Free Pansy by Charles Hayes Page A

during the Middle Ages was so offensive, Randy couldn't bring himself to discuss it with anyone. It was heartening just to realize how far in some ways humans have advanced, and yet he didn't know a single soul on the planet who knew enough to appreciate this fact except, of course, Mandy.
    Lately it seemed he and Mandy could not have a conversation without her bringing up animal cruelty, although she seldom gave graphic details. There was one image Pinker wrote about, however, that he could not get out of his mind. At one period in fourteenth-century England, there existed a sport in which live house cats were nailed to a post and then participants, with their hands tied behind them and using only their heads, would proceed to pummel the animals to death while risking having their eyes scratched out. What kind of people could or would do such things, and what kind of people would want to watch them do it?
    Randy wondered if Mandy kept that image with her, too, but he would never bring it up. People needed to know about these abhorrent behaviors, but they didn't need to talk about them. Or did they? Were worse things going on today? Knowing as much as he had learned about human nature, he answered his own question saying, “Of course.”

Appetites
     
    Tonight seemed to warrant a celebration, but there was no real occasion to observe. It just seemed as though a special surf-and-turf dinner at the table together was appropriate. Nadia already seemed like a member of the family, and her presence was reason enough to celebrate. What was clear to everyone was that Randy was crazy about Nadia, the reverse appeared to be true as well. Ed thought Nadia was perfect for Randy and so did Mandy. All three liked to hear her broken English spoken in what seemed like a Russian melody.
    When the conversation lulled, Nadia said, “Mandy, you do not like the steak?”
    “Nadia, I’m a vegetarian,” Mandy said.
    “Oh, I forget.” Nadia looked a little uncomfortable and couldn’t think of anything to add.
    “Do you think living on a cattle ranch made you a vegetarian?” Randy asked.
    “It’s not something I decided on suddenly. I’ve been thinking about it and studying about it for a long time.”
    “Well, something must have started it,” said Ed.
    “Maybe, sort of.” Mandy got up from the table and returned with her laptop computer. “There’s a philosopher in Wasilla who writes a blog.” She began reading from the screen, “He says, ‘Imagine you are sitting on a hilltop overlooking a canyon below and that before you is a seemingly infinite stage as far as the eye can see. Upon this stage, facing you, is every animal whose flesh you have personally eaten. You have to work at this for a while to get your mind around it. All of these creatures could and did feel pain.’”
    Glancing around the table, Mandy could see she had everyone’s attention. “He says chances are, if you’re a senior citizen like he is, you can remember when livestock and farm animals had something of a life before they were slaughtered, but that was before industrial, assembly-line farming took over.” Then she read further, “‘Currently many creatures live in such tiny spaces that throughout the whole of their lives they don’t even have enough physical room to turn around. When we consider how many cattle might be represented in all of the hamburger we’ve consumed in the half-century or more that we’ve lived, you have to wonder if it’s even possible to position the stage in our thought experiment to include all of these animals without blotting out the earth and sky.’”
    She set the laptop aside and looked at Ed. “I just don’t want to say when I’m old that a view of all the animals I’ve eaten will blot out the earth. In a book called Eternal Treblinka, Charles Patterson says that assembly-line slaughterhouses for domestic animals were what created the psychological conditions that led to the Holocaust.”
    “But