If I were forced to shop at a conventional grocery store, I would be a vegan.

In case you are currently tearing into a fecal matter-laced, cancer-laden, and inhumane piece of mystery meat from Walmart right now—I will spare you the gory details, but when you finish you can check out the following link for more information on why.

If, after you have read the above, you are wanting to know how I can be a self described, animal rights activist carnivore, here goes. (Beware: The sad realities of how we get our meat even in a humane way can still leave you a little shaken).

My mother raises hogs, they are raised on pasture and fed corn or milo depending on her crop rotation (she plants her own row crops to feed them). They are left with their mother until they are ready to be moved to the “fat hog” pen. They are never given any types of hormones, so they grow at varying rates. Thus, when it comes time for slaughter you have to sort out the ones of the right size. This is done by opening and closing certain gates to create a path to the hog cart, and then standing in strategic places so that the hogs see the opening you want them to go through.

There is no stress for gatherer or hog in this method. In fact, my mother has the saying that “If they don’t want to get on the bus, they don’t have to.” If the hog of the right size doesn’t want to go, it doesn’t. At first, this didn’t make sense to me. Wouldn’t she end up with a pen full of really, really big hogs that never wanted to go? The answer is no, somehow it works out and the ones that didn’t go this time go the next time.

The next step is that the hog cart, hooked onto the tractor, is driven one mile to the local locker. Since the animals haven’t been stressed for a difficult loading or a long journey, they are free of stress hormones that some vegetarians will swear makes people a little edgy after eating a big hunk of meat.

The locker is owned by a local family. Elvin is responsible for the killing and cutting up of the animals, and Barb does the scheduling. They are always busy and normally you have to get on the schedule a few months in advance. They are always open for inspection, will answer any question you have, and will even show you the meat locker if you want. This is a definite change from the veil of secrecy large processing plants hide behind!

One would wonder why, if they are always busy and do such a great job, they wouldn’t expand. The answer is quite simple (I asked them the same question): Because they only process a few animals a day they don’t ever become numb to the fact that they are actually killing another creature. Since they aren’t numb, they are able to kill the animal swiftly & efficiently—they don’t want them to suffer anymore than the rest of us do. Also, because they only kill a few per day, they are not under the stress that a traditional meat packing worker is under to keep the assembly line moving quickly. Therefore, they are able to make sure each animal is “tended to” properly before moving to the next one.

All in all, the eating of meat is a personal choice, but if one is to eat meat, it should be the norm that it has been raised by people who take the care of their animals seriously, and processed in a way that honors that animal’s sacrifice.