Meet the activists who say goodbye to the animals before they die.
My first slaughterhouse vigil. Yes, such a thing does exist. In Spain, for the last year; in other latitudes, for the last decade. The idea was born in Toronto. The first time you participate in one of them, the surprise is even greater than the first time you hear about them. Perhaps you, who are reading these two words – slaughterhouse vigil – together for the first time, are just as surprised. You would even be more so if you had been to one. A group of hard-core vegans, the kind who go as far as to replace the egg in the Spanish tortilla with chickpea flour, gather outside a slaughterhouse to "bear witness" to lambs, pigs, cows and chickens in the last moments of their lives, minutes before being slaughtered. They pet them, whisper kind words in their ears, give them drinks of water from plastic bottles... It may well be the first time in their lives that they are able to experience the kind side of human beings. The farewell sometimes brings on a catharsis. After saying their goodbyes to a flock of lambs, two girls hug each other and sob inconsolably for several minutes. In Spain they are called “vegan vigils”, or vigils of such species or other of livestock (cow vigil, lamb vigil, etc.), but in the English-speaking world, they don’t mince words as much: they’re called ‘slaughterhouse vigils’.
