Hot Racks and BBQ Stacks

We're not too proud to admit when we're flummoxed.

Friends, we are flummoxed.

The role reversal has got our head spinning. Instead of the "food" animal playing the part of the Edible Seductress—a reality we have, alas, grown familiar with—the pig almost appears to be calling the shots. So complete is the upending of the long-standing belief system that the hackneyed double entendre (racks for ribs and breasts) here serves to degrade actual women and not sows or cows.

Is this the day the animals have waited for? The day their shackles fall to the floor? The day the animals see their former superiors servile and scraping?

Well, no. Let's not get carried away. The pig is merely exhibiting a new motivation for self-sacrifice. The barbekooks have told him of the sexual pleasures he will sample—with humans!—if he only signs here on the dotted line. Like a deal with the devil, this arrangement hardly works to the pig's favor. He'll end up just as dead as all the rest, they who were promised nothing more than death.

Firehouse BBQ Cook Off

We don't know what's going on with the institution of animal-staffed fire houses, but something's not right.

If it's not sexual shenanigans, it's blatant conflicts of interests such as those on display at this firehouse.

You can imagine how it plays out: The alarm rings. The firefighters spring into action, stepping into boots, grabbing hats from hooks, and climbing aboard the trucks. The firehouse door rises, and the trucks scream into the streets.

The firefighters race to fulfill their oaths, to face danger and destruction in the name of protecting the lives and… property of…

Hang on.

These pigs are in the game for something else entirely! All their equipment, all their training, all their tireless labor—they're not out to preserve. They're out to destroy! When fire strikes at security and safety, they see it as an opportunity not to protect, or even to snatch the garment of prideful heroism, but instead to cook pigs! No doubt they will fling themselves upon the burning eaves and smoking rafters. So off they charge, ribs held aloft in valorous imitation of Perseus holding high the writhing head of Medusa!

Beware, unlucky homeowners. You might be better off with a hose and some friends with buckets.

Naptown barBAYq

Ahoy there, spirit of adventure! What ho, joy of discovery! Be addressed nautically, thrill of conquest!

How eager the pig is to seek out new lands where he and his kind can be butchered, barbecued, and washed down with beer!

Setting out from old Annapolis, into the Chesapeake, the pig speeds along merrily.

It stirs one. It intrigues one. Let's be honest: it disgusts one. Because we see how much energy the pig has for this, how much passion he puts into it. (He's so excited, his chef's hat is floating!) And when we consider what all of his passion is being funneled into—that is, death—it takes the wind out of our sails.

Festival of Cruelty 16

It's time. Every 50 posts, we leave the childlike world of illusion and visit the land of brutal truth. We turn our backs on the calming lie of complicit animals who are accessories to their own murders and face squarely an unending anti-animal sentiment. (Our most most recent visit was, as always, sobering.)

Whiskered Dog BBQ: For the crime of being born animals, the chicken and pig have been imprisoned, saddled with balls-and-chains, and then allowed to escape. And all of this, the whole sordid circus—the corrupt courts, the vicious penal system—exists only so that they can be chased down by a dog police officer on a motorcycle and a cleaver-happy little girl. Are we alone in wondering (again, again, and again!) why the animals have to be brutalized, tormented, and ridiculed prior to being slaughtered and butchered? Justice deferred is justice denied! Or, you know, injustice deferred is still injustice.

(Would you believe that two previous festivals of cruelty—this one and this one—also feature images of canine predators on motorized vehicles hunting down pigs and chickens? They might, in fact, have been created by the same artist.)


Jake Culpeeper's Cattle Company: Is Jake Culpeeper hiding his eyes, unable to confront his own cruelty?

No, we believe he is merely wiping away a single tear of mirth.

"Jump, cow! Lookit 'er go!"





Piping Hot: She must not only die. She must die a lingering death. She must die from a broken spirit, as much as from the severe burns, asphyxiation, or whatever trauma actually kills her in their enormous death chamber. The fans they have supplied are clearly intended as mocking imitations of mercy. Dying of thirst? Take this thimble topped to the brim with warm seawater. Dying of exposure to the freezing elements? Have a watchband. Starving to death? Here's a photo of a single kernel of corn. Likewise, the cow slowly dying within a makeshift torture apparatus.



Louie's Chicken Shack: Down at Louie's, they got a lumberjack/Quebecois fur trader who delights in hacking off the chickens' heads out back. They don't even have to pay him. He just shows up, sharpens the axe, and gets to it. When he's ankle-deep in heads, he wipes down the blade and goes home. It's a sweet deal for everyone.







Freestate Smokers: Free state, huh? They sure do have a sense of humor out in Maryland. It's not so free for the "food" animals. Sure, they're free to burst out of the smokers. They're free to be wracked with fear and anxiety. But mostly they're free to shut up and die.

Heavenbound BBQ

Let us take a moment from the concerns of the day to remember all that we do for pigs.

There are the trivial things, the earthly things, almost contemptible for their worldliness:

The feeding, the (temporary) housing, the (grudging) medical care.

But look higher! Cast your gaze to the spiritual fulfillment of the pigs. For it is here where humankind's drive to do right by pigs really shines! By killing and eating pigs with such care and gusto—and with an admirably monstrous frequency—we free them from this world of muck and mire. Free, free, so many pigs free! More than a billion pigs a year! It's monumental, an operation alight with the zeal of a million missionaries.

We launch them to their eternal reward, so that they might cavort in the very bliss we so assiduously deny them down here.

Pork Chop on a Stick

It's all here. This one photograph embodies all the horror of the movement—Suicidefoodism—we have devoted these last years to documenting. An infected ideology smiles back at us from the photo.

The pig, about to become not merely food, but fun food, novelty food, carnival food, looks on with such good humor, such a gentle nature, that we should be shamed and driven to flee the vicinity of Rosemount, Minnesota. Knowing that his whole life has been a joke, still the pig encourages us with his eyes. "Take my chops," those trusting eyes seem to say. "Skewer them and eat up. Have a good time!"

What would it take for you to see yourself this way, as a mass of would-be meat wedges waiting only for convenient handles?

(Thanks to Dr. Jeff for the referral and the photo.)

Big Daddy's Q'n Crew

It's the ultimate expression of no-nonsense motivation. The pigs are challenging you. Do you care about pig meat as much as they do? Do you want to see them dead as much as they do? Are you as uninterested in their fate as they are?

Leave the guesswork to the weekend warriors. These guys here are seasoned professionals.

Or, well, maybe the two little pigs are petulant teenagers forced by their dad to work at carcass-cleaning and pig-cooking. We don't pretend to have all the answers.

We just know that these guys are heavily invested in the whole dying thing.

BlackMustard Barbecue Slather

All too often, animals are made to serve as pawns, puppets to express the darkness dwelling within our hearts. Cartoon effigies are created and dressed in the garb of the willing victim, made to wriggle their danse macabre when it suits us. These depictions are drawn as the mouthpieces of our obsessions. We put the script before them, a gun to their heads, so they might speak our sermons for us.

How refreshing it would be to hear from genuine animals, directly, to know their own authentic thoughts, unfiltered by our preconceptions, unhidden by the palimpsest of our competing desires!



















Oh.

Yes, well.

Butt Rubbers BBQ

Does it just get your blood pumping and your juices flowing? Sex and death—the Great Positive and Negative of existence, the Creator and the Destroyer—have been rejiggered and reengineered so many times we barely even know what we're looking at anymore.

As we have asked before, what is the purpose of images like this? What would they drive us to do? How, exactly, are they meant to inflame us?

Does this one inspire procreative or all-destroying impulses? Does it prompt some viewers to imagine sexual conquest, while others imagine shoving the sow into the flames? Are some led to imagine both?

A puzzle: If they know nothing else, the barbecultists know that "pork butt" does not come from the former animal's rump. They know it comes from the pig's shoulder. So why, one may well wonder, do we see so many depictions conflating pork butt with the anatomy of callipygian women? We think we know the answer, but it frightens us.

Belly Busters BBQ

This bloated figurehead, this depraved emblem of the anti-animal worldview, has a magic talisman: his obscene girth, his grossly distended form. It is a source of endless pride. And why?

"Why?" you ask?

To you, we say, "Why not!"

It's as though he has accepted the whole institution of meat-eating—swallowed the entire enterprise, you might say—and transformed it into flesh. He has appropriated the engine of his own destruction! He lives by becoming one with the forces arrayed against him! His pride is the pride of the survivor. But no—he doesn't merely survive. He transcends! He dominates by being dominated! He contains a multitude of enemies. He preserves and memorializes the refutation of himself. He has become a temple to his own worthlessness, his body its wheezing altar.

And this is the story told by his cartoonishly untenable physical state. It is a tale of supreme satisfaction.

Every day, each steppingstone on the pathway to his doom, is a kind of victory. A very strange and very, very meaningless victory.

Alligator Bob's

We don't need to bring up the list, do we? The roster of all the animals we've documented here in their ceaseless bid for death?

There's the Unholy Trinity (cows, pigs, and chickens), of course. And turkeys, geese, ostriches, and emus. Sheep and goats and buffaloes. Whales, fish, crabs, lobsters, crawfish, shrimp, octopuses, squids, clams, and oysters. Even sea urchins, ants, spiders, and worms. Kangaroos! Rabbits! Snakes! Bears! And don't forget the dog! (Search for them all on the site. Make an afternoon of it!)

Sometimes we have the feeling that all of creation is clamoring to die, to be rendered instantly forgotten. We must admit to a certain professional thrill when we find a hitherto unaccounted-for animal knocking on the great black door. So it is with a sour kind of excitement-mixed-with-depression that we present to you Alligator Bob and his reptilian lackey.

The gator is all about the business of being turned into food. He wears the toque. He's got the dipping ladle at the ready. He just wants to die in his brothy little swamp.

The look on his face seems to say, "Don't forget about the alligators! We are sick to death of living, too! We too hope to find our fulfillment, at last, when we have finally abandoned these bodies!"

We know mental illness is at work, festering in his brain, but for a moment, a foolish, fleeting moment, we almost feel happy for the poor thing.

(Thanks to Dr. Bea for the referral.)

Turkey Farmers of Canada

You know those hilarious "Eat mor chikin" cows? (Hold on. We have to stop laughing. Almost. Just a sec. Okay. We're good.) Those scamps are "funny" because they are desperate to avoid being killed and eaten. They're just like people, what with their instinct for survival and their fear of pain. It's adorable!

This tom here is humorous in a whole different way. A whole different way we've only seen about a thousand times before.

Like the cows, the Canadian turkey edits a sign to upend the status quo. Of course, the system he wants to topple is the barbecue orthodoxy, which holds that turkeys aren't suitable ingredients. So you can understand the urgency.

The turkey derives meaning only from his desirability as a foodstuff. His one-bird crusade may seem quixotic. Irrational. Stupid. Insane. (We could go on.) But it's really the logical outcome of living in greater Suicidefoodistan.

(Thanks to Dr. Ken for the referral and the photo.)

Indian Emu Life

Aw, just look at this little guy.

His eyes wide with innocence. His frank, good-natured face. His smile so ripe with gratitude.

It has to do with knowing that the world he has been born into—the world of Indian Emu Life Pvt. Ltd.—has been engineered expressly for the efficient exploitation of all his constituent parts. His thigh meat, yes, naturally, but it goes further than that. IEL has so much more to take from him: his feathers ("largely used for making pads, dusters, masks, and car cleaning brushes"), his "body leather," his "nails," and an oil derived from his fat, which can "protect the hair and scalp from dandruff."

This is why the emu chick, in his dawning moments of sentience, bubbles with pleasure. It's all for him! The compound surrounded by chain-link fencing, the iron or cement poles. (?) Everything has been made with him—or, more properly, the extraction of his bodily components—in mind. It gives him a feeling of safety and security. Peace, even.

And so, happy and humbled, he kicks off his eggshell and strides into life!







Addendum: We assigned the ostrich label to this one. Close enough.

Mama's Real Good Chicken

Are you surprised to learn of the long tradition of parents offering up their young for your gustatory enjoyment?

(Ducks do it. Pigs do it. Cows do it!)

We know we shouldn't find it remarkable that chickens engage in this hideous custom too. But we do, we do. We might have supposed—a nagging sense of decency still resisting everything we've seen here—that this practice couldn't continue.

Still, the evidence is plain: Some mama chicken has transmuted her motherly pride into a bloody campaign of poultricide.

Unless… You don't suppose this is just another example of birds happy to be raised, killed, packaged, and marketed by humans, to humans?