Our Lives' Wedding With The World

Last year, a few days before we were to slaughter the hogs, I slept fitfully if at all. Death and animals were on my mind a lot. At the time, Amy and I were close to losing Japhy, our very loved dog, at fourteen. She was grey in the muzzle. Her legs didn't really work as they were meant to anymore. But she was sweet and loving as she had always been, perhaps more so. We knew that she would do her best to keep going. That was her way. She was going to force us to choose the day that she wasn't going to be with us anymore. It is a horrible thing to think that you will schedule the day you will kill a creature you love so much, a day, that if nature could be circumvented, you would hold at bay forever. When the weather began to gray and turn cold, I thought it mirrored my heart in ways I was not prepared to face. I was not ready for gloom and sadness in the skies when I looked up from the lifeless body of my long time companion.

So that fall as the demise of Japhy was looming, I couldn't help but feel a little emotionally squeezed as we made the decision to slaughter the hogs on the farm instead of sending them away to an abbatoir. Ulla championed them staying home, where they would be cared for and loved until the end. She stayed in the house until the deed was done, but it didn't take long to see how brave she actually was. Most people who raise animals for meat avoid forming a real bond with them. I remembered thinking that Ulla would regret naming these pigs, and petting them, and playing with them, and caring for them with genuine affection, that it would take a great emotional toll on her. What I didn't know, is that she understood that from the beginning and she didn't care. What mattered to her was that the lives they lived were wonderful. If she withdrew from them, it would be to protect herself and that would be of no help to the animals.

So she loved them. And slowly, the rest of us decided we could love them too. This year and last we told stories about these hogs like they were our pets. We laughed about their antics and felt genuine sorrow when they were gone. But we also understood that they were there for a purpose, and without this purpose, they would't have existed at all. And in the end, there is a job that must be done and to do that job well was meaningful.

We had four hogs this year, twice the herd. The experience last year was so overwhelmingly positive that we were immediately convinced that pigs would be on the farm the next year. Fred hatched a plan to get some friends involved in year two. We invited people out to be a part of the slaughter, butchery and charcuterie of these four hogs because we knew we should share it. The learning curve had flattened a bit from year one, and the path to flattening it out further next year became more obvious. Fred began to talk of handling the shot himself instead of leaving it to someone else. If not the shot next year, a gun and some shooting lessons.

Sleep was again elusive the night before this year's slaughter. No one likes the idea (and certainly not the practice) of killing animals. Darrell, the farmer who supplies Red Horse with pigs, a man who has been around this particular farm chore his whole life, is the first to admit a distaste for it. But Darrell was there on the day of our slaughter, an indispensable participant in every way. The farm was set up and fires were blazing. My heart sank when the first pig went down, and again with each of the four, but immediately the work to preserve these animals as food at the highest level possible became priority and just as quickly a sense of accomplishment and reverence set in. Smiles began to spill across faces in the group that only moments before wore sadness.

And everyone set to work. Some were watching the temperature of the water churning on the smoky fire, some began to scrape bristles while others went off to attend to the next kill. Ulla kept us fed and caffeinated, roasted chestnuts, and wrapped an arm around those who needed it. Amy, loathed to see anything wasted from so generous a gift, put aside the swelling of her full heart to climb into the pen to collect blood. Not minutes before, she scratched his head and smiled lovingly at him. The year before, after the first pig went down, the first ever in our circle, she saw that Fred, who held that pig down during the stick, was a little shaken. Amy walked over and hugged him briefly. He closed his eyes, he rested his chin on the top of her head and forgot for a moment, his boots, for the first time since he became a farmer, covered in blood.

This year, the last pig to go started to get a bit agitated. Not stressed, but nervous. We decided it was best to not let this state persist or get worse. "Do you want to scrape or kill?" Fred asked. Five of us gathered in the pen. Travis took his time, as usual, to find a still moment, a moment of peace to take the shot. He fell. Travis stuck. He ran away in his dreams as we tried our best to keep him still. He slowed for a moment, then ran again, going nowhere. The same as the three before him. I suddenly heard myself whispering to him that it was all ok. Scratching him behind the ear. I looked up toward the fire and the first of the pigs was split and ready for butchery. As the sun started to set, that cliched "good tired" of a hard day's work began to set in, doubled with the relief of knowing we had done our best, done well, by the animals in our care.

Some say the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. I think the same applies when it comes to how we relate to the animals we eat. To withdraw your engagement with animals as food (or as companions, tools, or simply as unseen neighbors) and think that somehow this makes life better for them is at best naive. Left to the flippancy of mother nature, a death in the wild typically comes with great suffering. This is why we call a death with mitigated suffering a "humane" death, because as humans, as creatures with an understanding of suffering and death beyond simple physical responses, the best among us try to do better than disease, starvation, and injury without medical attention.

We are by nature omnivores, which means at some point in history we were (and sometimes still are) predators. Eventually, farming replaced hunting as the primary means of obtaining meat and this perhaps began a new conversation about the morality of eating animals. Sometimes, even the most ardent vegan will aquiesce at hunting, unable to reconcile the idea that without it overpopulation would cause great suffering in wild game populations, and that all humans, including vegans, are to blame for this. It occurs to me, then, that their problem is with farming, not the act of eating meat.

That one bad day a well cared for animal ends up at, the day the gun and the knife come out, especially at a farm that claims to care about its animals, seems to the soft hearted as betrayal: a friend and caregiver who steps up and performs unspeakable violence against them. But it is is not. It is fulfillment. It is the delivery of the promise we made these animals when they came to be under our stewardship. We promised to find a place for them in this world, a world that we have selfishly usurped and callously neglected to account for them in.

In exchange we ask for blood. But if there is no blood, there is no deal. There is no room in this world for them unless we fulfill our obligations to one another. Should we decide to not eat them any longer, we reduce them to nuisance, and then to extinction.

I tire easily of the banal rhetoric that sometimes passes for a defense of animal rights. They say life is sacred but it is not. Life, whether short or long, influential or transient, has definition which outlasts the corporeal. It's entirety, which includes death and the impact it has on its successors, is equally significant, but we shortsightedly see value only in what is before us readily, the "real world". Life is a moment, a blur, a minute piece in a long and unknowable continuum, a continuum that is forever changed by even the slightest shrug from every life and this is what gives life its real beauty. Death is not cruel. Death is not a thing apart from life. We toast to death. We praise and thank the dead. We welcome it as a part of life and living. When we close our eyes and plug our ears and pretend death is not among us, we dishonor everything that was once real. And when we pretend that it is better to disregard a living creature than it is to bring it into our lives, care for it and see that it has a good and humane death, we commit an act of emotional selfishness. I wonder if there is a difference between the gluttonous meat eater who has no association between meat in a package and an animal, and the vegan who thinks his diet eschews violence and acts in advocacy of a creature he has made extensive effort to have no interaction with.

There is no tragedy in a good life followed by a kind death. Tragedy is in suffering. Pain, abuse, cruelty, indifference. Indifference. As long as I don't pull the trigger I am not culpable. This is cruelty: caring more about keeping the keel of your emotions stable than the day to day welfare of the creatures you share the earth with. Maybe to call it cruelty is hyperbole, but it is certainly not advocacy. No vegan has ever spared an animal death. The conscientious meat eater who chooses to buy meat from farms that care for their animals makes a real world impact on animal welfare. That one bad day is coming for us all. I wonder what the ultimate aim of veganism in defense of animals is, since it can't be an end to death. It seems to me their stance is more about protecting their own precarious emotional well being than opting in and understanding the relationship between people and agrarian animals in a real and meaningful way, the good, bad, and ugly in it.

As it turned out, Japhy outlived the first year's pigs until spring. We had walks every day that winter that brought joy to all involved and her almost absurdly happy face lasted until the end. When we laid her down for the last time on the porch where she loved to nap, it occurred to me that she was not sad, not nervous, that she was not drifting away wishing for just one more day. She lived until it didn't make sense for her to do so anymore. And then she was gone. A firm, embracing breeze was rattling through the tree's new leaves. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny spring day.