It’s been a beautiful day, blues skies and bright sunshine, although the breeze had a little autumn nip to it. Because the weather forecast has been warning that it will all change tomorrow, we decided to take a trip out to the Frome Valley farm shop at Frampton Cotterell.
It would be a lie to say that I am a vegetarian, but I don’t eat a lot of meat these days. But as Bumble has been suffering from a lack of iron, we went to the farm shop to buy some ‘happy’ lamb’s liver. I say ‘happy’ because the butchers in the farm shop know exactly where their meat comes from, and more importantly, that is has been reared in an ethical and humane way.
As we arrived, we could see that there were a lot of people feeding scraps to the pigs who live in the enclosure next to the shop. But as we got out of the car, we could smell the unmistakable aroma of frying bacon. There are few things that smell quite as nice as bacon in the pan, but it did seem a bit sad when you could see the parents and siblings, the relatives of the rashers that were sizzling away.
Now I’m not saying that we should stop meat production, or that it is unethical to rear animals for food, but seeing the livestock rooting in the mud, whilst smelling the results of their slaughter being fried so close by, I did wonder whether they associated the smell with their recently missing relative.
Pigs are pretty intelligent animals, by all accounts, and although they clearly happy to wallow and root around in the mud of their nice little field, I really hope they are unaware of their ultimate fate. If not, I doubt that ‘happy’ would be the right word to use.
The Search For Enlightenment 
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