He was a big guy, and he had two little kids with him. I was too far away to tell if they were boys or girls, but I could see that they were all fishing. There are rules about fishing in the lake where I live–you have to have a license, you must be a resident, and it’s catch and release only.

Catch and release. Not catch, torture, kill, and release.

I grew up understanding that if you found a mouse in the kitchen drawer, you caught it and let it go. If you discovered a gorgeous, but occupied, shell on the beach, you let it be (or put it back in the water). If you had spiders in your house, you left them alone (because after all, they don’t eat much and what they do eat you really don’t want around anyway).

My family was not vegetarian (it was the 60s, after all), but I came to understand that in a time when you don’t HAVE to kill for food, it’s the more compassionate choice not to. And my family was supportive in my decision.

We live in an immensely cruel world, and we are 100% responsible for it. We normalize, and even glorify war and the people who volunteer to participate in it. We are a country filled with and proud of its weapons, some designed to destroy entire cities, some able to only take out a classroom of children. We are filled with hate, especially when we can spew it anonymously on social media. We think it’s fine to shred hundreds of thousands of live baby chicks to get the few we think we need to produce food for us. We delight in our agricultural and animal husbandry system, which has been proven over and over again to deplete and pollute water and soil, use up food for animals that could go to people, and to create a global food shortage. We gleefully use animals for food and materials we don’t need, torturing adult and child alike before slaughtering them.

It is nearly impossible to live a completely vegan lifestyle, because we use animal by-products in nearly everything that is produced or in the process of its production.

And if you stand up for practices that are compassionate, that don’t result in the death of other sentient beings, that might require–gods forbid–people to make an actual effort to take care of themselves and their families without supporting cruelty, you will likely be shamed, laughed at, and told it’s not possible.

One of the kids caught a fish, pulled it out of the water, and taunted it, shaking the line it dangled from while the father stood there and watched. The father finally took it and removed the hook and threw it back in the water. “Dead,” he said, and laughed.

Those children will grow up believing that kind of cruelty is normal and expected. And that the death of an animal is funny.

Is it any wonder this country is in the state that it’s in?

Image by Pexels from Pixabay