And You Get A Carrot, And You Get A Carrot

Visitors to Chicago had plenty of options when it came to touring. One of the must-see sites was the Beef House.

Guides conducted tours through Armour's slaughterhouse and people found it fascinating.

Back then, everyone knew where the food on their table came from, and it wasn't packed into shrink-wrapped containers. They marveled at the efficiency of production, as hundred of head of cattle were processed into steaks and roasts.

Fast forward to modern day Chicago. The Union Stockyards are gone and most folks have little or no idea what butchering cattle involves.

God in Heaven! The horror! We must all become vegans. And Oprah Winfrey, who happens to be pushing Kathy Freston's how-to book, has put her staff on a week-long vegan diet.

You get a carrot and you get a carrot and you get a carrot!!!

For anyone with agrarian roots (or relatives who made a living in the meat industry when the Stockyards were churning out America's meat), you shake your head and wonder how we've stumbled into such a dense bubble of unreality.

The animals in Lisa Ling's video tour of a Colorado slaughterhouse are more humanely treated than any steer that trotted into Armour's Beef House. And these are animals we're talking about, not creatures capable of the complex emotions found in homo sapiens.

Animals eat other animals to survive. It's biology. Treating animals like they're Disney characters isn't biology, but a mindset that the rest of the meat-eating world, and those who hunt their food, find laughably pathetic.

If I was stranded on a desert island, I'd rather share the space with a hunter armed with a .410 than a vegan armed with sympathy for the poor little fishies and birdies.