I am writing in response to Nicholas Day’s article in last week’s Chicago Reader about farmer Stan Schutte’s quest to build his own “organic slaughterhouse” [June 29]. I was completely appalled to see the pictures of beautiful farm animals under the article’s headline, “Please Kill Me.” The suggestion that any healthy animal would want to die is completely ignorant, and if that title was meant to be witty, it is appallingly callous. These animals face frightening and painful deaths, whether or not the slaughterhouse that kills them is “organic.”
The article paints this bucolic picture of a kindly and enterprising farmer on his organic farm, and doesn’t even touch on the fact that these lovingly raised creatures will be killed, dismembered, and sold by the pieces. I am afraid this is the kind of article that makes it seem OK for people to buy organic or “humane” meat. It completely skips the part in the cows’ lives about betrayal, terror, pain, and death, and goes straight from happy pasture to selling meat at farmers’ markets and natural grocery stores. I guess the problem really is that it skips the part about the cows’ lives period. They seem to be irrelevant to the story.
Leslie Patterson
Lincoln Park