Zephyr here,

>I think that anyone who believes that being slaughtered does not involved
>pain, terror, sadness and suffering would have been convinced otherwise
>had s/he been there that morning.

I'm sure that what you saw and what you felt are deeply valid and sincere
feelings.  I just wonder about something.  Why is it that everything that
is born dies?  Soil, which grows all our food, is a teeming realm of birth
and death.  Bugs, worms, micro-organisms in a mad, harmonious dance of
eating, birthing, living, shitting, dying, eating shit, eating life, eating
death, shitting shit, shitting death, living, dying, day in day out.
Plants live on this meditation of death and life.  We and other animals eat
plants.  Our bodies are constantly birthing, dying, eating, shitting,
birthing, eating, dying.  After a longer cycle we die.  We're eaten either
by large animals, bugs or bacteria.  Thrown back into the soil.  The sun
keeps pumpin' in energy to keep the whole cycle going.  So, how is death
bad?  How is even killing bad, wrong, immoral, unnatural?  I just don't
think it is.

I think there are aware ways to commune with death and separating,
objectifying, ignorant, and hateful ways to be with death.  These
definitely produce different sets of experience, karma, life, culture, etc.
 But I really want to implore you and other vegans/vegetarians to look
deeper into the process of life/death/birth/eating/shitting.  What are your
projections, fantasies, anthropomorphisms, and naivetes.  Even more so,
look how the urban vegan lifestyle creates so much more havoc, death,
deforestation, and transportation than an earth-based tribal culture that
hunts or herds animals for food and partakes directly in the mystery of
life/death/birth/eating/shitting without flinching or intellectualizing or
becoming insensitively calloused.  Enter into the true life cycle, come out
of the house, the super or farmers market.  Give up your car and computer;
or give up the ethical vegan rap.  Is eating and killing to be shunned and
avoided or embraced with open heart, grief, celebration, awe, and
nourishment?

Every day's a holyday,

Zephyr