The Butcher's Defense - a short story
When awareness, that most insidious of aspects, flickered in the butcher’s eyes that morning, he found himself in a cage. Plastered walls surrounded him and a filthy set of bars blocked the exit. It was a most unflattering prison and the butcher wondered why he was here.
He had been a dutiful member of society all his life. From boyhood on he had worked in his father’s butchery. He had grown large in his adult life, since never was there want of quality meat in his house. His profession filled him with pride and he processed many cows a day, cutting them up to his clients’ specifications. In the years he had built up a real knack for it. When he first saw a cow slaughtered it had hurt him, but young minds quickly adapt.
The butcher tried to stand, but found his legs collapsing onto the trampled hay scattered around. There was a pain in his shoulders and he felt a bruise, as if something had pinched him there. This was a most strange scenario to be involved in. He recognized the prison, of course. It was one of the stables from his own butchery.
Just when he considered crying out for aid, a presence made itself known. A thin man wearing an apron approached the bars and looked inside the cage with a disinterested expression. The butcher used his blubbery arms to raise himself up along the wall into a sitting position.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. “I seem to have been misplaced. Could you perhaps help me out of this stable?”
The thin man looked at the butcher, his interest piqued.
“My, my,” he answered, “aren’t you the talker.”
“For goodness’ sake! Stop amusing yourself and assist me. This is an embarrassing situation and I’d soon see it behind me.”
“What makes you think you should be let out?”
The butcher was momentarily stunned by this innocuously posed question.
“What do you mean to say with that?” he said with a heated voice.
“Quite simply that we have no intention of letting you off the hook,” the thin man chuckled. “Come on, you are not a dullard. You know why you are here.”
“Surely you’re not serious. I’m here to be… butchered?”
“You have grown ripe and plump in the years since we raised you, and now the time has arrived for your harvesting. It’s as simple as everything you’ve ever done.”
“You mean to say,” said a flabbergasted butcher, “you have reared me for this purpose?”
“Your surprise is thoroughly unfounded. Or could it be that you, who have seen so many reared for this purpose, never suspected yourself to be so treated? A curious blind spot. I always thought men were apt to see what they were experts in. Professional deformation.”
“What nonsense!” shouted the butcher in equal parts outrage and fear. “Who has ever heard of such a thing? You can’t go about slaughtering people, that’s unseemly, and uncalled for! Who would want to eat human flesh?”
“Many have in history. There is a precedent. A better question would be, why don’t we eat humans?”
“You’ve unmasked yourself as an agent of absurdity now. It’s perfectly clear why not: you don’t eat your own kind.”
“As I said before,” the thin man smiled, “cannibalism is known to man, and practiced in nature with regularity. There is no reason why you should draw the line at eating your own species. In fact, it is strange that you don’t. The reason you don’t eat pets, like your cat or your dog, is because you feel a kinship to them. In that same vein, the animals in your immediate environment should be much dearer to you than a perfect stranger on the other side of the world. Who are you really closer to: the pig and chicken from your neighborhood meadow, or any one of a billion Chinese you’ll never meet? It is much more logical for you to eat the Chinese person.”
“I would still not eat the Chinese person, because I’d know his family would miss him.”
“I’m not certain a cow would not be missed by her family, but let us say the following. We fly to China and find an old man there, who has lost all his relatives and has lived alone in his house, in seclusion, for the past decade. We whisk him away to this place and process him. He will most certainly not be missed. Is it all right then?”
“No! Absolutely not!”
“Then your argument about being missed is not the real reason to exclude humans from our diet. Would you inform me what is?”
The butcher felt his anger at the injustice done to him rise and tried standing again. This time he managed to take a clumsy step forward, fuelled by rage, before he once again fell to his knees.
“Release me!” he shouted. “I’ll call the police! My family will see you in prison for the rest of your life for this crime!”
The thin man curled his lips, which was not a sight the butcher was hoping for.
“I’m afraid the deal is sealed. The forms were filled out and approved long ago. You don’t seem to realize this is not some illegal abduction, but a perfectly authorized procedure.”
“But I’m not cattle, I’m a butcher!”
“And so you were for many fine years, but now you’ve reached the end of your productive life and it’s time to earn the full investment back.”
“I’ve never heard of such thing!”
“Cruelty,” explained the thin man, “would have been to tell you beforehand. That would only have caused unnecessary stress. And as a professional, you can appreciate what stress does to the meat.”
Despite his frantic state of mind, the butcher found himself in agreement. Perhaps he was not impervious to job conditioning after all.
“So, what, tell me,” asked the thin man, “is the real reason we shouldn’t slaughter you?”
“Because,” stammered the butcher, “because I don’t want to.”
“You mean to say you haven’t given your consent?”
“Exactly!”
“But neither did any of your cows, and that didn’t seem a terribly convincing argument to you back when. I will grant you, the cows did not offer an eloquent rationale in their defense, but you must accede they were hardly desirous to join you here. Or did those bulbous eyes tell you they welcomed the fear and their subsequent killing? Cows are perfectly capable of sensing a mood.”
The butcher once again erupted in anger.
“Damn you! I’m a human being!”
“And why should that matter? I’ve tried explaining this before, but it seems to fall on deaf ears.”
“I have rights, human rights,” the butcher sulked.
“You have arbitrary human rights, which is a luxury. The right of the strongest, the victor. But you are here clearly not the strongest, nor the victor. Being a human gives you no natural rights. If I were to introduce a tiger into you cage, would it look upon you and say: ‘I will not eat you, for you are human?’ Of course not.”
“I still think it matters.”
“Why should it? You are made of flesh and bone and organs and cartilage, just as any other animal. When we have taken away your shape by processing you, you are no different.”
“But I have feelings! Doesn’t that count for anything?” cried the butcher in despair. “I feel pain, agony, the fear of death; I have nerve endings and a sensitive skin! I have relationships and complicated emotions!”
“So did the cows,” yawned the thin man in response, losing interest. “Come now, we have already wasted much valuable time and I have other places to visit.”
The butcher was lead into a tiled shower area, where limescale residue spoke of years of careless purging. The thin man placed a metal device on the butcher’s head, with a tube leading away to a compressor. He pressed a button and a most horrible sound shot through the room for but a second. A metal rod propelled by air pressure smashed through the butcher’s skull and reduced his brains to pulp. The butcher’s bloated corpse fell limply onto the floor.
Blood gushed out of the head as he was hung on a meat hook and via rails on the ceiling rolled into a cavernous hall. A circle saw cut him in half, spilling his glistening gut and innards on the floor, which a watery broom pushed away. Already, the flapping leftovers, though disgusting, were impossible to empathize with. And when the butcher’s body was cut up and packaged and placed in attractive rows in the supermarket, it was truly indistinguishable from all the other meat.
Roderick Leeuwenhart