24/01/2026
You ever been inside an abattoir, a slaughterhouse if you like? I have. You seen the eyes of the inmates, the nightmare desperation of dead-end terror? I have. The drop-dead dance between life and death, the unanswerably suffocating bellow of one whose throat pi**es air and clots of blood? Have you been there, electric-prodded into the very depths of hell itself, all sh*t-splattered concrete and an unyielding mass of metal bars? In and never out.
And what of the young ones, especially the young? Innocence don’t come anywhere near it, believe me. Strung up, snuffed out and not always in the blink of an eye. Can you go there, down, down into the heart of such living horror? The lambs and calves and screaming porkers, sentenced to something so unspeakably dread and dark. It’s them who suffer the most, poor little souls. If you could only see their eyes, bulging, all bright shine ripped to weeping shreds. Yes, they cry. Great tears that speak of hopelessness. Some of them can’t take it, don’t make it to the end of the line. Could we say they are the lucky ones, getting out before the stun-gun leaves its shattering mark?
Torn from their mothers, sisters perhaps or brothers, in they come, day after bloody day. They know what’s coming before they arrive. We all do. You see, there’s something in the air that neither wind nor rain can wash away. It lingers, ghost-like, in the shadow of its own making. Yes, there is darkness here, black holes too deep to speak of. It swallows them whole, breath, bone and broken-hearted surrender to what must be.
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The opening lines from the next offering from Dave Mountjoy, author of Being with Cows: From grief to gratitude.
A work in progress but very much a product of these increasingly intense and uncertain times. Tapping into so many themes - Agricultural crisis across Europe, Rupert Lowe's call for an end to inhuman methods of slaughter for farmed animals, the questioning of the whole food production systems and all they contain - compassion versus industrial sponsored cruelty and suffering and so on and so on.
This fictional piece taps into the very heart of our relationship with domesticated animals, explores both the cruelty AND the compassion, bringing intense focus to their potential for facilitating deep and permanent healing and transformation in those who surrender to their natural love of harmony and quiet. More than anything else, it pays homage to Love, to its infinite capacity for in-spiration, for union and the simplicity of just being.
