That's the Meat of the Issue

When I was younger, I was an animal-phile. I loved books about animals, pictures of animals, zoos, doctor's office fishtanks, teachers' pets, horses, cows, pigs, dogs; anything mammal related. I suppose this love is connected with my dislove of meat. I look at fibrous steaks and see the muscled haunches of a cheetah bounding through savannah grasses. In bacon: there lies my best friends from the summer before pre-school: Petunia and Alfred, my grandmother's (now butchered) pigs. I see their saunter sizzled - their plump, pleasant pinkness now sickly sanguine. So I look at meat and see animals. That's established. But I was pondering that's vice versa today. Do I look at animals and see meat? Do carnivores/omnivores? Do they see ham in the sty? Do they see roast poultry in the pond? Do they see ground beef in the pasture? Is it beef to them or is it bovine? What about to me? In my sophomore year of high school, I moved to Sanpete County, Utah: home of the Norbest Turkey plant. As well as a few cattle yards. The smells - even in residential areas (well, the places as "neighborhoodly" as Sanpete Co. gets) - were horrendous on cold mornings, unbearable on hot noondays, and agonizing whenever it was breezy. They carried a peculiar mixture of ferality and finis: of feed and blood and feathers and mud and feces. There was a particularly unstomachable cattle yard near Manti High School, which my necessary route passed twice every day: to and from that place of learning. The cows were gaunt, grubby, polluted with overpopulation and unendurably putrid. Over the summer, I remember eating my last ground beef: it was something I had to handle raw, and a bit bloody. I recall watching it transform from blubberiness to the thing I knew as meat - a process I had seen and participated in numerous times before. Then, for some reason, just after my first bite, those sick cows flashed before my eyes. I retched. And retched. Since then, I've been unable to eat any form of cow. I've also come to eliminate other animals, and am now vegetarian. So, that's the meat of the issue, I suppose. As well as some statistics/experiences my father has related to me.