Anja Bärmann carries a heavy, blood-smeared apron. Before she slaughters the pig, she tips herself on the wide brim of her cowboy hat and speaks a short "prayer", as she calls it. “You had a nice life. Thank you for letting us eat you.” Anja Bärmann loves her animals. But she also kills them.
Between fall of 2019 and summer of 2020 I spent several days at the Bärmann’s farm in the Black Forest in southern Germany. Together with journalist Christoph Wöhrle I witnessed the deaths of two pigs, a duck, a goat and a sheep. As a vegan, the process of abstraction and the ignorance that people eating meat show always baffles me – even more so after seeing how “ethical” meat is being produced. The cruelty of factory farming, inhumane to animals and humans alike, still is a long road from what Anja Bärmann does, though.