Hey! I’m Tessa and my brother Theo always wants to feel special and important. I guess that’s why he suddenly became a vegan, even though he had never cared about animal rights before.
At first, I tried to ignore him, but he kept on talking about how “meat was murder” and I deserved to burn in hell just because I ate a hamburger.
Obviously, I told him to him to fuck off [will be beeped]. I mean, it’s just a burger, right?
But then he said,
“You don’t understand how much those animals suffer. I bet my next birthday and Christmas present that if you lived like an industrial pig for just one week, you would become a vegetarian afterwards and never eat meat again.”
Well, it was summer vacation and I had nothing better to do, so I agreed to his stupid bet.
2 days later, he had built a cage for me in our barn. It was so tiny! And when I went inside, I could only stand straight or lie down, but there was no space to move or walk around.
And then, my brother threw a load of mud on me to make things more ‘realistic'. It was disgusting, but I quickly got used to it. Much worse was the boredom. I mean, I had no phone and no one to talk to.
After 4 long hours, I called my brother Theo, because I needed to go to the toilet. But he said that I wasn’t allowed to do that because pigs like me live and sleep in their own faeces.
I told him to [beeped] again, and he was kind enough to let me go to the toilet twice a day as long as I didn’t take a shower.
But even though I had better living conditions than most pigs, I still got a cold on my 3rd day inside the cage and I started to feel terrible.
When my brother saw that I was sick he started laughing and told me that the only reason industrial pigs don’t die within weeks is because they are being pumped with antibiotics and other medicine.
At some point our dog, Popo, sneaked into the barn. And when he saw me, he started barking because he was so worried about me. In that moment, I realised that if someone put their dog into a cage and didn’t let the dog out to poop or take a bath, that that person would go to prison for the neglect of his dog.
And why should we treat dogs better than pigs? I mean, did you know that pigs are more intelligent than dogs?
When my brother Theo came into the barn, he chased Popo away saying “pigs don’t have friends”. But luckily, Popo got my parents and led them into the barn where they found me inside the cage covered in mud and suffering from a cold.
My parents immediately stopped the so-called “my-sister-is-a-pig-experiment” and sent me to take a shower and get some rest.
Many industrial animals are force fed until they collapse under their own weight. And baby pigs are separated from their mothers at a young age, even though pigs are very social animals, just like us humans.
Imagine taking a toddler away from its mother. You wouldn’t, right? You know how much pain it would cause. And it’s the same for pigs.
My brother Theo was wrong about one thing, though. Despite my experience, I didn’t become a vegetarian or vegan.
Instead, I decided to only eat free range meat from animals which live outdoors under humane conditions. Unfortunately, that kind of meat is very expensive and my family can’t afford it very often.
I strongly believe that someday we will look back on factory farming of animals, the way we look back on human slavery. There really is no difference. We’re exploiting living creatures for our own convenience.
And I know some people will argue that eating meat is natural, but so is murder. Humans have been killing each other for tens of thousands of years, but we still made it illegal… and for good reasons.
So even if, like me, you don’t want to go completely vegetarian, you can at least reduce the amount of meat you are eating or only eat meat by free-range animals.
Anyways, thank you for listening to my story and please subscribe to this channel.
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