annoying, mawkish goofballs, but after that day, I never took a another bite of meat.
I knew when I began my writing pilgrimage last week that animals would be a large part of it. Not just the pretty cats and friendly dogs who share my home, but the cows and pigs, the toads and squirrels and, yes, even the flies and the rats, the most despised of the despised. How my commitment to nonhuman animals will play out in my pilgrimage is an open question. I’m still figuring out how to be an advocate for animals in this world, and I have a lot to learn. But the one thing I do know is that I will never go back to the way I was before that day on the Altamont Pass, when the lambs disappeared from the hillside.