On the Disappearing of Oxen Instead of Problems
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Pattrice Jones, VINE Sanctuary
November 2012

I’m supposed to be blogging for VINE Sanctuary right now. Instead I find myself sitting in seething stillness, wondering what to say. Lou is dead—disappeared in the middle of the night. A man who only days ago referred to Lou and Bill’s impending slaughter as “processing” now wants us to believe him when he says that Lou was euthanized and buried in an undisclosed location.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe Lou—who was seen walking easily in a pasture only hours before—really did suffer such a drastic deterioration due to a minor leg injury that a veterinarian decreed that treatment would be useless and life too painful to bear. Maybe this deterioration really did occur in the middle of the night, when an ox would usually be lying down asleep rather than up and evidencing deterioration of a leg injury. Maybe somebody just happened to be in the barn when that happened. Maybe that somebody called a vet and maybe that vet was willing to come out in the middle of the night rather than prescribing pain medication pending a morning examination. Maybe that vet really did both recommend and implement euthanasia for humane purposes and by humane methods. And maybe somebody with a backhoe came out in the middle of the night to dig a big enough grave for a 1,000lb ox in that undisclosed location.

All of that’s not beyond the realm of the imaginable, but it’s all very unlikely. Especially the backhoe.

Because here’s something I know: Digging graves for cows takes planning. At the sanctuary, we dig a few—just in case—before the ground freezes over in the winter. Even when the weather is mild, you have to call somebody to come with the backhoe to dig the grave. They usually don’t rush right over, and I have a hard time imagining somebody willing to do the deed in the dark, when it would be awfully hard not only to dig the hole but also to accurately lower the body into it.

This is all about bodies.

Here’s what I think: This killing was planned for the dead of night and had nothing to do with Lou’s condition.Here’s what I think: No veterinarian was involved.

Here’s what I think: Either the secret grave was dug in advance or he’s not in a grave but at a rendering plant.

Here’s what I think: They had to haul him alive—alone and possibly in pain—to the site of the grave, if indeed there is a grave.

And then they killed him how?

This is all about bodies.

Here’s what I know: While vets don’t usually come out in the middle of the night, that’s exactly when animals are trucked to slaughter.

It’s also when people tend to be disappeared. Authorities or death squads come in the middle of the night and nobody sees them again.

When governments disappear people, it’s usually with the wish that, in so doing, they can disappear dissent.

My guess is that the authorities at Green Mountain College hope to do something similar and more.

My guess is that the authorities at Green Mountain College want the controversy that has engulfed them to just go away and they think that making Lou just go away will make that happen.

But the controversy will not go away. Everybody knows, now, that Green Mountain College schools liberal arts students in a particularly callous variety of supposedly sustainable agriculture. Everybody knows, now, that Green Mountain College faculty are willing to disseminate the most ludicrous arguments in service of their simulation of sustainability. Everybody knows, now, that students and faculty at the extremely insular Green Mountain College—like the subjects in some 1970s social psychology experiment—are particularly susceptible to groupthink, conformity, and obedience to authority.

And everybody knows, now, that–all of those hamburgers?–they’re all Lou. Or Bill. They’re not just some body, they’re somebody.

Why were the authorities so reluctant to show mercy to Bill and Lou, insisting that they must be made into hamburger? Could it be that, then, they would have to ask themselves: Why show mercy only to them? Why not show mercy to all of the animals we subject to needless suffering so that we can enjoy the brief sensory pleasure of a particular flavor or texture?

If they think that, by disappearing Lou, they can disappear that question, they are even more mistaken than they were when making illogical arguments in favor of slaughter. The question will not go away. The ghost of Lou will make sure of that.

But since this really is all about bodies, we should be thinking about how to bring our own bodies more fully into struggles like this. We erred, maybe, in going along with the Green Mountain College tactic of distancing themselves from the deaths they perpetrate by means of endless rational argumentation. So much of this struggle was conducted online, in the most disembodied fashion imaginable and mostly in the realm of logic rather than emotion. What might we have done instead? That’s the question that won’t disappear for me.

Return to Animal Rights Articles