Wave of Bliss

Author(s): N P Jain
Publisher: Jain Meditation International Centre

Page 30

AHIMSA
two babies, then four and one, whom I had left in Bangkok in order to take this trip. It was then that I thought, "If it were my own babies, would their suffering be anymore or less than that of the pigs?" I sat in that station and sobbed. That scene did something to me.
Today, the minds of many men are focused on how to streamline the process of turning animals into food with the same attitude as turning steel into cars. Efficiency. Profit motive. More and more. Faster and faster. Babies separated from their mothers, some even suffocated in bags (roosters, for example, deemed useless). This summer I witnessed a newborn calf crying tears and rolling its eyes restrained in a pen after having lost its mother to the dairy farmer after two days. I saw a movie called The Slaughterhouse Reform Bill in which the 'Kosher Kill' was exposed without commentary. Cows, calves, lambs were corrailed down a narrow corridor. One by one, they dropped through a trap door and were caught by a rope by one leg, after which they dangled next to one another fully conscious, in agony, until a man with a long knife came and slit their throats. The blood that gushed was in torrents. Everyone who watched that film in the room with me was crying out in anger, anguish, or uncontrollable tears. The last part of the film showed the 'humane' method where the animal is stunned first, with the blow of a sledge hammer, drops to the floor with others who are also in line, and where, unconscious though not yet dead, it faces the knife. The film ended on an absured note- 'If you were an animal, which method of slaughter would you prefer?'
That mentality which can kill thousands of non-human lives in a day, what is to prevent it from taking the next step, from killing thousands of human lives? If we can kill the most helpless, the most voiceless, the most
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