Lambs and Violets

The fluffy white lamb is a symbol of spring everywhere in the Euro-American cultural monad, and traveling to Scotland and back by train, as I did a few days ago, will make you understand why. Lambs in their millions dot the landscape, usually in twin pairs, doing all the cutesy-lamby things they’re known for, and eliciting exclamations of delight from sweet British ladies on their way home to a lovely lamb dinner. For make no mistake, most of these fluffy little beggars are destined for the table. Lamb is a very popular meat in Britain, much more so than in the U.S., and somewhere I’m sure, probably in Scotland, someone is still eating mutton, though I can’t imagine why. But then Scots eat haggis, so there you are.

Even when I ate meat I never liked lamb, so I can’t say whether I’d have been able to ride through pastures teeming with live ones, serenely munching a bag of Walker’s Lamb and Mint crisps *, but one eats what one eats. According to their adverts Waitrose, a slightly upscale U.K. grocery chain, was granted some award for animal compassion because their pork is raised by farmers who bed their pigs down on straw. I know if they were stringing me up by my hind legs and cutting my throat I’d like to remember I got a soft bed out of the deal. Of course pigs, while not nearly as cuddly as baby sheep, are still considered somewhat appealing, at least in their infancy, and are widely known to be as intelligent as many dogs. People keep them for pets. They star in films with James Cromwell. Cows don’t rate high on the Cute Scale, though anyone familiar with the conditions in a slaughterhouse might think at least twice before eating one, and certainly few people, vegetarian or otherwise, get sentimental over chickens. Still they’re all outside my personal dietary restrictions, which is not to eat anything that had a momma.

Joseph Campbell said humanity has always been in conflict between our natural tendency to compassion on the one hand, and the necessity for what he called the “continual merciless killing” necessary for survival on the other. In ancient times we told ourselves that the animals sacrificed themselves willingly to us, or that we were in fact sending divine beings back into their true forms by ‘breaking’ the animal bodies in which they’d trapped themselves, or at the very least we asked their forgiveness and showed respect for their lives.

But ancient people were a bunch of bloody primitives, after all. Nowadays we simply pass the brutality along to hired hands whose jobs depend on how much product they’ve racked up at the end of the day. Then we toddle down to Tesco (or Waitrose, where we know they slept comfy) and buy a chunk of bloody muscle wrapped in cling film, tagged with a price per Kg, and entirely sanitized of any taint of actual slaughter. We not only didn’t know that lamb, we don’t know the farmer who raised it, or even in many cases what country it came from (though if we bought it at Waitrose we know it’s a British lamb, at least). We aren’t constrained ever to think of it as having frolicked in a field outside our train window the other day. Some of us will give thanks to a deity for providing the lamb, but it’s a safe bet not one in a million will be thanking the lamb; after all, it had no choice in the matter.

*Yes, meat-flavored potato chips are pretty weird (Hi, Daniel!), but on the other hand, in the U.S. you’ll never find violet-and-basil-scented washing up liquid.