The slaughter of animals was a regular ritual on the farm where I grew up in the fifties and early sixties. Chickens, lambs, pigs, and cattle--sometimes even a duck.
My mother slaughtered the chickens. She preferred a machete to a hatchet for lopping off their heads. She would let them bleed out briefly, flopping headless on the ground. After that she would plunge them into a bucket of boiling water. Plucking their feathers was an easier task for that.
The slaughter of larger animals required the specialized help of Darrell Lindley, who in his youth had been a skilled Golden Gloves boxer. Very nearly qualified for the trip to Chicago one year. Darrell would periodically come to the farm in his pickup filled with equipment to slaughter a pig or a feeder calf that we had chosen from the herds for our own consumption.Darrell would drop a feeder calf with a close range shot to the forehead with his rifle. Then he would hoist the animal into his large tripod, suspending it by its hind legs so that he could strip out the organs and halve it for transport to the meat locker for further cutting.
With the hogs Darrell would suspend them while they were still alive in the tripod first and then shove his razor sharp knife up into their throats. There were a reluctant few that he had to stun with a hammer first. They would bleed out from there. In the winter time the snow all around him would be red with blood. Darrell himself would become bathed in blood.
Part of my job as an adolescent, in addition to helping sort out and pen up the selected animals in advance, was to scoop up the offal afterward and haul it to a deserted part of the fields for the carrion eaters.One day Darrell was sitting in Don's Standard Station on the square in town. Men often gathered there to loaf and discuss world level issues. Old Doc Robinson walked in. He had been the area veterinarian for years. And years.
Darrell looked up and said, “You know, Doc. I think I'm the only man in the county who has killed more cattle than you have.”
Doc Robinson did not receive this observation well.I visited the slaughterhouses in the area often, the abattoirs of my youth. I have seen electric cattle prods in liberal use and sheer, brutal beatings of animals reluctant to move from fear. I have seen cattle struck in the middle of the head with a sledge. Ideas concerning animal cruelty were less refined in my youth.
I have been inside modern hog confinement facilities. I have been in large chicken confinement facilities, too, where all of them had had their beaks clipped off so that they would not peck each other to death in their psychotic claustrophobia.
I know something about where my food comes from. Certainly, the cruelty of the slaughterhouse can be mitigated, and it has in many instances. It can never be totally eliminated. The fear of the animals is palpable in even the most humane of these places. While these domesticated animals are a product of highly selective breeding and therefore in a real sense the creation of men, fear has not been bred out of them.Perhaps because I was hardened a bit at a young age, I enjoy the corrida. I attend. The bull, also a product of highly selective breeding by men, has had all fear bred out of him. He knows only rage at the hour of his death after having faced a man whom he has himself had a chance to kill. It is a better death than death in the slaughterhouse. I do not know how the chronically hungry poor of the city who eat of the bull's meat afterward view all that, if they even give it a thought.
I have seen another thing that bears on the subject at hand. I have seen groups of men gather at a long tables stacked high with meat, potatoes, and vegetables prepared by farm wives. These men had come to dinner, the mid-day meal where I come from, in the midst of back-breaking, punishing labor for long hours. They were working their bodies to the very limit so that others might eat.
As it so happened, they had been provided with omnivorous bodies, and they did not have the luxury of indulging in fine moral judgments. They desperately needed jolts of protein, fat, and other nutrients. They ate everything in vast quantities in preparation for continuing their labors, and the grease dripped off their chins.
But before they ate, they endured a long peroration by their designated spokesman of thanks to God for what was laid before them.I prefer the approach of the indigenous people of the plains who thanked the buffalo himself. I thank the animals that have suffered and died so that I might eat. I thank the plants, too. It is my own way of making peace with a small part of the rampant cruelty of this cruel world.
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I read someone's post about not being able to eat meat if it looked like a body part, preferring a chicken nugget over a chicken leg. The person is a kind-hearted soul, but the logic just escapes me. I prefer to know where it comes from, so that I am properly grateful for those who did that bloody work, or the hot work in the kitchen, etc. If I cannot look that in the face, I feel I have no right to eat it.
I'm glad you're reminding people that foregoing meat is a position of privilege, something the working poor simply can't do.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin
This is an important piece on a few levels, and I want it to get wide reading...for me, this part is beautiful and memorable:
"As it so happened, they had been provided with omnivorous bodies, and they did not have the luxury of indulging in fine moral judgments. They desperately needed jolts of protein, fat, and other nutrients. They ate everything in vast quantities in preparation for continuing their labors, and the grease dripped off their chins."
She is also one of the world's leading authorities on autism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (Aspergers), and is herself autistic.
Amazing woman.
Half the water consumed in the U.S. irrigates land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as the entire human population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times as concentrated as raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause thrice as much water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes thrice as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.
Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a 1,000 lb. steer could float a destroyer. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!
Subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.
Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil each year and 85 percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U.S. has been one acre every five seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.
One-third of all raw materials in the U.S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes thrice as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."
"All Things Are Connected," the concluding chapter to John Robbins' Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987), begins with a quote from (reincarnationist) Christian mystic Edgar Cayce:
"Destiny, or karma, depends upon what the soul has done about what it has become aware of."
John Robbins writes:
"At the present time, when most of us sit down to eat, we aren't very aware of how our food choices affect the world. We don't realize that in every Big Mac there is a piece of the tropical rainforests, and with every billion burgers sold another hundred species become extinct. We don't realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health. We don't hear in the sizzle the cry of the hungry millions who might otherwise be fed. We don't see the toxic poisons (pesticides) accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come.
"But once we become aware of the impact of our food choices, we can never really forget. Of course, we can push it all to the back of our minds, and we may need to do this, at times, to endure the enormity of what is involved.
"But the earth itself will remind us, as will our children, and the animals and the forests and the sky and the rivers, that we are part of this earth, and it is part of us. All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth.
"Thankfully, we have cause to be grateful--what's best for us personally is also best for other forms of life, and for the life support systems on which we all depend.
"The Indians who dwelt for countless centuries in what we now call the United States lived in harmony with the land and with nature. Their societies were each unique, yet all were founded on a reverence for life that conserved nature rather than destroying it, and which lived in balance with what we today call the ecosystem. To them, it was all the work of God. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every humming insect was holy.
"When the white man forced them to make the ultimate sacrifice and sell their land, the great Chief Seattle spoke for his people and asked one thing in return. He did not ask something for himself, nor for his tribe, nor even for the Indian people. There were, of course, many things of immense importance he must have wanted at such a time. He could have asked for more blankets, horses, or food. He could have asked that the ancestral burial grounds be respected. He could have asked many things for himself or for his people. But what stood above all else in importance had to do with the relationship between humans and other animals. His one request was as prophetic as it was plain:
"I will make one condition.
The white man must treat the beasts of this land
as his brothers.
For whatever happens to the beasts
soon happens to man.
All things are connected."
"Chief Seattle spoke for a people whose bond with the natural world was unimaginably profound. Yet the white man called them savages, and utterly disregarded his plea. The factory farms that produce today's meats, dairy products and eggs are living testimony to how totally we have disdained the one condition he made.
"The white man thought Chief Seattle an ignorant savage. But he was a prophet whose wisdom and eloquence arose from living contact with Creation. And his words are astoundingly similar to those of a book written long, long ago. The Bible, too, tells us the fates of humans and animals are intimately intertwined.
"For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth the beasts.
Even one thing befalleth them:
as the one dieth, so dieth the other;
yea they have all one breath,
so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.
---Ecclesiastes 3:19
"Chief Seattle did not know that centuries before a book called the Bible had spoken in words almost identical to his own. But he spoke on behalf of life itself, and the wisdom of the ages poured through him. Today, when we have strayed so very far from an ethical relationship to other creatures and to the welfare of the world we share, his message remains with us as a light of immeasurable brilliance. Never before has the truth of his words been so apparent:
"One thing we know;
Our God is the same,
This earth is precious to Him...
This we know:
The earth does not belong to man:
Man belongs to the earth.
This we know:
All things are connected
Like the blood which unites one family.
All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth
Befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life.
He is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
He does to himself."
Thanks for this very honest piece. We should do all we can to raise animals in dignity and respect. But human civilization is not going to be renouncing meat anytime soon, and I'm not sure they should. To do so would be to renounce a massive chunk of our history and culture. I agree with Temple Grandin. It is ethical to eat meat. But it's not ethical to subject animals to needless physical or emotional abuse or torture.
Responding to this kind of status quo thinking, Isaac Bashevis Singer once observed.
"People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times."
and...
"I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual development to leave off the eating of animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came into contact with the more civilized."
---Henry David Thoreau
I grew up with grandparents who lived on an egg ranch in Southern California with 29,000 chickens, a cow or two for milk, the occasional pig which we raised for meat and cattle that we raised and butchered. My mother always had a garden if she could. Sometimes we also had enough space for some livestock.
My grandfather taught me how to shoot the cow in the head so that it would die immediately and without fear. I couldn't have been more than about ten years old. I had to go in pretty close and I was quite small next to its hugeness as it dropped. We all stood under a great Coastal Live Oak Tree near the same place where we barbequed ears of corn in an open fire, near the spot where my grandmother chopped the chickens heads off against a stump.
The chickens ran downhill, headless spurting blood and we dragged them back where she too plunged them into a bucket of boiling water prior to plucking them. The smell of that process is unforgettable. We did all this with same energy as we raised a vegetable garden, preserving and freezing the foods. We also took care of a citrus orchard, harvesting the fruit. I remember my grandfather going out into the sagebrush to get certain plants that my grandmother used in her pickles. For me, it was just a part of life for which I became increasingly responsible as I grew older. I learned to do all of the same chores with the same enthusiasm.
When I got older I learned that the word enthusiasm had something to do with living in the presence of God and that seemed right to me when applied to the way we lived in harmony with what the earth could provide us. I had no idea that others were so far removed from the origins of what they eat until I was an adult and somehow it has always seemed to me that the remove from such knowledge is the source of a great lack of gratitude and reverence I observed in many people.
Thanks for the "salt of the earth" essay.
Sue
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I don't know what was going on with the pig that morning. It's for sure that pigs don't know what guns are. And I don't know what was going on with my Dad, either. Born in 1927 on a hard scrabble farm with the killing of animals a common thing, he was a man's man. A brick layer, and a macho one at that. So no one, not his family or the neighbor, ever talked about that morning. My mother, after hearing the story, (Mom and Dad divorced 30 years ago) said it wasn't that uncommon for farmers to grieve. She said her grandfather, who was a farmer, was having a pig slaughtering day, walked into the house in the middle of the day and cried. She said he could never talk plain; he walked up to his wife and hugged her and said "it's mudder, Ma, it's mudder..then he wiped his eyes and went back out and finished the job.
The night Dad died, I kissed his hand and said" thank you, Dad.
The relatives standing around I'm sure thought it was a generic thank you, but I was thinking about him and that little pig..
I wouldn't eat a piece of meat unless I was actually starving. People smirk and lose all respect for me when I tell them that.And when they ask WHY, I just smile and say it's not my fault; it's in my dna.
I had no intention of responding to the “Conflicted Carnivore” Open Call until I read most of the other responses. I read those because I am conflicted. Many of those responses were written by young, good people. It then occurred to me how few young people today have had anything like the experiences I had as a youngster, having looked the animal in the eye when it was alive before seeing it quickly became a carcass and soon thereafter seeing the piece of meat on my plate. My reaction was very similar to that described by Dr. Freeborn at the end of her comment.
I wanted to focus on a family that killed its own domesticated animals for food. There are implications to that, implications that were never explored on “Little House on the Prairie.” The piece ballooned a bit on me but within reason, I hope. I am right with John Robbins whom Vasu quotes in part as follows:
“Of course, we can push it all to the back of our minds, and we may need to do this, at times, to endure the enormity of what is involved.”
Vasu, I have read “Diet for a Small Planet.” The situation is worse today than it was when that was written. Meat is an incredibly inefficient food source, and the manner in which we produce the meat is environmentally destructive. No question about that. It is just that this subject was not what I wanted to write about. Many others can write about that better than I.
The position that I have settled on is exactly that described by Juliet Waters. I cannot accept the proposition that eating meat is immoral or unethical. That seems to me to be a denial of our hunter-gatherer past and the nature of our bodies as they have evolved. When we glorify the indigenous people's relation with the planet, are we not glorifying hunter-gathers?
Of course people are free to chose not to eat meat, and I believe that I understand the various reasons they might have for doing as well as anyone. Perhaps Thoreau was correct, Vasu.
The large hog confinement facility as it is operated today, however, is immoral. The vast majority of the people who grew up on family farms as I did detest them, too. If they were questioned closely, I believe it would become apparent that they detest hog confinement facilities on moral grounds among other reasons. It is one thing to impose quick suffering, pain, and death on an animal. It is quite another to torture the most intelligent of the domesticated farm animals mentally and physically for its entire existence.
On the other hand and based upon my own observations, the packing plant industry has made great strides since the fifties. You even encounter the occasional prosecution of someone for cruelty to animals in a packing plant. You are right, angrychef, it is just a job, but there is a correct and an incorrect way to do it. Who the hell knows how slaughterhouses in the rest of the world are operated though.
Scanner, good for you. Nothing wrong with that life except for the work.
wasper, Kathy, linnnn, and the rest to whom I have not responded directly, thanks again for these wonderful observations and reminiscences.
And remember this. We will ourselves all be tortured. We will all suffer. And we will all die. Nobody can buy their way out of that. There is the beautiful overriding justice in this whole scenario.
Drop back for my piece on bull fighting forthcoming.
"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields." - Leo Tolstoy.