Blessed Be My Freshly Slaughter Dinner Analysis

After I read chapters 18 and 19 in Animal Reader I almost couldn’t bring myself to eat meat. I had already begun to shy away from red meat, but not because my conscience was making me feel shame or guilt. Instead, I just sort of break out with hives if I eat a lot of red meat, but even that reaction didn’t stop me from enjoying my previously heavy carnivorous diet. I am beginning to be more mindful of my treatment towards animals and of my meat consumption. I don’t think I can ever look at bacon the same way because I now think of a pig being stuck inside a box and not being able to even turn around and it ties into my acute fear of claustrophobia.
My nausea got even worse after I read a few more articles in the Slaughterhouse file, but one of the articles that struck me most was: “Blessed Be My Freshly Slaughtered Dinner”. The image that the (female) author chose is clearly a male hunter (as you can infer from the bullets on his large and wide chest) that is about to dig into his carnivorous feast of pork and beef. The fact that the image portrays a man eating the meat and no woman is tied into the argument in chapter 19 in AR. Since it is a male hunter that is eating meat in the image supports the argument that meat is reserved for the powerful and
So reading Leach’s article wasn’t news to me, but it did allow me to view kinships and the labels we put on our siblings, neighbors, etc. in a different light in regards to animals and the labels and relationships we have with them. Something that popped up in my mind after I read this article was the concept of beastiality… so if applying some of the ideas given by Leach could we suggest that those people associate animals as neighbors? What about pets? I really don’t know much about beastiality, but it’s something to think