As I mentioned, while at Bodhi Farms I had the privilege of participating in the process of ending the lives of several animals. Particularly as a meat-eater (my meat consumption is very infrequent these days, but I am not fully vegetarian), I’ve long felt it important to participate in this process that the vast majority of meat eaters are completely ignorant of. In this post, I’ll relate to you the actual experience and process, followed by commentary, analysis, and philosophizing.
Taking the Lives
(Content warning: I will go into details that some may find unpleasant; if you just want my philosophizing, you can skip to the next section)
While I was at Bodhi, there were two separate slaughter days.
Slaughter I: Meat Birds
Last year, Brian had gotten into raising chickens for their meat (referred to as “meat birds”). There are several breeds of chickens that are bred such that they grow in size quickly and have good-tasting meat. The breed most common in factory farming, which Brian loved to disparage, are Cornish Crosses, which are the ones that, if not slaughtered young, will grow too big to carry their own weight. An unenviable existence to be sure, even setting aside the disgustingly deplorable conditions these animals are often forced to live under. I don’t recall the name of the breed Brian was raising, but he liked to say that, if you showed it to a 1950s housewife, she would easily recognize it as a chicken (whereas the overbred Cornish Crosses might be less-easily recognized).
He’d raised and slaughtered over 100 birds last year, and when I was there, only 4 meat birds remained. At the time, they were well past the time to be slaughtered (meaning the quality of the meat would start to be affected, the longer they went). Well, regardless, Brian still took his time getting around to this somber task, and so we finally got to it two weeks into my stay. By the time they were slaughtered, these hens were old enough that they’d started laying eggs.
We prepped the slaughter area outdoors, including a table for processing, the kill cones, a large pot of water for scalding, and an automated feather plucker. I gladly took on the task of catching the animals that were to be slaughtered. I held each of them, spoke to them, and thanked them.
Then I placed her head-down inside the kill cone, with her head sticking out the bottom. Brian grasped the chicken’s head and cut her neck arteries as swiftly as possible and allowed the blood to flow out. This was a somber and intense process, and the twitches and spasms of the dying creature were unnerving and unsettling. I’m consoled to know that the death is relatively swift, and that the muscle spasms continue long after the animal has departed. This was made clear with the last bird, which demonstrated the proverbial “chicken with its head cut off” when its strong twitches in the cone actually caused it to decapitate itself and its body to flail about on the ground, until the process was over. This was most certainly unnerving.
And yet, I felt strangely calm.
I didn’t quite know how to process what was going on. It was incomprehensible to me how a warm, breathing creature in my arms could, in an instant, transform into a limp lifeless carcass, and then, in another instant of defeathering, transform into something that is so familiar in any grocery store. My brain still doesn’t quite know how to comprehend it.
Once the life had departed their physical forms, the process became pretty simple to me. At least emotionally. The head and feet were removed, the body was scalded in boiling water in order to loosen the feather follicles, and then it was placed into the plucker, which would remove about 90% of the feathers. The rest were removed by hand. After that, I was shown how to eviscerate the torso, and the meat was parted out and packaged for sale at the market.
Plucked feathers were composted. Heads and undesired innards were brought up the hill to the coyotes in what felt like an offering, in exchange for their continued restraint toward the living flock. The feet were fed to the dogs.
Many who know me will know that I am very keen on consuming as many parts of an animal as possible. Part of that is that they taste good, part is about not wasting. These birds were very fatty, and so I made shmaltz from the extra fat. I also saved the livers, hearts, and gizzards and froze them for another time. Interestingly for me, these hens also had many undeveloped eggs inside of them, which I cooked and ate. They tasted like meaty yolks. To me, this process of figuring out what to do with the many parts feels like respect and reverence for the animal and all that its existence can provide to us.
Slaughter II: Roosters
The impetus for the second slaughter was very much my doing. My cabin was located rather close to the chicken pen, and so I was keenly aware of the early-morning crows of the roosters. One day, when watching the chickens chick, as I often did, and noticing the aggressive sexual behavior of many of the roosters toward the hens, it occurred to me that there may be too many roosters. This might explain excessive crowing. It might also explain overly aggressive behavior toward the hens. (A handful of hens have bald patches on their backs, because for whatever reason, roosters tend to mate with them most often. And if you’ve seen chickens mating, you’ll know that consent or desire on the part of the hen is rarely a factor.) I mentioned this to Brian, and he was open to the possibility that reducing the number of roosters could make for a healthier flock overall. So it was decided: we would cull the roosters.
While I was never explicitly told to do it, I sort of put it upon myself to set things up. And it was important to me that it be done right. I did some reading to understand how to choose the roosters to cull. One line of reasoning applies only if you are breeding the chickens (which Brian does not), and that entails preserving the roosters who have good temperaments and are large, meaning they are efficient at converting food to meat, and maybe ones that are aesthetically attractive, if having pretty chickens is important. That wasn’t as much a factor, so what I looked for was behavior. Roosters’ role in the flock is to maintain order (literally a pecking order) and to protect the hens. Roosters who seemed to be asocial or anti-social were perhaps less likely to be effective at protecting the hens from predators. (Roosters have been known to give their own lives in protection of the flock from predators.) I also looked for roosters that seemed overly aggressive toward the hens when it came to mating.
The process of identifying the roosters to cull was heart-wrenching and challenging as hell. I spent an afternoon observing the flock. There were a few roosters that I could tell pretty soon were doing exactly what was expected. They would stay with a group of hens who might be foraging, and the roosters were constantly on the lookout for danger. You could just tell. I know this is anthropomorphizing, but I really respected those chaps. They seemed honorable to me.
But beyond the couple of roosters clearly doing the right thing, all the other roosters were pretty much the same. I was perturbed by the somewhat random nature of what I was doing. If I observed one rooster being aggressive, or maybe just foraging by himself, I’d target him. Maybe he just happened to get hungry (or horny) at the wrong time, and I decided he needed to die. The other selection criterion was whether or not I could catch them. A (perhaps faulty) justification in my mind was that the roosters unable to escape my clumsy efforts are less likely to do well against other predators, compared to their more-evasive peers.
I guess the problem for me was that I needed this killing to feel morally justified. Because that’s the only way I’ve thought much about killing. But sometimes (usually) death is random, and moral justification is only bestowed after the fact. And in this case, seeing the flock as a unit with health that needed to be maintained, I guess that’s justification enough, even if the selection of the individual animals was somewhat random. But of course, this didn’t make it any easier.
With the slaughter planned for Friday morning, I was to select and sequester the chosen birds on Thursday without food so that the slaughter and butchering would be a more sanitary process (minimal food in their guts). Brian suggested I just stick them in a small cage for the night. But as I faced the prospect of putting them in an unfamiliar small jailcell for 16 hours until their demise, I was sick to my stomach. Instead, I wandered into the front chicken coop in search of a chicken tractor. In the early days of the farm, Brian built many of these structures: chicken coops on wheels, generally about 4 by 4 by 15 feet. They are used for moving chickens around easily so that they will graze and fertilize the soil in a controlled manner. Brian hasn’t used the tractors in years, and they’re all in various states of disrepair and destruction. The only one that appeared to be salvageable was one with metal sheeting all around it that Brian had built to protect the chickens from bears. I dragged it up the hill as far as I could (not far) and then repaired the entrance to make something resembling a door. Having the roosters spend the night in there felt like a reasonable compromise. So I went about selected, capturing, and detaining the unfortunate animals. I ended up with 4 in total.
My calmness from the first slaughter made another appearance in the second, once I had gone through the highly emotional initial selection process. The next day, I felt a bit uneasy, but I focused on the task at hand. For Ryan, whom I’ve mentioned previously, this was his first slaughter, and he seemed to be approaching this with a sense of profundity and import similar to my own. He and I went to collect the first two roosters from the tractor, and I showed him my approach. I held the rooster firmly but with kindness. I sat down with the bird, breathed with him, and said to him:
Thank you for your life.
Thank you for your gift.
May you be at peace.
May you be free from suffering.
Ryan took to my approach and did the same. When we were ready, we wordlessly walked to the slaughter area and gave the animals over to Brian’s knife. When Ryan carried the last of the roosters over, I felt that I was ready to wield the knife myself. With sober fortitude, I honed the knife to ensure sharpness, held the bird’s head, and took its life. It felt procedural but also very intimate. I also noted a lack of moral turbidity in this action. Maybe because I’d previously had my fill of moralizing. Maybe because I was tapping into some sort of carnal killing instinct that’s inside all of us.
Processing these departed animals proceeded the same as before, except that roosters’ feather are more firmly attached and so require more manual labor. Being males, they also had testes to contend with, which I cooked up in a few ways and enjoyed eating. I ended up personally butchering all four carcasses, and I used one and a half of them to cook coq au vin, the most well-known dish using rooster meat. Roosters tend to be very tough, so they need to be tenderized and cooked for a long time. My coq au vin turned out pretty tasty, but the meat was still rather tough.
Thoughts On Death & Killing
Before each slaughter, I journaled and thought about the deed I was about to do. My first line of thinking was recognizing that a large part of the strife of this process is around the duration of life and the pedestal upon which we place a “long life.” If we can maximize an animal’s quality of life during its lifetime, and we can try our best to provide a dignified and minimal-suffering death (this is a big “if”), then the perceived immorality of killing an animal comes down to shortening the duration of a life beyond what we think might be natural. But what constitutes a sufficiently long life? And do all animals experience time and life’s duration in the same manner that we do? The temporal aspect of life is a subjective experience, and our feelings of tragedy over an “untimely” death may be a human experience that we put onto animals. For us, when someone dies at age 90, it was “their time to go.” When they die at 9, it’s a tragedy. But if a creature has no concept of time, no ability to recollect and examine the entirety of its life, is a “premature” death any less “their time to go” than a death at old age?
I was reminded of a childhood friend who died from leukemia in his teens. I considered the tragedy of that experience and the important role duration-of-life plays in our feelings toward death. We can’t help but hold onto “what could’ve been,” had a life been longer. That seems to me a uniquely-human (or perhaps even only in some cultures of humans) way of inhabiting the pain of another’s death. But death is not a question or a negotiation, so what if what-ifs had no place? What if a deceased rooster (or human, for that matter) has no concept of its own what-ifs? What if a rooster’s friends lacked the mental faculties to think (or care) about “what if that rooster had lived longer”? The tragedy of the thing melts away, doesn’t it?
In thinking about this friend, I also thought about some of the things we tell ourselves to cope with the feelings of a “premature” death. One of them is that this life was taken for a reason. That some higher power has a plan. “It’s God’s will,” and so on. I found myself wondering whether the chickens have some semblance of this concept or feeling: a resignation to a higher will, be it random chance, hungry coyote, or human choice. Does human-playing-God in this instance allow for chickens to feel comfort in the loss of a peer?
This higher-power thinking leads me to a conversation I had with Rachel at Rainwater Collective. While we were clearing brush in the duck coop, Rachel asked me in her classic pointed manner what I thought about killing and eating animals. Rachel is a practicing Buddhist and all-around lovely person, and yet she has no compunction about slaughtering her ducks. Her view is that ducks live in flocks that are designed to be predated upon. In order for the flock to exist as it has evolved to, there needs to be a predator that kills the ducks. It’s a matter of maintaining a balanced system. In this case (and in most cases), humans are the apex predators. We are the higher power, if you will, making the choices about life or death. And in the same way that we console ourselves that a death is, in some way, more justified if there was a higher, unknowable purpose behind it, can we not also console ourselves in a similar way about the deaths of the animals that we kill?
But here I’m touching upon one of the most troubling aspects of all of this, and something that I felt acutely in my process of selecting the roosters to be culled: are we not playing “God” in this? Or to put it more agnostically, are we not inhabiting a “higher-power” space that is not ours to inhabit? It is a great boon to human civilization, and also a great moral curse, that we learned to tame nature herself, and to deign ourselves worthy of deciding what creatures live and die in a systematic manner (i.e., animal husbandry). While incredibly useful for the thriving of our species, it is morally troubling to be playing this part of a higher-power over animals, when our own conceptions of a higher-power is very decidedly not a human one. (Many mad men have insisted on playing God to other men, deciding who lives and dies, and humanity decidedly finds it unacceptable, even if it does continue around us in various hidden ways.)
Thus I’m led to believe that part of my pain and disquiet throughout this process has to do with my self-hatred as a human. At my willingness to wear the hood of the Grim Reaper, when it is simply not mine to wear. And further, at the great suffering and disequilibration in the natural world that we humans create through our insistence on playing the part of the higher-power; our belief that we are above Nature; that we are Nature. It makes me feel like pushing back, rebelling against this exertion of our natural power to kill, which we wield so broadly and destructively.
But let’s settle down. For my despair is about the system and the wide-ranging harm that we humans and our systems inflict upon the world. The questions truly at hand have to do with these chickens and the task we must undertake.
Going into the second slaughter day, I tried to stay more focused on the specific task at hand and the individual lives that were to be separated from their bodies. It occurred to me that there’s a serious issue of consent here. When we slaughter these animals, we take their lives by force, having neither requested nor received consent from them. But we take them all the same. And indeed, it is true that something must always die in order for us to live. Even the sun dies a little with each photon it feeds to the plants. The sun knows no other way than to give a little of itself. Do we malign the grass for killing the sun? The difference, of course, is that the sun freely gives its sustenance to the grass. Do the chickens give to us? In all likelihood, a chicken cannot consent to giving its life. But I asked nonetheless, and I listened gently for any indication of assent, if not consent.
While I’m typically happy to apply my personal values and morals to the entire world around me, I think it’s important to step outside my anthropocentric box and perspective. The tragedy of killing animals, viewed through our modern human lens on mortality and morality, is powerful and hard to ignore. But is it possible that I’m being entirely self-centered in applying my existential lens to everything around me? Is it possible that chickens do not experience time linearly? That they do not feel aggrieved at a shortened life, so long as they do not suffer while alive? Is it possible they are evolutionarily built to accept a violent fate? That their evolution draws them toward a state of implied consent to the taking of their lives? Is it equally possible that chickens suffer tremendously in death? That the experience of a foreshortened life is intensely upsetting? We cannot know.
At the end of the day, I believe that we are bound to view the world through our own human moral frameworks; because to attempt to do otherwise is to speculate wildly about the experience of others, which is even less accurate than following our subjective experience-based outlooks. And my core, it simply feels tragic to end a creature’s life before it’s time. To end it by our choice, as humans, especially when it’s no longer essential for our survival, feels cruel and gratuitous. So insofar as I’ve justified killing these chickens in my philosophizing above, these thought processes are really about helping myself feel better about something that will be done, with or without my complicity. And furthermore, I do feel it’s important for me to participate in this process. So this philosophizing is my effort to justify it to myself.
My point above that killing animals is no longer essential to our survival is an important one. too Nutritionally, there is no reason for everyone to eat meat, at least not in the quantities that we do. But the ability for anyone to be vegetarian (certainly vegan) is a product of modern technology and globalization, make no mistake about it. The ability to replace meat consumption with plentiful sources of protein and other nutrients is directly tied to a global food system, propped up by modern technology and techniques. Personally, I think this globalized system is highly problematic; but I also think that the modern meat system is highly problematic. And the ability to abstain from the meat system largely relies on the global veg system. In an ideal world, I believe that we should all be eating local, highly-varied diets consisting not only of cultivated foods but also wild/foraged foods that we’ve forgotten how to eat (we eat probably less than 1% of the edible plants out in the world – not even to mention edible insects and other wildlife). But until we have a system that can support that, it strikes me as morally best to abstain from the unacceptably cruel large-scale meat system, and to eat well-sourced meat (limited) and veggies, complemented by veg meat replacements from the global food system.
Our modern society has made us so familiar and comfortable with the idea (and reality) of meat, wholly separated from the life that formerly inhabited every muscle that we are consuming. That reality of meat is a difficult one to contend with, and those who sell meat don’t want consumers to have any sort of difficult experience. So they bury that connection between life and food. We use words like beef instead of cow, pork instead of pig, etc., as a way to separate ourselves from the difficulty of the reality. And to be clear, this reality is difficult, it causes friction, but it is not an absolute impediment. My experience with these slaughters did not turn me into any more of a vegetarian than I already was. If anything, it helped me to feel more connection with any meat that I do eat. It gave me an experience that enables me to be more mindful, aware, and awake around my consumption of meat. Going through this process has helped me begin to contend with the reality of it. And this process has helped me connect with my food, the way we interact with the wider system of life, and the essentiality of death as a part of life. I hope that more of you will have the opportunity to become awake in this way.
Wander on.