Despite an avalanche of invitations, this year I decided to spend Christmas alone with myself. It is true that I have been suffering from a nasty cold for a week which has made me alert like a turtle suffering from muscular atrophy, but this temporary indisposition is in no way responsible for this Christmas which I am preparing to spend alone. No, if I generally hesitate to go out this evening of the year, it is to avoid the confrontation with the eating profligacy which very often characterizes it.
What a strange way to celebrate life when, from foie gras to capon, including snails and slices of smoked salmon, we only gorge ourselves on the carcasses of dead animals. To what moral cowardice do we stoop when, to satisfy our appetites, we massacre such a large number of animals that it would take centuries and centuries to inventory them? How can we take pleasure in tasting the flesh of these animals which, without our unquenchable thirst for blood and death, would continue to inhabit our forests or populate our meadows?
Never like Christmas Eve have I felt so intensely this shame of belonging to a species which, even though it has no need, continues to joyfully massacre millions of innocent animals. Of these geese fattened just for the pleasure of tasting their livers, of these poultry sent by the millions to the slaughterhouse, of these decapitated salmon in enclosures barely large enough to allow them to grow, we make a feast, a feast, yelps of joy which by their obscenity end up resembling the squeals of poor animals needlessly murdered.
If Christmas were truly Christmas, on this day more than any other, in the name of celebrating life, we should refrain from eating what death has taken away. Christmas is peace descending on Earth, the wish to see men and women fraternizing around a few common ideas, a moment of truce in an existence marked by the seal of war and violence.
How can we reconcile this spirit of naive joy with the massacre of atrociously killed animals? You have to be very blind not to understand that human beings will never achieve peace if they do not first renounce exploiting animal suffering. A world built on death can only lead to death. A society based on an unbridled consumption of dead flesh, dead for it, dead by it, can claim nothing except to maintain a perpetual cycle of violence from which it will never escape.
At Christmas, animals cry, people eat. Perhaps they eat so much to forget that they are eating. In order to sink into the intoxication of oblivion which forgives everything, weaknesses and cowardice, renunciations as well as failings, the mediocrity of lives where we go from death to death, without ever being stunned by a promise of light and lightness.
There is no Christmas spirit for animals. As if our fate was not linked to theirs. That our existences did not also depend on their well-being. Anyone who claims to love life and respect it cannot accept the idea of seeing other living beings die for them. It is no longer even a contradiction, but a divorce of the individual from himself. This is what Christmas is above all, a monstrous hypocrisy based on carnage, the carnival of animals sent to the slaughterhouse.
