Dead kids, dead animals, and other such jollity
How to Spot a Psychopath
<p>Here's <a href="http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2013/05/12/on-human-freedom-and-education-and-boobies/">another</a> post that was about to be a comment on <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1ezro9/an_8yearold_died_from_head_injury_but_her_donated/">a Reddit thread</a> that no bugger'd read because the thread is five whole hours old.</p>
<p>The thread is about <a href="http://i.imgur.com/mGd0Aax.jpg">this picture</a> of some <a href="http://slide.news.sina.com.cn/c/slide_1_2841_32470.html/d/1">Chinese</a> <a href="http://www.itotii.com/1021.html">doctors</a> (disrespectfully translated versions <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fslide.news.sina.com.cn%2Fc%2Fslide_1_2841_32470.html%2Fd%2F1">here</a> and <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.itotii.com%2F1021.html">here</a>) bowing in respect to the body of a terribly young organ donor. She donated pretty much everything, and was only eight years old.</p>
<p>Needless to say, the Reddit conversation immediately wandered as far and fast from the topic as it could, thanks to someone noting the similarity between the doctors' respect for the dead girl and a hunter-gatherer's respect for the animal he's just managed to kill.</p>
<p>(Put like that, it sounds as if it's about half an inch away from turning into 4chan dead-baby jokes. The thread isn't actually like that. Well, no non-deleted comments with a score above minus 50 seem to be, anyway.)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1ezro9/an_8yearold_died_from_head_injury_but_her_donated/ca5i0v8">This comment in particular</a> pressed one of my personal Talk Buttons, so now that I've spent a couple of hundred words explaining the background, here's my Canned Rant on the subject of carnivores who never see an animal killed:</p>
<p>I don't think it's <b>bad</b> that people don't see where their meat comes from any more, but I think everybody who eats meat should at least visit an abattoir once. Not watch a documentary, <b>visit</b> one, so you get the full experience - sights, sounds and definitely smells. The smell of blood cooking on the steam pipes, the smell of various useful components of animals that people aren't going to eat, the smell of the hair being burned off the hog bellies by a guy with one of the safest, and least interesting, jobs in the whole awful place...</p>
<p>Talk about your "<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1ezro9/an_8yearold_died_from_head_injury_but_her_donated/ca5i0v8">life leaving the eyes</a>..."; how about seeing a pig screaming, thrashing around, managing to get its back feet off the hook and then flapping on the concrete floor, still fettered but no longer hung, as the blood <i>fountains</i> out of its throat and its dog-level brain may actually realise it's now every bit as fucked as it thought it was going to be if it got shoved up that ramp with all the rest...</p>
<p>(Sheep and cows don't seem to have any idea what's coming, thanks partly to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin">clever</a> feed-ramp design. Pigs figure that shit out, though, and do <b>NOT</b> want to go into the building. Perhaps that problem's been cracked now with even more animal-psychology; I saw all this, including the unexpected Porcine Murder Show, on a school trip more than 25 years ago.)</p>
<p>I still eat ham and bacon. But only occasionally.</p>
<p>(I also don't know whether it was normal, back then, for slaughterhouses here in Australia to hang up very-much-conscious pigs and cut their throats, without stunning them first. The usual reason for hanging and bleeding conscious animals is to comply with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashrut">kashrut</a> and/or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halal">halal</a> rules, but obviously there's no such thing as kosher pork, so that couldn't have been it. If an animal's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunning">stunned</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_bolt_pistol">brained</a> before being bled, then this sort of drama's only ever going to happen, with or without an audience of rather alarmed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ruse_Agricultural_High_School">Agricultural High School</a> kids, if the stunner-guy manages to miss.)</p>
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