For the love of animals

Our son no longer eats meat. He is five and understands that living beings can die. That really concerns him. Children should be told the truth. But if the truth is: there is no heaven and when we die, we disappear into eternal darkness, then you have a problem as a father. I tried to make reincarnation palatable to him. Unfortunately, the thought that he could be reborn as a pig and end up just like the schnitzel in his plate had a negative effect on his appetite for meat.

He just loves animals. However, he tends to think of his fluffy cats or Peppa Pig from the telly. He was born during the pandemic and got to know the artificial world before the real one, which is why he thinks it's the real one.

Last summer we visited a wildlife park where we saw lynx sleeping on a tree trunk in the distance. The red deer turned their backs on us. The wolf wasn't there at all. No wonder, our son prefers the animals on Netflix, which have thoroughly spoilt his appetite for meat with their droll behaviour and human traits.

But how do you react to this as an adult? Ideal parents would probably take the situation as an opportunity to switch to a vegetarian diet as a family. Unfortunately, we are not ideal parents. Or not yet. At the moment, my strategy is to eat my son's refused schnitzel myself.

At night, all the livestock I've devoured this week passes before my inner eye.

My wife takes a different approach. «Eat the schnitzel. It's soya,» I heard her say to him the other day. Firstly, the schnitzel wasn't made from soya. Secondly, our son has no idea what soya is. This shows what a desperate state we are in.

On top of that, my mother-in-law, for whom meat is a religion, feeds us meatballs, beef roulades and sausages by the kilo every week. Protein-rich food that is supposed to turn her grandson into one of the strongest men of his generation. What she doesn't know is that all of this blessed food ends up in the stomachs of his carers.

Never felt so bad

I've never eaten so much meat in my life. I've never felt so bad. Physically. And morally. At night, all the livestock I've devoured this week passes before my inner eye. All the lambs, chickens and pigs. I wave to them. Forgive me. If you can.

We are threatened by the moral super-GAU, also known as Greta Thunberg: on the one hand, the sinful lottery life of these unworthy creatures called parents. On the other, the virtuous purity of their child. This must not happen. We didn't make a child to be taught by it.

Our only chance is to compromise the guy. So he accepted Wienerli for a while, as he couldn't identify them with any animal. Eventually, however, he took offence and asked for a cucumber instead. I was beginning to despair when the story took a surprising turn. We were sitting in a restaurant. Our son was nibbling smugly on a carrot when he pointed with the vegetable at a guest at the next table: «What's he eating there?» - «That's a beef entrecote,» I explained. He nodded. «I want one of those too.»

Since then I have been relieved, because I know that our son is not a vegetarian at all. He's just a snob.