Love Us, Not Eat Us!—All Lives Are Precious

By Patricia

She was almost the only vegetarian in the family that she was born into. That’s how she had been from as early on in her life as she could remember. It wasn’t that she was a vegetarian because someone had told her that it was a good thing, that one should love animals (rather than eat them) or that vegetarianism was a much healthier option than meat-eating. Her distaste for meat was, as far as she could tell, instinctive. It came straight from within her, without her conscious willing. The heart has its own reasons for some things.

But despite her innate revulsion for meat, there was intense pressure on her to bend to family dictates. The days when fish would be cooked were a horrific torment for the poor child. “One bite, for Papa’s sake,” her mother would say and stuff a bit of baked salmon into her mouth, ignoring her pathetic protests. She felt like bringing it up, there and then, but she forced herself to swallow it. Just then, her mother would fork another bit of fish into her mouth. “Second bite, for Mumma’s sake.”

She would burst out crying, but that wouldn’t move her mother one bit. “You HAVE to eat it. It’s good for your health. The doctor says so,” her mother would aggressively insist.

Oh how she hated fish days!

On Sundays, the family would sit together for a special dinner. A giant tray of mutton steak would occupy a big portion of the dining table. That was her father’s favourite dish. There would be a chicken something too. Mercifully, for her, her mother would cook a vegetable dish.

How she hated the smell of all that meat! It really stank! She just couldn’t stand the sound of her brother chomping on a chunk of chicken and telling his mother how tasty it was. The worst was when her father would chew on a big bone and suck out the marrow! Oh, how she wished the earth would part just then and swallow her up, so that she could disappear forever, never to return! But if she registered even a mild whimper of disgust, she would be rudely shut up. Very soon, she learnt to tolerate what she thought was the simply intolerable.

Later in life, when she came to know about things like the importance of early childhood experiences in shaping a person’s character, she would often reflect on how her ambiguous feelings for the members of the family she had been born into—affection combined with revulsion—had much to do with her traumatic childhood experiences with her family’s fondness for meat and their couldn’t-care-a-damn indifference to her sensitivities on the matter.

In her 20s, she strayed from her path for a while. A bit of fish once in a while and a couple of eggs a week, she was led to believe (by someone who styled himself as an expert nutritionist), was really good for the health. Fish-fingers and soup made a delicious dinner (and so very convenient to make), she now decided, and that became a once-a-week feature. Soft, creamy scrambled eggs with hot, buttered toast now became her favourite breakfast. And, if she went to someone’s house for a meal, she wouldn’t mind taking a tiny peck of chicken, provided it was boneless, or a sip of crab soup.

But some years later, her instinctive childhood compassion for animals, which she had suppressed, resurfaced. It happened all of a sudden. One day, she happened to visit a Buddhist monastery, where she saw a colourful sticker pasted on a window. It had faces of several different animals on it. On top, it said in big letters, ‘LOVE US, NOT EAT US!’, and below was a line that declared, ‘All Lives Are Precious’

The endearing pictures of those lovely animals and that compelling slogan went straight to her heart. Tears welled in her eyes when she thought of the many animals she had eaten all those years. Oh, how insensitive she had been! She almost couldn’t forgive herself. And as she stepped out of the monastery, she decided she would go back to how she had been more than half a century ago, as a little girl of two, who knew that eating animals wasn’t at all a good thing without anyone having told her so.