Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> Those of you who do raise, kill and eat  
> large animals, do you find your attitudes toward the practice evolving  
> in any way as the years pass?
> 

They are.  For some years now we have hardly tasted meat or fish that we did 
not kill with our own hands (or guns).  Part of that is economics, but also 
the stuff sold in the Marts, well, there's something wrong with it.  Doesn't 
look right, doesn't smell right, doesn't taste right, and if one is unused to 
it, 
it's a bit sickening to eat it.  Someting wrong, don't know what and probably 
don't want to know.

We have killed cows, goats, pigs, deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, rabbits 
(domestic), lots of chickens, and untold number of fish.  This year we are 
setting 
up with quail.  

First, I find the prospects of an animal-less homestead to be grim.  Animals 
are walking, high efficiency composters.   I could not maintain the current 
fertility of my gradens an grain plots without the animals.  I could still 
have 
gardens, of course, but they would be drastically different.  So more and 
more 
I see the 'circle of life' on the farmstead.  So this is the main change it 
has led me to:  Valuing the life and sensibilities of a cow more than say, a 
chicken, is an artificial bit of anthropromorphism.   I found myself 
questioning 
why I seemed more aggressive killing a cow or pig than a chicken or rabbit.  
When I was able to shake off that illusion, I saw too that the chicken was 
not 
a more valuable life than a fish.  A fish not more valuable than a tree.  A 
tree not more valuable than a carrot.

Things die so that other things live.  We all have a place in that. There is 
a north-facing hillside here where non-food farm animals are buried (I won't 
diminish them by calling them 'pets', each earns its keep).  There too we 
take 
what's left of slaughtered animals (after the magnificient flock of buzzards 
is finsished) an their bones lie there in a place of honor.  Some day, I will 
lie there too, bones mingled with bones, the animals and I all together as we 
were all together in life as well.

So the change that has come over me is that when I kill the goat for food, I 
am mindful of what I am doing.  I don't regret it, abhor it, shrink from it, 
enjoy it, nor analyze it.  I do it mindfully.  But I do that too when I pull 
a 
turnip or cut off a cabbage head, or cut a tree, or move a rock.

Does it make me more brutal or more aggressive?  No.  Quite the opposite if 
anything.  I know what it means to take a life.  When we sit down to beef, or 
chevon, or catfish, I know the where-with-all that put it on the plate.  I 
know 
what a knife or an axe does to a living animal, and a 30-30 round.   I can 
tell you that I would never put my hand to such a weapon in response to a 
human 
being unless there were absolutely no other way to guarantee the safety of my 
family ... because ... I know what it does, I know what it's like.

You cannot mindfull kill for your food and ever become jaded or hardened to 
it.  Rather the other way around, says I.  If you mindfully take the life of 
a 
cow or pig to eat it, you will be aware that you are also taking the life of 
the cabbage and carrot, that you are halting the passing along of the DNA of 
the wheat kernal which has been going on for a million years, and you put a 
stop 
to it ... forever.  That wheat seed had a parent plant, and that plant had a 
parent, and so on and so on and now you have cut off that line forever.

------------------

Corn and grain, corn and grain
What falls to the Earth will rise again
Hoof and horn, hoof and horn
Whatever dies will be reborn.   </HTML>