The Half-hearted Homesteader

Ever since reading the Omnivore’s dilemma I have been thinking alot about Michael Pollan’s defense of carnivores. Although his latest book suggests a simple, somewhat vegetarian mantra (Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants), Om Dil argued convincingly for meat-eaters’ rights. I had the sense that he began his argument from a desire to eat meat, instead of assessing all the data and then coming to a logical conclusion. Rather in the same way the George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq, then figured out a bunch of bullshit reasons.

The thing that really stuck with me from that book was Peter Singer’s suggestion that in 150 years or so humans might well look upon the eating of animals in the same way that we now look upon the keeping of slaves. Its a powerful suggestion.  And its easy to see how this could happen, especially when you start looking at some of the literature of animal rights, going back a few years even to George Orwell’s Animal Farm in which the humans come across as Nazis bent on extermination.

hey ewe

Orwell wasn’t the only one to make this connection (and its only completely valid with modern intensive animal operations like Concentrated Animal Feed Operations –CAFOs–although there’s an element of the death camp even in larger ”family farms”–more below).  Alan Weisman describes in The World Without Us how humans have the dubious distinction of causing the mass extermination of species after species through their relentless hunting.  Even the “traditional” tribal societies who are often described among the cogniscenti as being much lighter on the earth than us White Men, waged a relentless war against animals. About 10,000 years ago America was home to “super mammals” the like of which the earth has never seen: Ground Sloths the size of Elephants; Mammoths the size of several Elephants; wolf’s that make Africa Lions look like Labradors, Lions as big as rhinos. Not long after the arrival of Clovis Man (our brainy, upright ancestor) these animals were history, yet they continued to live on in other places where Clovis didn’t get to, for some 5000 years before dying out. Then fast forward a few centuries to the scene in Cormack McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in which “the Kid” follows a pack of Buffalo hide hunters, and encounters plains strewn with the butchered remains of hundreds, or thousands of buffalo–a scene to make a Native American weep.

So Man has been the bane of animals’ existence since he first came down from the trees; a kind of super ape with a taste for blood. Although it seems clear that we did hunt and kill alot,  Jeffrey Masson, in his book The Face on the Plate, discusses work among anthropologists and paleo-anthropologists that suggests maybe we did not evolve to eat meat, but were actually better suited to plants. Our mouths are small compared to most carnivores, our jaws certainly not designed to rip flesh from live prey like other predators. And our teeth are grinders of plants more than slicers of meat. 

We are then, one of the only creatures on the earth that does not know, exactly, what it should eat.

Is there any wonder that I felt so conflicted when I slaughtered 50 chickens over a couple of weeks last summer? Yes, you do get numbed to it after a while, but the question is, should we? The Nazis probably became numbed to incincerating people in the camps. Repetition does that, even with killing.  Due to the power of denial, all behavior can become normal. But deep-down, something just felt wrong about running the knife across the chicken’s throat and stepping back while it went into its death-throes,wildly flapping and spraying blood. I even closed the barn door while I did it, or did it at night to hide this indecency from the kids. Although we aspire to a kind of truthiness in agriculture, it was just too gruesome to want little children to see, suggested a kind of brutality I did not want them to associate with me.

"Processing"

The fact is that all creatures want to live, and in eating them we come into conflict with this awkward truth. One reason we started raising our own meat was to get a handle on what, exactly, it meant to eat meat. Another was to eat stuff that was not reared in conditions that are unnacceptable on all sorts of levels. But when you think about the basic conflict between the farm animals and us, even the “family farm,” that bucolic fantasy of wholesomeness, is essentially death row, where all animals, pig, and sheep, and cow and chicken, are more than likely to meet a sticky end, against their wishes, and the time spent there is time fattening up for the pot.

bantams

We even have a dillemma with the laying hens. We bought 25, lost a couple the first spring, and know that in a couple of years they will all slow down their laying and eventually stop. Then there will be little choice but to get rid of them. Some people turn them into stock. Perhaps we could slow cook them. But there is not much meat on these birds, so it looks like we will be faced with a massive slaugher–of the birds that the kids have spent two or three years getting to know and love. Why? because they can’t sing for their supper–not even these birds who have been selectively bred over centuries to lay far more than their wild ancestor, the Wild Burmese Jungle Fowl, ever laid (20 or so eggs in a life time).

silver-laced wyandottes

Killing animals has always nauseated me. I remember the first time I shot something with a BB gun, at the age of eleven or twelve. I went out before dinner with my Webley .177.  I wandered away from our house into the lightly wooded pasture and through the orchard. It was twilight, and a few birds were still out. I came across a starling about thirty foot up on a branch. I shot it out of the tree, but because of the feebleness of the gun, and my inability to get the pellet between the bird’s eyes, I only winged it.  I then stalked it about half a mile, as it tried vainly to escape. Finally it went under a gate and into a sheep field. I put the barrel on the gate and sighted at the bird’s head and flattened it in the grass.  Upon inspection I had made a mess of that bird that a few minutes before was minding its own business and probably gathering food for its young. I went back to the house for supper with no feelings of satisfaction, no pride in the kill, and ate a very meagre meal.

I’ve had that same feeling dozens of times since. Perhaps hundreds. I went on to slaughter more starlings with that Webley. I once shot a fly catcher, sort of by accident, an Ancient Mariner moment.  Then I graduated to a 20 gauge shot gun and went after rabbit, duck, pheasant, pigeon, grouse.  But large mammals, thankfully, I have never felled.

skinny

What is interesting to me, however, is that the feeling of numbness never totally left. I think this is part of the sense of denial that Masson talks about in his book. On some level we know that this taking of life is somehow wrong. I don’t necessarily say wrong in an objective sense, because I cannot be sure that it is “morally” wrong, at least by some objective sense of morality. But for somewhat sensitive souls (as children, we are all sensitive souls, some lose it, others do not completely) there is an underlying unease with our taking of animal life, at least in both the senseless and systematic ways that we are want to take it. Yet we repress these feelings, and are taught to do so by persistent cultural training. We cover the origins of the meat, and we lie to our children’s questions about the origin of their food.

We had a rooster, briefly. Like all roosters he went psycho and started attacking the kids. I told them I would deal with him, and I shot him and put him in the crock pot. He was a Polish bantam, not really designed for eating.  But he was less than a year old, so not too tough. The kids seemed pleased that I had killed him, having both been attacked at some point  by him, andI made no secret of that fact that I had done so. That was why at dinner that night, when Conrad asked innocently, Is this King? I told him Yes, without flinching. I was not sure whether his mum had told him we were eating His Majesty, but I thought it was likely. I was a bit surprised when Conrad pushed the plate away.

king

In a sense I took this as evidence of our confusion about eating. Yes, Conrad was happy that King was gone–he was a vicious bastard, and for small children he posed a real threat, with those spurs. But he was uneasy about the prospect of eating him, as if it was taboo, as if it was, somehow, just plain wrong.

So to sum up for today: its tough eating animals. Maybe we shouldn’t. But then again, we have for a long, long time. And anyway, what would become of all those domesticated animals if we let them go? Not pretty. One thing is for sure, all the industrial shit has to stop. For them, for us, for the planet. Please!! In the meantime, perhaps Pollan is right: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

grass