Voices
but, at the end, she will drop like
a stone. In the time it takes her to
flutter those pretty long lashes,
she will go from conscious to unconscious. And within seconds
of that, the life will rapidly drain
out of her after the slaughterman
deftly inserts a very sharp knife
into My Pretty Girl’s throat. With
the force of her still beating heart,
My Pretty Girl’s blood will gush
out of her neck and splash onto
the kill room floor.
The slaughterman will leave
My Pretty Girl’s body to dangle
for a while to ensure that all of
the blood has drained out. Then,
using that same sharp knife, the
slaughterman will methodically
take My Pretty Girl from a cute
woolly lamb to a familiar-looking
skinned carcass ready to be rolled
along the rails into the cooler
where she will hang for a week before being cut up by the butchers
in the cutting room, while other
lambs, or cows, or pigs, though
almost certainly none as cute, are
being killed on the kill floor.
One of the interesting things
about Foster Wallace’s article is
that it ends with the issue unresolved. Most of us who admit the
ethical quandary about eating the
meat of vital, gregarious, sentient
BOB
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