a whole new exciting way to avoid admitting that eating meat is wrong!

An article from October in the New York Times addresses the new "foodie" trend of butchering as art. The classes and seminars (only for the rich, it seems--one internship is 10,000$) feature people who want to know where their food is coming from, what happened to it, and ensure its purity. It seems that these are mostly people who recognize the ethical issues inherent to the killing of sentient beings for their flesh, and are trying to avoid actually confronting the problem. One girl says:

“I feel like if I’m going to eat meat... I don’t want to eat stuff that I haven’t had to work for.”

Does "working for" something you find morally questionable make it any better? Or does it just distract you from the fact that the practice does not sit well with you? The sense of having come through an ordeal--challenging oneself--can be reward enough to overlook the initial problem entirely. Simply proving you can watch an animal die doesn't change the fact that the animal dies.

Killing someone with your hands doesn't change the fact that you're killing someone. No matter how humane you are, you're still taking something of theirs--their most important of all somethings, everything they have--for the minor human pleasure of bacon.

One participant wrote, powerfully:

Animals do not want to die... They can feel pain and fear, and, just like us, will struggle to breathe for even one single more second. If you’re about to run 250 volts through a pig, do not look it in the eyes. It is not going to absolve you.