First story of the new year. This one is a flash fiction about a human meat farm. Remember: if you don't eat your meat, you don't get any pudding.
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The Meat Farm
“Hey there, new kid. Lemme give you a run-down of the place. I see you staring all-funny-eyed like you don’t know where the hell you are or what to make of it all. I can relate. I remember my first day. The blood. The guts. Oh, and the smell. Funny thing is, you just stop smelling it after a while. Pretty soon you’re driving home with your work clothes on, and your truck reeks like a slaughterhouse, and your wife is bitching that no matter how much she washes your clothes, the smell just won’t come out. And there’s truth to that, both literally and figuratively. This is a job that hurts your soul. You won’t be the same after working here for any extended period of time. But somebody has to do it. And after you see how they live, it becomes a whole lot easier to rationalize. Not to mention there ain’t any other place around here that pays thirty bucks an hour.”
“Now let’s go over to the holding pens. This is where they live their entire lives. Yeah, I know it’s small. They say back in the day before domestication, homo sapiens lived in large colonies and often traversed up to a hundred miles or more in a day using one of their primitive, coal-powdered vehicles. Can you imagine? Their overuse of that antiquated tech is why it’s so goddamn hot all the time now. Convenience and economic development outweighed cooking their home planet. Yeah, it’s a strange perspective, but it’s not like our species have never been short-sighted. Remember that crazy guy Muskie Ratt who bankrupted the entire economy of his solar system trying to build a Dyson sphere? How could you not have heard of him? Ehh, yeah I guess it was before your time. That’s the problem with getting old—you carry your cultural touchstones with you.”
“If you look through this pen you’ll see a big ol’ guy—we call him Herman—who has been here about twenty years or so. There’s been a real push by the industry to slaughter them younger, but this is a reputable abattoir, and we let the animals mature. The holding pen is about fourteen square feet. Small, but plenty of room for his activities, which are pretty limited. He’ll sit there and watch the images on the screen for hours on end. We have to turn them off or he’ll keep watching them and not get enough sleep. We use a simple risk-reward system hardwired into his brain via cybernetics. Basically, he’s playing video games that tickle the right parts of his mind. The crazy thing is, despite being from an entirely different evolutionary tree, they do have some similarities to us. Just like our ancestors, they evolved in an environment of scarcity, and so ancient reward pathways were preserved, not anticipating modernity. That makes them highly vulnerable to substances that give them pleasure. Crawl after that thing that serves you dopamine and survive, so sayeth the worm. Junk food, alcohol, gambling, and digital entertainment keep him constantly stimulated and pacified. See that slot machine over there? He’s damn-near worn out the buttons.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard what the protesters say. They say that homo sapiens are sentient beings who are capable of complex thought. They say that the animals deserve to roam free in their natural habitat. My question to them is this: What kind of intelligent being wrecks their own planet? The biosphere was on the verge of collapse before we came. Now half of the planet is a nature preserve and creatures that were on the brink of extinction are flourishing, especially since we’ve been hard at work pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. When homo sapiens were roaming free, seventy-three percent of the planet’s wildlife populations were in decline. Seventy-three percent! This planet would’ve been an apocalyptic hellhole were it not for us. Some people want to anthropomorphize everything! That’s what children do, you understand? They’re not people, not like us, anyway.”
“Anyways, let’s get away from the holding pens. Lemme show you the corral. See, it’s better psychologically if the animal doesn’t see what happens to the one before it. Less screams, less resistance. So we herd them down these long, curving pathways where they can only see the animal in front of them. They’re so tame that you can kind of just nudge them along. They’ll give you a prod but you really don’t want to use it unless you absolutely have to. When they get to the slaughter bays, one single bolt penetrates the skull, killing them instantly. Simple, effective. Humane. There’s no shame in it, alright? This is a better role for homo sapiens than master of Earth. Hell, they were halfway to this result themselves. Limited socialization due to addictive stimulation had cratered their birthrate, and economic inequality rendered many of them unambitious and without purpose. Basically, they had altered their environment to the point where they could no longer flourish. It was time that someone domesticated them and gave them a role as livestock.”
“What are those pens over there? You’re not ready for that yet, buddy. Those are for the little ones that’ll become veal. I won’t eat it myself, but it is apparently a very tender meat.”
“Hypocrisy? What, you think it’s hypocritical to work here and not eat meat? I said I didn’t dine on veal, kid. I still eat meat. Now it’s been a while, I got to say. The smell, you know, I think about it every time I see a steak. The smell, and all the carcasses piled up, all the meat and bone we couldn’t use.”
“You’re not sure you want to work here, huh? Take it from me, kid: this is a good job. Like I said, you won’t make money like this anywhere else. Everything eats something else living. What does it matter if it can think? A mind ain’t no great luxury in this universe. Fact is, it’s a chain dangling heavily around your neck. Do what’s best for yourself and your family. You get used to the smell, even if it never leaves you. Here, let me show you where we get cleaned up.”
