Big Red

I eat meat. But until last week, I had never witnessed the harvest, or slaughter, of an animal for food. The process wasn't easy to watch, but it felt like something I needed to see.  If I wasn't willing to watch an animal killed for food, then I shouldn't be eating meat.  Nowadays, it's so easy to go to the grocery store and buy meat, hermetically sealed and highly processed, such that it hardly resembles its animal of origin.  With the grocery store, meat becomes a commodity, not a precious sacrifice. You don't even think twice about throwing out leftovers--you can just get more meat at the store. To be honest, for most of my life, that is how I've approached eating meat.

However, of late, I'm been trying to eat more mindfully and pay attention to where my food comes from.  We've been buying grass-fed beef at the farmers' market from a local ranch where the cows live a good life.  The natural next step seemed to be to witness the slaughter of the meat I eat.

At Soil Born, we raise chickens for eggs, not meat, but roosters who don't play well with others are not tolerated.  Big Red, the rooster we killed, was on the losing end of a battle with another rooster, getting pretty beat up in the process.  After the fight, it was decided: Big Red had to go.

At the appointed time, Big Red was carried from his isolation pen to the area we had set up for the slaughter.   He didn't seem to know that death was imminent.   Held upside down by his feet, he was practically asleep as the knife that would slit his carotid artery approached.   I really didn't want to watch the cut being made, but felt like I needed to watch everything, every second of the slaughter.  So watch I did, until Big Red's eyes stopped blinking.  Once the rooster was dead, I was amazed at how quickly he was transformed from a fluffy, feathery creature to a skinny carcass as we quickly pulled the feathers off after dunking the carcass in near-boiling water.  Once the rooster was dead, the emotional attachment that I had felt before the slaughter was gone.  It felt odd that now that he was dead, I could handle his body just like any other chicken. 

That night, back at home, I cried for Big Red.  The experience had been harder on me emotionally than I had initially thought, but I was glad I participated.  I hope that I will get to the point that I'm ready to slaughter a chicken myself, rather than just watch, but I'm not looking forward to that day, either.  Life, even a chicken's life, is precious.