Lambs and Lamb

The general public loves lambs.
Sheep farmers put every effort into seeing that lambs are born safely and that they then grow and flourish.
Yet much of the public eats lamb.
Yet sheep farmers sell a quantity of their lambs to be killed and eaten.
There seems to be dissonance here. 

It would appear that there are ‘two minds’. One mindset of valuing lambs and seeing them as precious living creatures.  Another mindset of not minding lambs being killed, early in life, for reason of human wants: sheep farmers’ want to obtain income from selling lambs to be food; a sector of the population’s wish to eat flesh and organs of lamb. 

Of course, a proportion of lambs are not sold by sheep farmers to be eaten. Those lambs left to grow up are being kept for breeding: to make next generations of sheep. These are the lucky ones. 

Lambs for breeding reach adulthood. Those lambs to be eaten have a life so foreshortened that they never get beyond infanthood to have the rest of experience of life - that of being adult. 

What forms the definition of a lamb is a sheep which has an age from day of birth to about a year. Slaughter of a lamb to be food can occur from 10 weeks to 12 months - or even stretching to 14 months, and with around 6 months being the most common time of slaughter.   

Let us ponder our ‘two mindedness’ about lambs. Let us consider about lambs and lamb, and what occurs in relation. And we might do so especially at this season of the year that is characterised by: young lambs abounding in fields: lamb being, for some humans, the chosen thing to eat at Eastertide.