On Urban Farming and Mental Instability

I have a question for all of you mental health professionals (it’s 6am, otherwise I’d call one that I know): What’s the term for someone who claims to love someone but kills them, claims to suffer gravely each time she kills, and also claims to "like" to kill and "feel like God" doing it?

It sounds to me like some kind of psychopathy.

Or urban farming.

In L.E. Leone’s "There Will Be Chicken Blood: The Gritty Truth About Urban Farming" (and thanks to Carnivorous Kitty for the tip), the author (who lives in the woods, not in the city) writes:

I’m a sweet girl, I swear! Every time, I cry like crazy. It’s not easy to swing the ax, but I do; then I kneel in the dirt, holding the body still while it flutters, and hyperventilate. It doesn’t take that long. There’s never as much blood as I think there’s going to be, either, which is vaguely disappointing. If I’m going to kill what I love, I want as much as possible to show for it, including ruined clothing.

Regarding whether killing is an essential evil for omnivores, she writes:

I can vouch for "essential." I can vouch for "omnivore." My brain and my body crave meat with my salad. In fact, I think I might die without it. For sure I’d go crazy. But, personally, I don’t know about "evil." I’ll own it: There’s a part of me that likes to kill. When I do what I do with a hatchet and a chicken, I feel like crap, and I feel like God. I feel alive and in love and closer than ever to death.

I wish I could say that this was all a joke–some kind of satire. But it’s real and there’s a lot more of it:

[S]he took it [a rooster named Twitchy] to the back porch and chopped off its head. “I cried,” she said. “I buried it. It was very sad. But then I realized that I could do it again and eat it.”

These people will teach you all about raising chickens, including helping you find the right one for your needs, as if you’re building a car online.

I always wonder what kind of person slaughters sentient nonhumans for a living. What’s going on in their heads that tells them their behavior is acceptable? They obviously see that the animals are in pain and anguish, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

I consider the (often illegal) immigrants working in slaughterhouses who are trying to feed their families and I can almost say that it’s a matter of survival for them. Perhaps all they are thinking about is how to get by, and they’re going to do whatever they need to in order to feed and clothe their families. (And let’s not forget they often get irreparably injured while working and don’t get proper–or any–medical care).

But then I think about this phenomenon of the educated (white, from what I have seen) middle-class that involves the purchase of sentient nonhumans to take their eggs and to kill them for their flesh, all when that is not necessary. And said educated middle classers then brag about enjoying the killing. That’s mighty troublesome to me. They cannot make any legitimate claim that they’re doing what they’re doing for survival. From how they themselves describe what they do, I wouldn’t call it farming–I’d call it sport or entertainment. They’re killing the animals because they like to. That’s a whole new, disturbing level of behavior absent of empathy and full of narcissism, yet painted as if it were a noble endeavor.

We must examine claims made by "urban farmers" the same way we examine claims made by slaughterhouse owners and workers. I don’t know which is worse: seeing animals as mere objects to be cut up for your profit and palate, or claiming to love them and then enjoying their slaughter.