Severing involves cutting off limbs.
Sever is a verb that refers to cutting off the extremities of something . The term, from the Latin circinare , can also refer to shortening or reducing something , whether physically or symbolically.
For example: “After catching the shark, the man did not hesitate to cut off its fin to display it as a trophy” , “The murderer first shot the victim, then hit him with a stick and finally he dedicated himself to cutting off his upper extremities” , “ “The owner of the company asked to cut expenses to avoid greater losses.”
Sever a body
Severing or severing can be applied to a human or animal body. If we take the case of a psychopath who, in addition to killing his victims, decides to cut off their arms and legs as if it were a ritual, it can be said that this criminal cuts off those he kills.
A hunter also often cuts off his prey. A man who hunts a wild boar and prepares to eat it must take a series of steps before being able to cook its meat . One of them will be to sever the animal, separating its limbs.
Symbolic use of the concept
The narrowing can be carried out on issues that are not material, such as a budget or a time period . The people in charge of earning money in a family group can ask others to cut down on superfluous expenses so that everyone can travel on vacation in the summer.
In a similar sense, the organizer of an arts festival can curtail a singer's performance time , limiting it to half an hour versus the originally planned 45 minutes.
To market them as food, animals are cut off by humans.
Cutting up animals for food
This term highlights a phenomenon that unfortunately characterizes us: the same acts of violence that we repudiate between human beings, we accept as normal and necessary when the recipients are animals of other species. In the previous examples, it is shown that the use of the verb to cut off between people can only occur if the person doing it is a psychopath, a murderer, or a sick person.
However, if the mutilated being is a non-human animal, there is no social problem: no one in their right mind would show a child a video of one person cutting off another person's arms, but the most normal thing is for the entire family to go to the supermarket and walk among the meat refrigerators, where a wide variety of cuts are displayed and even some animals that retain a very similar appearance to what they had before they were killed, as is the case with pigs.
But the contradiction cannot only be seen when there are children involved: except for individuals with vocations related to medicine, it is not normal for someone to be able to endure a scene of extreme violence, which includes the mutilation of a human being, although the majority of people normally chop the meat they buy into neatly labeled trays.
How can we explain such a difference in reaction, especially considering that many human beings feel a very deep attachment to dogs, cats and horses, for example, which are not so different from cows, pigs and chickens? Two fundamental factors stand out in the answer, which are culture and market organization.
On the one hand, we are taught from a young age that meat is necessary for our diet, that it has a large number of properties that we cannot find in vegetables, which is why we depend on it to live; This has been shown to be untrue in more than one study, as there are many vegan people who lead healthy lives without touching a single animal product .
Regarding the way in which the market is organized, animals are not killed in front of consumers, but rather the entire exploitation process, which includes torture such as overcrowding, occurs on a level that for many is almost abstract; The media shows us a smiling cow, happy to give us milk and meat, and we accept it because it is more comfortable than seeking the truth and going against centuries of customs.