What Did You Do Today?

     "Hey.  How ya doin'?"

     "Doin' great.  You?"

    "Couldn't be better."

     "So, what'd you do today?"

     "Oh, nothin' much.  Raked the leaves.  Put up the tree.  Fixed a dining room chair.  What'd you do?"

     "I killed a couple of goats, field dressed them and took their carcasses to the butcher."

     Yup.  That was my day.  My son and daughter-in-law raised a couple of goats for the purpose of eating.  I volunteered to do the killing.  However, because I felt like I wasn't knowledgeable enough to do the gutting and skinning on my own, I solicited the help of a friend.  He has field dressed and butchered many deer, and had allowed me to participate in a couple of instances.  He had never dressed out a goat, but we figured it isn't much different than a small deer.

     Why, you may be asking me as you sit in front of your monitor where I cannot hear you, would you want to kill goats when you could have hired the butcher to take care of the whole process for you?  It was all about recognizing and stepping into our place in the food chain.  Michael Pollan, in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, explains it this way in a section about taking up hunting, "For one of the things I was hoping to accomplish by rejoining, however briefly, this shortest and oldest of food chains was to take some more direct, conscious responsibility for the killing of the animals I eat.  Otherwise, I felt, I really shouldn't be eating them."  It was also about bestowing the dignity upon those animals that they deserved.  They were God's gift to the family and deserved better than the wholesale, dishonorable and degrading slaughter the vast numbers of domesticated animals receive in corporate slaughterhouses at the hands of uncaring death mechanics.  How dishonest are we when we deliberately force ourselves to believe that those cellophane-wrapped cuts of beef, pork and chicken were placed in those display cases by loving hands and refuse to even think about the fact that lives were taken, blood was spilt and guts were removed so we might enjoy sterile meals on white tablecloths?

      As I indicated earlier, I was apprehensive about remembering all the steps involved in field dressing this kind of animal.  It turned out that my friend was apprehensive about the first step; the killing of the animals.  He had hunted and killed deer, rabbits, coyotes and an assortment of other game many times, but he had never simply walked up to an animal on a rope and killed it.  It turned out we complemented each other.  I had no problem pulling the trigger on my new Ruger .22 Mark III pistol.  I had deliberately not become "friends" with those goats.  When I was over there, I saw them, but never called them by any names or petted them.  I knew the day would come when they would be the main course on a dinner table, so I purposefully looked at them as meals on hooves.  In my opinion, farm animals of this kind should never be named, played with or spoken to like they are extended family members.  They are part of the food chain and will someday have to take their assigned place in that chain.  It is not fair to expect someone else to do that final deed because I chose to befriend an animal.

     The actual killing was simple enough.  A rope around the neck to keep her head still.  The barrel up against the skull to ensure a clean shot.  A brief prayer of thanks.  Pull the trigger.  Each of us there individually valued that goat.  All effort was made to ensure a quick and painless death.  A brief feeling of sorrow was followed by gratitude for the gift of life given by way of that animal's death.  Then came the removal of all the parts that we didn't want to eat, including the hide.  I am still on the learning curve in this area.  When we were done we had accomplished what Michael Pollan described as his ultimate destination, "…to look as far into the food chains that support us as I could look, and recover the fundamental biological realities that the complexities of modern industrialized eating keep from our view."  At that moment we knew, by experience rather than meaningless head knowledge, that there is an order to nature and that we are a part of it.  We, as an integral part of that food chain we so glibly reference in discussions, are dependent upon plants and creatures to provide sustenance.  And we must take responsibility for the act of eating.

     So, what did you do today?