Winter Is Here

So, just like that, winter is here, and, surprise, surpise, I was more or less prepared. All of the animals but one of the breeding flocks of sheep are super well protected from the wind and snow. That one breeding group could use another shelter, which I plan to drag into their paddock today. Everyone has one more cycle to get bred, and then the rams go into a nice big stall in the barn for the winter and the ewes, including the ewe lambs not being bred will be reunited in their one acre winter pasture/feedlot (depending on how much snow there is and for whole long [the pasture is stockpiled]) with enough run in space for all of them. Anyone not bred in two cycles will be slaughtered for mutton in the spring. I have a marginally profitable market for mutton, and I don’t want to have a three month long lambing season, so I will be selecting (and managing) for a flock that, ideally, all lambs within a month to six weeks (I know of farms that lamb out completely in twenty days, but they really know what they are doing).

I feel better about this last group of pigs than I have in three winters of raising pigs. There are twenty of them and they have a draft-free, deep bedded, 1,000 square foot barn to hang out in and a similarly sized barnyard to eat and mill about it in. If it gets super cold, because of the low stocking density in the barn, I can move their feeder and waterer inside, and the pigs will only need to go outside if they want the exercise.

Little by little I am doing it better. Hopefully one year soon I will be doing it right.

 

Slaughterhouse Days Are Good Days

The ultimate purpose of the farm, though not the whole point, is to raise animals to be slaughtered and butchered so that we can eat their meat. While the killing part is the most troubling, it is also the most satisfying. I feel the best about the farm not when I am on the farm watching the pigs spin and twirl and bark and run in excitement, or sitting still listening to the sheep munch grass in a new paddock, but in the truck on the drive home from the slaughterhouse.

On the farm the animals and their care are about an idea, or a number of ideas, really. They are about the idea of ethical care, about the idea of sound ecological management, about Booker T. Washington’s idea of living a “high, simple, and useful life,” about the idea of community, and about the idea of finding a viable, satisfying alternative to the cubicle.

The slaughterhouse, however, is not about ideas, it is about reality. It is the place where ideas go to become reality. Packages of meat, whether of a pig, of a lamb or sheep, or of a chicken, that bear the Stony Brook Farm label are not merely packages of taste, texture, and nutrients, they are the literal embodiment of the ideas that form the purpose and governance of the farm. And, so, when I pull out of the slaughterhouse driveway and see the trailer fall into line in the rearview mirror as things straighten up down the road, I feel satisfied, I feel that I am a true and integral part of the farm, I feel a complete sense of purpose, I feel that my life has meaning and direction, that it has value, that I am doing something good, that I am living as best I can according to Booker T. Washington’s maxim.

It is, I really do think, unfortunate (perhaps more than unfortunate) that a living, breathing, sentient being is killed to give me such a sense of purpose and meaning, but I eat meat, and in order for me to eat meat, animals must be killed; and as long as I am going to eat meat, I want the animals that are killed to be raised on a farm like mine, where the ideas infuse the meat with values every bit as essential and nourishing as those of the flesh itself.

 

The Ethics of Chronic Pain

For the second time this season, I have a pig with chronic pain. They aren’t sick and they grow fine, they are just clearly in constant pain in their back ends. There are no obvious injuries. They just mince around when they walk, sit on their butts while they eat, and spend most of their time lying around. The simplest description would be “growing pains,” although they aren’t around long enough for me to find out if they would ever grow out of it.

I have been wondering what, if anything, my ethical obligation is. Generally speaking, I think I have an obligation to keep the animals under my care from suffering. But, what to do with a pig that has chronic pain? Certainly, I am not going to put the pig on a pain medication regimen. Am I then obligated to have the pig slaughtered to (ironically) relieve it of its pain and sell it (at a substantial loss) as a roaster? Or, is it ethical for me to do nothing about it? Can I just let the pig live in pain and have it slaughtered on schedule when it reaches slaughter weight?

I took the last option with the first pig. I just kept an eye on him. I decided that if it became clear that his pain was getting substantially worse, or if the pain became so great that he was no longer well enough to get around, that I would have to do something about it. With that pig, that never happened, so I kept him around and made no interventions. He grew fine and went to slaughter on schedule with the rest of his paddock mates.

So far, I have been taking the last option with the current pig as well, but taking the last option has me ill at ease. I don’t like knowing that the pig is in pain and doing nothing about it. Yet, I also don’t like the option of selling the pig at a loss as a roaster. And, I really don’t like making a decision about whether to relieve an animal of pain based solely on how that will impact me financially. And, yet, that is exactly what I am doing.

It is pretty clear to me that while I am having trouble admitting how I should act, ethically speaking, it is not actually an ethical dilemma. A dilemma, by definition, has more than one outcome and all of the outcomes are “bad” in some way, which is what gives force to the dilemma. In this case, ethically-speaking there are two outcomes: 1) relieve the pig’s pain (by whatever means) or 2) don’t relieve the pig’s pain. Option two is unethical, so it is therefore not a dilemma, and the ethical imperative is clear.

I have to admit, therefore, that I am acting unethically, in spite of the fact that in an effort to retain the illusion of ethical behavior, I have lowered the bar all the way to the ground by stating that I will act to relieve the pig of its pain only when that pain becomes unbearable, evidenced by an inability or unwillingness to rise. While the pig spends more time than the others lying around, I do see her up and grazing, so by my definition the pain is not unbearable.

There is more to say (there is always more to say), but I have to go out and do chores.