Zebra flings a book away and snorts angrily, causing its black nostrils to flare.
- What's the matter? You're not Zen today? Okapi wants to know.
- I can't today, grumbles Zebra and puts its forehead in beautiful, lengthwise striped wrinkles. - It simply doesn't make sense to me that one takes any – often invented – traditions as a justification for one's own ignorance and cruelty. Especially when one is supposedly "mindful".
- Now that sounds a bit like a round-about way of putting it. Doucement, Okapi tries to calm down.
- Ok, then think about how "doucement" one can slaughter an Easter lamb. The "traditional sacrificial animal". And how you even get the idea that you can only celebrate if you kill someone first.
Okapi nods with a worried expression and lets its ears circle in an elegant flowing movement. Then it struggles to come up with a suggestion: - Maybe some feel they only live when others die?
- Maybe. And another part must be plain and total repression. Zebra picks up the book again. - I strongly agree here, it says and reads. "The living animal is replaced by its dead flesh, the part of the individual, the uniqueness of each animal is sidelined. The animal person and their death become a blank space." And Carol Adams puts it like this: "Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes." And as she goes on to say, it's always about a person. Zebra pauses and throws the author a kiss across the pond. Satisfied, Zebra folds the book closed.
- So one suggestion would be to finally really understand Easter as a celebration of life and to rejoice in spring with other living beings, d'accord? asks Okapi.
- I couldn't agree more, says Okapi.
Carol Adams: The Pornography of Meat and The Sexual Politics of Meat