Slaughter God
Powerful bronzed arms. Whiskers. A pair of blazing eyes. This was Ku Yenlung, known far and wide as the king of the cattle butchers. People would rather have run into a tiger than Ku Yenlung. He was called Slaughter God.
Slaughter God had two sons, just like their father. They were strong and rough. The neighbors were careful to stay out of their way. Not only that, but their mother, Mrs. Ku, was skilled with a butcher's knife, too. She could kill a cow as quickly and neatly as her husband.
This frightening family lived in a big, sparsely furnished wood house. The father and mother slept on a brass bed, but the boys slept on the floor. They kept a big stump in the house as a chopping block to kill cows on. The only other decoration was strips of meat hanging from hooks in the windows. Legs, heads, tails, and all the other parts of cattle's anatomy hung from the hooks.
With the whole family at work, naturally they killed a lot of cattle. Then one day, Slaughter God complained that his eyes hurt. He went to see all the doctors he could find, but none of them could do anything for him. Before long, he was totally blind.
Shortly after that, Mrs. Ku came down with a strange ailment. The skin all over her body seemed to rot and crack. She was in such pain that she could barely stand to get dressed. Even the touch of her cotton clothes seemed like the scraping of a knife.
One night, when her maid, Shen, was taking care of her, she heard the old lady say, "It's the court of Hell. They're teaching me how cattle suffer when we skin them for food.
"I never knew! Even when they're dead, their souls can feel the pain of the knife, the heat of the cooking fire. What agony! Oh, it hurts! It hurts! I wish it would stop!"
Shen was terrified, but there was nothing she could do to stop the torture that Mrs. Ku created for herself by years of mistreating animals.
Cattle never hurt anyone. In the old days, they pulled our ancestors' carts, and in many parts of the world, they plowed the fields. Is it fair to slaughter such nice animals?