Denmark and Vietnam.

 

From the NYT last week was an article about a Chilean artist whose exhibit took place recently in the back room of butcher's shop in Copenhagen. (!) The subjects of the 'exhibition' were three piglets who were being starved to death. The theme was to voice discontent about the industrialisation of the entire unethical food industry. The small critters were given just water to drink as they headed into a deathly decline that was to have lasted about five days. But surprise, the upside to the story is that they somehow 'disappeared' when a door was mysteriously left ajar for a short time. They thus were spared of their cruel fate. 

Personally, I think it was 'coup monté' rigged by the artist himself because (I believe), that he was in fact a lover of animals and he only  wanted to make a stinky statement about how animals are treated. One cannot argue with that.

The artist, Marco Evaristti, (bless his heart), in the photo below, either really believes in this cause or is just cashing in to make some publicity. I think it's the former, and I even think he saved the piglets himself, but hey, what do I know? 

(Disclaimer: I haven't eaten red meat or pork, or anything, except for about a dozen chickens since the Spring of 1980.

But I applaud the artist, if in fact his idea was to save the piglets in end. The Food industry is disgusting. 

In 1971, when I was a freshmen at Denver University, a group of anti-war protesters designed and distributed flyers around campus declaring that they would napalm a Golden Retriever at a specified spot on a certain Saturday. Naturally, it cause an uproar as everyone went apoplectic. 

"A dog! really?"

On the day on which it was supposed to happen there was a big crowd and also the campus police, but possibly even the Denver Police on hand to make arrests. Of course, it was just a hoax just to see how riled up people would become over the killing of a dog when at the same time, Vietnamese were being slaughtered by the Nixon regime. 

I wasn't too involved either way, my cynicism had already been too well established in both heart and mind by that time and I just wanted to get the hell out of America and into a cafe in Paris.

And today, it's also a pretty insane time and I think it behooves us all to make our own decisions thoughtfully based on fact not fiction today.