always to love
The following is from my friend (and talented classical singer, I might add) Susan Millard-Schwarz. After emailing back and forth, I asked if she'd be open to sharing some of her background with vegetarianism and caring about animal suffering on the blog, and I'm very grateful to her for following up on the invitation ...
My husband, Jack, and I are vegetarian, meaning we don’t eat meat, fish or poultry. Jack and his first wife raised their girls vegetarian, and now one of them is married to a young man who became vegetarian after knowing her. So, it truly is the culture at my house. But I am perpetually in meat-eating “recovery,” and probably will always miss the taste of meat to some degree. Jack, on the other hand, does not.
It is not a completely consistent practice in our house. For example, we do not feed our dogs or cats vegetarian diets. We know some who do, but it doesn’t make biological sense to us. Are we aware that lousy practices are used from slaughterhouses to the canneries that produce our pet food? Yes. But we do what we can in an imperfect system. We try not to buy unnecessary leather or other animal product goods, etc. We try not to consume and discard plastic that could strangle and kill our wildlife.
A significant issue from my own perspective is the treatment and quality of life for animals – especially farm animals. And, though Jack and I feel animals raised for food consumption can no longer be justified in most countries, we have a strong interest in seeing that humane methods of slaughter (and I do struggle with that oxymoron!) are implemented.
The recently publicized issue of downed cows at the slaughterhouse in CA was and still is excruciatingly painful to me. It is a thing that challenges my faith in the same way that such issues as the Holocaust and child abuse challenge the faith in others. Jack recently submitted a commentary to the Jewish Chronicle regarding the miztvot (commandment) of keeping kosher. He took kosher-observant Jews to task regarding the requirement of humane slaughter practices stated in that mitzvot. Unfortunately, it is often ignored in kosher slaughterhouses, and many rabbis have turned a blind eye to the issue.
I will make an unsavory admission to you about myself: I knew something was different about my heart and brain when, at age 22, I sat alone in my grandmother’s living room in Atlanta and caught a video on TV of a man clubbing a juvenile seal to death. I became wildly enraged; crying and yelling at God with an unbearable frustration. I was so angry; I didn’t know what to do with myself. And I knew that if I had been in that Alaskan location, and had access to a weapon, I might well have killed the man on impulse. It was very frightening and horribly illuminating for me.
Of course, I knew this would not serve as a productive way to maneuver through life! I was a Christian then as I am now, and I knew I was being called to compassion and understanding for these hunters, even as I was discovering my own extraordinarily miserable empathy for the suffering of animals. It was through that experience that I learned I would be viewing these issues differently from those around me; it has drawn criticism from my friends and family at times. But I haven’t been able to change my feelings about this any more than I could change my own DNA. Indeed, I would not want to.
You mentioned your desire to remain approachable to others regarding your vegetarianism. I absolutely understand and agree that this should be a priority. My husband and I often talk about the importance of remaining warm and open, while completely honest about our thoughts and feelings. The first and last rule is always to love.
(post courtesy and copyright Susan Millard-Schwarz, photo similarly by Amy Sondova; to find out more about seal hunting, check out the Humane Society's ProtectSeals campaign.)
January 9, 2009
Reader Comments (3)
Ben, thanks for sharing the perspectives of others. I love to see the journey other people have taken to get to where they are.
Susan, I love your honesty and frankly enjoyed how you are not "hard core" as far as not feeding your dogs a vegetarian diet. The reason I say that is because I think the hard core folks sometimes realize that it takes some folks one step at a time to get to where they are going. Not everyone can jump in fully right away; some need to stick their big toe in first to test the water. If that goes well, they may then wade up to their ankles and then their knees.
I so appreciated hearing Alicia Silverstone saying during an interview that any little thing that someone could do to help animals was a huge step and to be honored and valued (I am paraphrasing that!). The interviewer was hammering on the fact that some vegetarians still wear leather (she doesn't), and her response was to the effect that even if they ate one less hamburger a week, it was a help.
Your perspective drove that point home again to me. Thanks for sharing it! Whatever little bit we can do helps, and we can hopefully continually expand our efforts to see that all animals are treated humanely.
I agree! Susan, your story was eloquent and very helpful for me as a fledgling vegetarian in knowing it's okay to take small steps in changing my lifestyle. I am in that stage of 'discovering my own extraordinarily miserable empathy for the suffering of animals' and Ben's website and work has been infinitely helpful. Thank you for sharing!
Thanks Tracy and Rosie ...