Pigs like this one were victims at the county fair.

Earlier this year I put on my activist hat for cats and dogs and helped to staff a booth at a local central California county fair. The purpose of the booth was to raise awareness about our small city’s shelter and our efforts to reduce the number of unwanted and stray animals. We were having a fund-raiser, selling raffle tickets, and helping people sign up for low-cost spay and neuter vouchers. We had some puppies there, and we talked to people about the realities of caring for the city’s many strays in a time of budget cuts and foreclosures. Our booth was productive, and it was exciting and effective to be part of this fair, which is well attended by both locals and people from out of town. Everyone can benefit from the message, and some might carry it back to their own towns and cities and end up getting involved in their own local efforts. I was proud to be there and happy to have the company of my fellow animal advocates.

And those are the only good things I can say about this county fair. In almost every other aspect, it was a house of horrors for animals.

Call me a coward, but I purposefully avoided picking up a schedule of events for the fair. I moved from Ithaca, New York, to central California just over a year ago, and although upstate New York is a rural area with agriculture and farms aplenty, I had lived most recently inside city limits, and for several years had not been directly exposed to the harsh realities of animal agriculture that are all around me here: on my runs, on my drives, on the freeways, and in the news. Let’s just say that I’ve had some difficulty adjusting, and although I face these horrors head on and without denial, I still find that I need to limit my exposure at times while my constitution hardens enough to bear witness again without an overwhelming and nearly unmanageable emotional response.

I had biked to the fairgrounds two days before the fair officially opened to help set up the booth and prepare for four days of advocacy. Already, farmed animals were being gathered. I saw 4H and FFA participants leading cows and pigs about, grooming and caring for them, and working with them so that they could show them and earn high marks for whatever it is that these animals are judged on at these contests. Some of what they’re judged for is “market quality”–their weight, muscle mass (“meatiness”), and appearance for prospective purchasers. The fair is an opportunity for farmer wanna-bes to participate in the raising and selling of livestock. The stands were full of people, and an announcer’s voice called out names and numbers. The arena and surrounding barns were alive with the sounds of young animals, and although those sounds brought delight to my heart, they also filled me with dread, because I knew that they were voices that would soon be silenced.

And it wasn’t long before word of their demise started trickling to me, despite my best efforts to avoid it. Constant questions such as “How did you do with your pig?” and “Did you sell your pig?” floated between visitors to our table. One teen told me a story about how his brother failed to file his paperwork in time to participate, which required them to slaughter his pig right away. His pig and his brother’s pig were siblings, brother and sister. It took them three shots to drop the sister. The first ill-placed shot damaged her nerves, causing her to flail and flop around in the pen as she tried to escape her attackers. Her brother observed the whole episode from his feed trough. I can only imagine the squealing and the blood. The kid told me that his pig, the surviving brother, didn’t eat for two weeks after this episode, losing weight and threatening his own participation in the fair. The boy could only conceive that the pig was traumatized by his sister’s death and the fear that it raised within him. Yeah, you think so?

During the fair his pig was reunited with yet another of his siblings, and even after months apart, the two animals recognized each other, nuzzling and grunting with familiarity. He was amazed by this and commented that it forced him to see his pig differently. He had been instructed not to make his pig a pet, and although he hadn’t, he said he felt sadness at the prospect of the animal’s sale (and butcher). I told him that he shouldn’t push those feelings away and that he was not obligated to continue to participate in a system that produced such mixed emotions. He seems unlikely to change his mind now, but I tried to plant some seeds.

Other incidents continued to throw the local culture’s disregard for farmed animals into sharp relief. One man came up to our booth and asked three times whether we were affiliated with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Thinking that he had heard about the organization’s shameless acceptance of donations meant for shelter animals when the organization itself shelters not a single being, I assured him that we were in no way affiliated with them. Turns out he was bent about their television ads that depicted dairy farmers moving downed cows with backhoes and forklifts to get them into the slaughterhouse. “Not a single dairyman does that to his cows,” he stated emphatically. “I believe in humane treatment of animals.” He was all butt-hurt about HSUS supposedly making dairymen out to be bad people.

As a representative of a local shelter group, I decided not to get into the cruelties of even “humane” dairy farming, but I did respectfully disagree with his assertion. Someone is moving cows that way, I assured him, even if it wasn’t him or anyone he knows. I personally know people who have seen it with their own eyes. I steered the conversation back to the city’s companion animals but inside I couldn’t help but wonder why he directed his anger at HSUS rather than at the cretins who treated animals in ways that he professed to disagree with vehemently. But dairymen and agricultural animal abusers are like cops: they stick together even when some of their own are breaking the law right out in the open. The media has dubbed it the blue curtain in law enforcement. In animal agriculture, it’s a red curtain that represents the bloody and brutal lives of sentient beings that flow away on the slaughterhouse floor.

Yet other discomforting news reached me during my stint at the fair. Early in the schedule an event called the Barnyard Scramble took place. In this grotesque contest, ducklings and possibly other animals are released, and 4- through 8-year-olds are invited to chase down and catch the animal of their choice. At the end of the contest, children can keep the animals they’ve captured or trade them in for tickets to the carnival rides and games. One family that came up to the booth included a young girl who, her mother told me, wanted to be a veterinarian. “She loves animals,” she said. “She can’t even stand to watch the barnyard scramble with the little ducks getting trampled on and stuff.” My heart just sank. I know how clumsy kids can be, especially in haste and excitement. It’s not their fault, but putting small animals under their feet is just asking for grisly mishaps. Who conceives of such a contest? The same people who enjoy bullfights, kangaroo boxing, and bear fights, I suspect.

Either way, this contest is pathetic on two levels, the first being the abject disregard for the lives of animals, and the second being the cruelty of giving young animals to kids, the majority of whom, I suspect, are unprepared for the acquisition of a pet like a duck and even more of whom live in urban settings wholly unsuited for such an animal’s well-being. Furthermore, the California Criminal Code section 599 clearly outlines such contests as illegal. More on that in an upcoming blog post.

The worst of this county fair came on the last day of the fair, Sunday. When I rode into the gates in the late afternoon, the atmosphere was completely different. The arena and the barns were absolutely silent, empty, and devoid of activity. No one—not a person, not an animal—was there. Even the amusement section of the fair was still sparse at that time of day. The only sound I heard was someone playing the blues. It was so fitting.

I helped staff the booth until closing time. Two of the four puppies we had brought had been adopted, and we had earned a nice amount of money in our fund-raiser. All the raffle prizes had been claimed. All four days of the fair had been a rousing success for our organization. Right after we had mostly broken down our booth, an acquaintance of my fellow volunteers arrived at the table, and while I was fetching my bicycle, the conversation must have turned to farmed animals. “Do you know how many calves I’ve smacked across the forehead?” he bragged. “Once I hit one so hard that its eyeball fell out, and it was still alive.” He was smiling jovially. To their credit, the other volunteers offered up a weak, “You’re at the wrong table to talk about that stuff,” but they might have said that because they noticed that I had returned just in time to hear that part of the conversation. I don’t really know: They support 4H, FFA, and the use of animals for food. I don’t think they would support abuse, but then again, their close relations brutally slaughtered a pig in front of her brother, so clearly they support some cruelties but just not others.

I left the fair building then, filled with hatred and disgust for the boastful abuser who showed not a shred of compassion for those he killed. He is, to me, a sociopath. Anyone who does that is a sociopath or must surely become one through such acts. As I rode back through the gates, darkness had gathered in the fields and parking lots around the fairgrounds, but the arena remained lit, as it had every other night of the fair. On that night, however, the lights shone on desolation. Heaps of straw could still be seen lining the dirt, but the hooves that had beaten them down throughout the fair were prominently missing. The difference was so stark, and for me, spirits lingered—the spirits of all of the animals who had suffered there or were now suffering at the hands of others.

I rode away with sadness, relieved that the fair was finally over.