Starving myself was not something I had a talent for. I resisted a day and then two but I then tested the water from a stream and it tasted alright. The strips of meat were still hanging and had dried considerably. I checked on them because those were the only food I had left. Starving hurt and I had never hurt myself before, not when the only solution I knew of was right there for the taking. I ate ... meat.
Things got fuzzy after that. The meat had turned bad or it got poisoned too by the white dust.
I was moaning and suffering under my tent and my thoughts took me to weird places.
I remembered seeping into all the minds of the imprisoned creatures that still crawled through mud and faeces. The ones that were not being killed right away.
It was so disturbing to see them contrasting to the lives that animal companions lead. Why such a distinction? It surely wasn't the complexity of feeling; a pig's and a dog‘s minds had felt almost the same to me.
It is a known thing that they are comparatively intelligent. They were still being treated so differently. Most pets were cared for, if not revered. Race animals got groomed but the cruelty was still there. Could there be any kind of influence over an animal that can be the right or acceptable thing to do?
My mind spun and fuzzed at the edges and I dreamed of being stuck in a cage that would not let me turn around. I could only lay down or stand up and my piglets struggled on the messy floor. A few of them were already dead...
Dead, like I was dead. I was thrown in a chamber and as I breathed in, my chest burned. I screamed and screamed and thrashed along with other pigs. I could not fight this. Nothing to bite, nowhere to run. I breathed and I died, and then I died again.
In the open, too much light and too exposed. I flip and gasp but there is no water. Hands wrap around my slippery body and slap me on a hard surface. It hurts but the hands move fast and then it hurts so much more. My head is cut off in a single slice. I gasp and gasp and my head is being rolled into a bucket full of gasping faces. I gasp but there is nothing to breathe for.
I gasp as the rescue team shove me onto a stretcher and prepare me to be lifted to the helicopter. I gasp ... someone found me.
