Speaking of Death Speaks of Us

I was­ sitting in a large tent at a sustainable agriculture fair, watching a butcher demonstrate how to section a lamb into primal cuts. After effectively and efficiently dismembering the freshly killed animal, he asked the crowd if we wanted him to cleave the skull and remove the brain. A tableful of women up front cheered and chanted to proceed with the cleaving. Their response discomfited me, the hooting as if at a sporting event. It was an example of how we have come to deal with death, like in a funhouse mirror, through a distorted lens.

Our companions in this landscape

Killing gracefully. How we approach the act, if not with reverence, at least with mercy, appears to have gone on an extended vacation. Our race has always butchered. Vegetarians and omnivores, organic farms and CAFOs alike — all are sustained on a pile of corpses.

But while I do accept butchery as the blood price of living on this planet, I do not accept that we should pay with a callous heart. As a farmer, I have butchered sheep, pigs, and chickens and ended the life of damaged and dying creatures. And as a sometime hunter, I have pulled the trigger. But never as a grown man, after kneeling on the ground with a yearling lamb cradled in my left hand and slicing the jugular with the knife in my right, have I jumped to my feet and offered a victorious high-five.

When I was a child, the excitement of a good hunt or fishing trip always engendered good-natured bragging and boasting. But never once did my father or anyone else in the party point at a dead deer and say, “Who’s laughing now, suckah?” To me, such over-the-top gloating is unseemly, unmanly. Yet it’s a behavior that seems all too prevalent on today’s social media, where a hunting victory results in a jokey post on Facebook before the blood has cooled on the autumn leaves.

Such gratuitous exulting seems an outgrowth of our urbanized world, a place peopled by inhabitants increasingly removed from the costs of their existence. A place where finding the respect and compassion seem to have gone wanting, where too many have wandered too far from the honorable path.

Finding the appropriate note in discussing death, particularly as it relates to farm animals, is difficult. Guests to the farm tend either to focus on the pastoral elements, divorced from the end results, or, like the women pounding the table for a good head-cleaving, engage in coarse talk that cheapens the lives we care for daily (“Ooh, look, bacon!”).

Both responses fit nicely into our world of industrialization. A world of factory farms and factory-like educational systems, work, and purchases; a world in which life is lived on an assembly line of experiences that flicker past for our amusement, detached from the blood and sinew of our animal selves.

Farming has always been an intimate exercise in finding and maintaining a path to where we own the acts that sustain our lives — a path where killing (rather than thrilling) humbles and strengthens a respect for the fragility and value of life.

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Reading this weekend: The Shepherd’s Life: modern dispatches from an ancient landscape.

The Blood on My Hands

I laid out my shotguns and deer rifle on a folding table outside the kitchen window. With fall around the corner, it was time to clean and oil the guns. It’s a methodical process that is satisfying to undertake on objects that are a beautiful marriage of design and utility. Using a kit made for the purpose, I rammed the cleaning rods through the barrels, oiled the working parts, and rubbed the wood stocks till they shone. I finished just as guests arrived for dinner, returning the guns to the cabinet as they walked up the drive.Guns 002

Growing up in Louisiana I, alongside my father and brother, hunted and fished year round. It was a rare week that did not find me crouching in a duck blind, running trot lines, crabbing, or catching crawfish. Game, fresh- and saltwater fish, shrimp, and oysters easily provided five dinner meals out of seven for our household. Staying up late at night cleaning and gutting fish, setting the alarm every two hours to run the trot-line, waking up at 3 a.m. to get to the duck blind or be on the open gulf by sunrise, all were part of the landscape of my childhood.

Mine was the hunting and fishing of providence, not of the trophy hunter. It was the experience of a profoundly masculine world. From the catching, shooting, and cleaning to, in many cases, the cooking, it was a culture of men putting food on the table for their families. It wasn’t needed in the middle class home of my father—he certainly could have provided all of our meat needs from the grocery store—but it was a lifestyle I shared with most of my friends growing up.

There was always an exhilaration in making a good shot or setting the hook on a large fish. It provided, and still does, a sense of accomplishment that is part evolutionary and large part tribal. The camaraderie of men in camp, the solitude of the hunt, being on the water by myself, or with my father, the rituals of killing and of eating, each shaped who I am as a person.

Perhaps it is counterintuitive, but killing another living creature can teach a person a lot about nature. Putting that act of killing in its “proper place” reminds us of where we came from and where we belong. And remembering our place in a natural order may be the best way to save this planet.

A detractor could argue against the killing, the male role in that culture, and I would listen and perhaps agree in part. But my defense is simple and straightforward: I prefer to be the one with blood on his hands. I believe it is a stance that makes me more, not less, sensitive to the value of life. It is the same reason I butcher poultry and livestock. It seems more honest.

Some may be shaking their heads right now. But as we collectively pile into our cars, while away our hours shopping, allow our kids to grow up without seeing the light of day as they game their way into perpetual adolescence, move from air-conditioned office to air-conditioned vehicle to air-conditioned home, with all that those actions entail to the planet, we might ask ourselves a hard question: who are we kidding?

Whether vegetarian or meat eater, just because we do not pull the trigger or set the hook, we are all culpable in the killing that our lifestyle requires.

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Reading this weekend: The Art of Stillness: adventures in going nowhere by Pico Iyer. And, Journey of  the Universe by Swimme and Tucker.