I worked on a mink farm once, for one day. I spent most of it scraping dried meat from cages, and filling them with comfy, cozy sawdust. As I looked down the long rows of cages I couldn’t help but think of Plato’s Cave, and whether or not all these mink knew that their lives were shams, that this wasn’t even a shadow of what lay outside the farm.

Jainism preaches compassion and non-violence, and that we must show a certain amount of respect for life. Mink, I would hazard a guess, don’t have the capacities to understand theories of respect, much the same way human beings in a vegetative state would not. But if they lack comprehension, that doesn’t mean that we should not show it, or that they do not deserve it. All life, I say as a Jain, is essential jiva, and if you respect one form of life simply because they are alive, then why not respect them all? I know that life outside that cage, though unprotected from the elements, would be much fuller and well lived than the one within it. That I could even make it as peaceful and plentiful as I wanted.  At least life would be a less… undetermined.

Later in the day I got to see how they skin the mink, it being mink skinning season and all. It is a process not unlike removing a latex glove from one’s hand. Just imagine that the tip of your fingers are the mink’s head and the base of your wrist as the mink’s bottom end, and the next time you remove a clinging latex glove from your hand, inevitably turning it inside out in the process, you will have a pretty good idea of what it is like to remove a mink coat.

Funny as it sounds, this process isn’t all perfect. The ripe mink are killed via carbon monoxide poisoning, which I will assume for the sake of argument is a lot like ‘going to sleep’. But sometimes, within the cart-like contraption that was wheeled beside the cages to accomplish this task, one mink would get buried beneath the others and would not be able to partake of enough carbon monoxide to get the job done. They would pass out, but they wouldn’t die.

And so every once in a great while, the man doing the skinning would have to deal with the mink he had just impaled on the table, screaming into it’s own skin that had just been pulled over it’s own head. This did not happen often, perhaps other farms are better at this than others, but this is what has been going though my mind these past few days every time I meditate on compassion of all living things.

My problem is that despite this imagery I conjure, despite knowing that we raise countless different kinds of animals in cages that are too small, and kill them as humanely as possible, despite understanding why and how Jains are compassionate towards life- today, I was genuinely excited that I got to wear my leather boots again, and that I got to eat sushi tonight with my friends. I am once again giddy at the prospect of tearing into cows and various forms of once complex sea life.

Seriously, what the hell Michael?

I have compassion for my fellow man, and maybe we are separate from other animals because of our fancy, sentient cortex. But I am also compassionate towards domesticated animals, and any living thing that I come into contact with. Yet I seem to be compartmentalizing my attitudes toward life- as there is no way I would buy mink fur, or go back to a mink farm after what I experienced, but I have no problem eating a fish that asphyxiated to death.  After all, I didn’t have to take part in their suffering, so it is beyond me in my daily life, right?  Right?

I keep seeing this difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’, even after Jainism awakened this intuition in me that the difference is illusory. For one month I thought that all life contains essential jiva, that all life is equal. Now it’s back to hamburgers and steak?  I don’t know.  At least now I can easily draw the line at vegetables, because I cannot reasonably extend my compassion that far. I cannot honestly believe that a carrot is of the same kind of life as I am, so I have no problem eating root vegetables again.  I don’t take solace in my superior cortex, but by the fact that I have a central nervous system and the carrot, sadly, does not.

Also, I can’t justify eating meat as a nutritional necessity anymore, partly because I don’t know a lot about it, and partly because at the end of this month I have lost weight and feel healthier than ever. This combined with the fact that I know unnecessary suffering is horrible, I seem to have no where to go but to accept the conclusion that killing animals for food or for clothing is unnecessarily cruel- we can survive without them and it seems better for everyone involved. I seem doomed now to identify with animals, to realize that I don’t have to kill anything that squirms in order to live.

The problem is, I don’t want to stop. I like my leather, I like my chicken shwarmas, and I like my tuna nigiri. It has been so long a habit to keep this up, that it’s hard to convince myself that it isn’t right.

But I really understand now where vegetarians are coming from, and I don’t want to forget that.