story No More “Pigs”. It wasn’t long that I heard from the editor telling me that he liked the story—well-written and coherent--till the ending, which was not something very agreeable to his sensibilities, or values perhaps. He wanted me to change the ending.My story was about a man, written in first person, who tells how his eyes started looking at pigs differently after a tragic accident. Growing up on a farm and then later in city environ with hamburgers, pigs were always food. But one night, after having lost his only child, the guy visited his childhood farm and had a close look at a baby pig that had lost its mother to slaughter. Everything about the behavior of that animal strikes the bereaved father with the inescapable semblance to a human child. And he adopts the piglet, naming it “Pinkid” (a small, pink kid). Thereafter, the man redefines for himself what “pig” and “child” mean.
The editor of the magazine had his issue with this ending. In the ensuing email, he wrote that the story could not be accepted because it equates children to pigs. He would only consider it for the magazine if I would revise the ending. Of course, I wouldn’t, and so I told him. Showing that a young helpless animal is a child, in need of care and protection, was exactly the whole point of the story. How could I change it? So I decided to keep my story unaltered.
It was perhaps too much for a person not a believer in no-killings of animals to digest the point inherent in my story. And the implications are indeed heavily exacting in the ethical sense. For if we accept the fact (and I call it a fact) that young helpless animals, including those we kill daily for food, are just like our kids, what would happen to the slavery of our palate? We will be at a loss of words and feelings to justify the killings of our children. For that then will be our ethical obligation – to protect the children and love them, and care for them. And what we love and care for as children can’t be hurt intentionally, let alone killed.
The other day, I read the story of a rhino calf, crying and nudging its dead mother killed by poachers for her horn. While my heart cried for the pain of a child, my eyes were happy to see the word “mother” used for the rhino that became a victim of [in]human brutality. And I believe it’s not something very recent. We are familiar with the usage of “mother” for female animals giving birth but we still hesitate, and conveniently so for the non-vegetarian, to call its little one a child, just in the sense a human child is to a human mother. In the story about the little rhino, it was called a calf, not a child.
To me, all those young animals are children. They are to grow up and have the right to their life and not be killed for food as long as we have vegetarian food available. The human defenses on high alert against the word “child” for an animal will perhaps get tame with time and greater realization of the true value of life. No one would then shrink from calling pigs, and rhinos, and puppies or others “children”. They will be all children – not those of animals, but “my children” .
