I wish we had saved your plate that day.

BarcelonaYou must have been very small, but you were already talking like a little man, perched on the wooden chair, stirring the plate and asking us if that piece of meat would grow back, the suckling pig.

That day we taught you that discriminating against nonhuman animals was natural, normal, necessary. Just as it had been instilled in us before, we inoculated you with the mother of all violence, of all oppression. This is how Gary Yourofsky explains it: first you learn to discriminate against nonhuman animals, then against women, then against those of a different skin color, then against those of a different sexual orientation… You now know how to dehumanize the other, the weak, the different. Speciesism, that is, discrimination based on species, is the root of all violence.

No child is born predisposed to discriminate against any animal. In fact, children barely realize that a cat or dog is a member of another species while playing when they're young. They're simply companions and love each other as friends, as siblings. This also happens very often among non-human animals of different species. And on family farms around the world. It's easy to find videos of children crying desperately, clinging to their non-human friend to prevent their parents from taking it to the slaughterhouse or killing it on the farm itself. People who have experienced this at home have either hardened themselves or—I know of some cases—have become vegans.

Now I feel like I was late. This was just before I decided not to eat animals, and who knows if your reflection also prompted me to stop. Over the years, I've understood much better what speciesism is and the extent to which our civilization has been built, and is sustained every minute, every passing second, on violence against animals. We have condemned them to live in a hell that never ends. The eternal Treblinka, according to Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer: "For animals, all humans are Nazis," he wrote.

Little by little, I understood the violence that eggs and dairy products also embodied, but you were already eating them. Look, it's easy to understand that to take a mother's milk, you must first take her child away, but speciesism blinds us to suffering. The calf, still a child like you, will go to the slaughterhouse. And while the mother cries, her suffering will be made into cheese and ice cream. Then, she will be forcibly impregnated again, and history will repeat itself until, exhausted, she no longer produces enough milk. Then her life will be taken too; she will have lived a quarter of what she could have lived in freedom. And the eggs? Confinement, mutilations, a production rate tenfold that of nature, and the crusher where the male chicks are brought down during their first hours of life.

Now you know all these things. Now you know that this bloodthirsty, money-grubbing industry exploits mostly nonhuman children.

I wish we had saved our plate that day. I wish the blindfold had fallen from our eyes that day, I wish you had taught us to be just people and not the other way around.

Because I arrived late, I now find myself fighting in the crossfire of omnipresent propaganda. The arrows of a ruthless economic interest that preys on animals, the planet, and people pierce you like everyone else, as do those of habit, custom, and false beliefs. And I continue to strive to educate you in anti-speciesism, to free you from infamy and break the main chain of transmission of the greatest atrocity perpetrated by humanity: the one passed, uncritically, from parents to children.