“It Wasn’t That Bad.”

Recently an environmental science and photography student from NYU came out to the farm to work on a farm to table project. She is also a vegan. In addition to seeing my farm, we planned to visit my local slaughterhouse, and a local farm where I get the grain I feed to the pigs.

After a tour of the farm, we had about half an hour before it was time to leave for the slaughterhouse, so we went inside for a cup of coffee, during which I brought up the fact that she is a vegan, and questioned why she would choose a livestock farm as her farm to table project. Her answer was very reasonable and straightforward: if people are going to eat meat, the animals should be humanely raised and killed. As a vegan, she was willing to accept that most people would continue to eat meat; she just hoped that the animals wouldn’t come from factory farms and wouldn’t be killed in industrial slaughterhouses.

After our cup of coffee, we hopped into her car and started off for the slaughterhouse, which is about twenty minutes from my place. On the way, I reiterated that I thought she would have fairly limited access to the kill floor. My expectation was that she would get to stand in the doorway and take pictures from there.

However, much to my surprise, when we showed up and I introduced the student to the slaughterman running the kill floor, he immediately invited her in. First the student had to don a white coat and a hard hat, which she happily did. She, a vegan, was almost giddy with the excitement of being given access to the whole kill floor.

There were only two rules: 1) One is not allowed to take pictures of the USDA inspector (a USDA rule) and 2) She was not allowed to take pictures of the act of stunning the animal or slitting its throat (a slaughterhouse rule, promulgated not out of a feeling that they have anything to hide, but out of a justified paranoia of potentially being portrayed in a bad light).

As she stepped past the threshold of the door onto the kill floor, I said, “just let me know when you’ve had enough, and we’ll go over to the cutting room.” In order to keep the kill floor from getting crowded, I hung out in the doorway and watched from there.

For the next half hour or so, the photography student poured over the kill floor, snapping photos of everything, only pausing when the slaugtherman brought a new pig onto the floor to kill. But, rather than turn away for the killing, since she couldn’t photograph it anyway, she watched, intently, as the slaughterman placed the captive bolt gun against the pigs forehead and activated it.

BANG! about as loud as a cap gun, and the pig dropped like a stone each time. Then she watched just as intently as the slaughterman put down the captive bolt gun and picked up his knife, which he deftly and expertly plunged into the pig causing the blood to gush out in a huge stream. A moment later, which is why you have to act fast when killing pigs, the pig’s death throes started, which, compared to other animals, is very violent. The pig, unconscious from the blow of the captive bolt gun, and quickly dying and then already dead, thrashes around like mad. It is in fact the most difficult part of watching a pig killed because it is so easy to imagine that the pig is thrashing around because it is in pain (and, I grant the possibility, though remote, that we do not properly understand the physiology of death and the pig is in pain, in which case what we are doing is very much an ethical transgression). Nevertheless, as soon as the slaughterman pulled the knife out of the pig and stepped away, the student rushed in to start snapping photos again.

She took pictures of everything: of the moments immediately following the kill, of the pig being hoisted up by a hind leg to finish bleeding out and then be hosed off, of the pig being skinned, of the pig’s head being cut off, of the pig being disemboweled, of the pig being split in half with a bone saw, and finally of the pig halves being run down the rail to the cooler.

The whole time, too, she was aware that these were my pigs that were being killed. Not the very pigs that she had just seen alive and well on my farm, but the same pigs, nonetheless. They were not abstract pigs. They had faces and attitudes and personalities. They had lives that she had witnessed and documented just before seeing them killed.

I thought she would never tire of the kill floor, and I think she might not have. It seemed that everything attracted her. When not much was going on, she pointed her camera down at the floor and snapped pictures of spatters of blood and bits of skin and fat, the detritus of death.

Every now and then, however, she would look at me, and say, “just a few more minutes.” Until finally, she walked over to me and said, “OK. I’m ready.”

From there we moved on to the cutting room, where for our safety, we had to stand behind the cutting table, between it and the wall. There is a cinder block on the floor, the primary purpose of which is to put the middle leg of the table on at the end of the day after it has been scrubbed clean and hosed off to drain, but it also makes an excellent perch from which to take photographs.

The cutting room is a very different place than the kill floor. Everything is pretty familiar. As the carcasses come out of the cooler, they are quickly broken down into cuts that we are used to seeing in packages at the supermarket. Nevertheless, she snapped away, just as excitedly as she had on the kill floor.

After about a half an hour in the cutting room, we were ready to go. We said our thanks and left.

On the way back to my place we were pretty quiet, but at one point she said, “You know, it wasn’t that bad.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “My first time there, I was surprised at how easy it was to watch my animals be killed. After thinking about it, I realized that it is because the place, the whole place, everything about it, from the tile walls, to the hard hats, to the stainless steel, to the chains and pulleys of the hoists, to the attitudes of the people working on the floor, is designed and organized to do the job. Somehow that design and organization makes it so that on the kill floor, killing seems perfectly normal, natural, even.

You don’t even need to distance yourself from it. You can watch, you can stand there and say to yourself, okay, this is my pig, a pig that I cared for three times a day for five months, you can even recognize the pig — oh, look, that’s that pig that liked to have its belly scratched so much that it would topple over onto its side as soon as you started rubbing it — and then BANG! the pig drops like a stone and the wheels of the machine, yes, a killing machine, start rolling, so smoothly that there is no question whether it is right or wrong. From start to finish it is exactly as it should be. Simply put, it just is. You know what I mean?” I turned my head to look at her while she was driving.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head slowly, “I do. It wasn’t that bad,” she said again.

 

Two Family Pigs Slaughtered

So, the Drunkard and the Little One are gone. They were killed yesterday just a few minutes after I dropped them off at the slaughterhouse at about 8:30am. They had been with us for about six months and were our two “special needs” pigs. The Drunkard, when he was about ten weeks old, inexplicably lost the use of his hind legs. He would lurch to his feet and stumble around, as if he were drunk, and then his hind legs would collapse. The Little One got pneumonia and nearly died.

A while back, I suspected there was something wrong with the feed that I was feeding the pigs, so I switched to another feed, one that I had had success with a couple of years ago. Within a month of the change, the Drunkard regained the use of his rear legs, a couple of other pigs that were having minor loco-motor problems also got better, and more importantly, meat quality, which had also gone downhill, returned to the high level I strive for.

With the Drunkard unable to use his legs, the other pigs were beating up on him, so decided to separate him, and since the Little One was sickly and stunted, we chose her as his companion.

In a small paddock together, they became fast friends. They ate their feed together. They foraged together. They slept together. And, even before the Drunkard got his legs back, they played together — the Drunkard, also affectionately known as “Drunk Drunk” and “Drunky,” would sit on his rear end like a dog and the two pigs would wrestle with each other. The Drunkard was about twice the size of the Little One so he held his own just using his head and neck while the Little One ran around and leapt and lunged at him. When he got his legs back they played even more.

Over the weeks and months that they were together in the little paddocks that we rotated them through over the course of the summer, Peter and I became very fond of the two pigs. They both had sweet, outgoing personalities, and they both liked to be rubbed and scratched.

Drunky and the Little One soon became family pigs to which (to whom, I suppose) we became very attached. It was very difficult for me to load them on the trailer yesterday. The Little One, always gregarious and curious, hopped right on. Drunk Drunk, always a bit cautious, I suppose because he spent such a long time in such a vulnerable state, took his time. He sniffed the trailer. He chewed on the steel bumper. He put one foot up and then put it back down on the ground just outside of the trailer. All the while the Little One happily munched on the grain I had placed in her feed pan in the trailer, occasionally grunting to Drunky, making sure that he knew right where she was.

“Come on Drunk Drunk, hop on up. It’s okay,” I said to him softly. “Go ahead.” But he wasn’t ready. He walked away from the trailer and took a drink of water. Then he walked back over and narfed at the Little One, who narfed back. “See, Drunky, everything is fine. Just hop right on up there.”

He still wasn’t ready. Then, finally, out of the blue and with no fanfare, he put first one front foot, then the next up on the trailer floor and hopped in. I swung the door shut and latched it. The clang of the metal locking bar rang loudly in my ears. The Drunkard narfed. The Little One grunted.

I gave myself two seconds to feel. I pressed the palm of my hand gently against the trailer door and unconsciously bowed my head. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered in my head, unable to say the words out loud. Then I pulled myself together, mentally shook myself off, hopped in the truck, and slowly drove off across the field, trying to keep the bumps and ruts from tossing the pigs around too much. Once I got to the paved road, I cranked up the radio, set, as it always is, to the hard rock station, and drove off to the slaughterhouse, leaving my feelings back in the field.

I had said my goodbye to the Drunkard and the Little One, so at the slaughterhouse we unloaded them and I watched them walk calmly through the pen directly into the kill chute without any more emotion than I do most of the nameless pigs that I never get to know beyond being able to recognize them by sight.

Even before I was two miles away, both of them were dead.

As I write this, the Drunkard and The Little One are gone. All that is left of them are carcasses, each one split in two and hanging by hooks on a rail in a cooler.

Actually, that is not all that is left of them. My mind is full of memories of them, and my cheeks are wet with tears shed for them as I pour over those memories.

Goodbye Drunky and Little One. Thank you for showing me that I haven’t become a killer after all.

 

Farming Has Changed Me

Every now and then a thought or situation will arise that reminds me that farming, livestock farming, has changed me in an important and fundamental way. In my broader life, I am trying to be less black and white, less critical of myself, less dichotomous, so I don’t want to pass judgment on this change, just note it, acknowledge it, bring it to light and let it be there.

When I started farming, I had never killed anything of substance, not really, only insects. I wasn’t one of those kids that ran around with a bb gun shooting birds and other little critters just for fun. In fact, when I was with any of my friends that were doing that, I always looked at the death of the animal as a sort of mini tragedy, a transgression of the sanctity of life. And, even though I did it all of the time, of course, I actually felt bad when I did kill insects.

Then I became a meat animal livestock farmer, who is, of course, a person who raises animals — most often sentient, expressive mammals — for the sole purpose of killing them so that we can eat their flesh. Initially, and still today, this was something of a challenge for me. My feelings about life were and are in direct contradiction to my actions in regards to the lives of those animals, or, more specifically, to their deaths. I am never more than a thought or two away from remembering that I kill for a living.

Over the years, therefore, I have been able to hold onto my discomfort, my uncertainty, my anxiety about raising animals to be killed. I have maintained, to some degree, that little boy’s visceral sadness in the face of death, at the sight, for example of a little robin gasping its last breaths as blood pulsed out of the bb gun hole in its throat, while my friend watched and spoke as the small bird died with an exaggerated sense of bravura.

Nevertheless, something fundamental has changed. When Izzy the Goat died, more or less in my arms, I bawled hysterically. I felt her death in the deepest parts of me. But, then, as the number of animals increased on the farm, first one and then another would occasionally die — of old age, of disease, of troubled birth. I have dragged the bodies of full grown ewes and 200 lb. pigs into the tractor bucket loader and buried them in the compost. I have picked up limp, still slimy and warm, dead lambs, wrapped them in some hay, and dropped them in the wheel barrow to also be buried in the compost.

More than that, I have strangled a pig that was in a coma to kill it, and, recently, I used a gun, a real gun, not a bb gun, to put down two lambs that were in the violent throes of what I was convinced was tetanus, which would have slowly, painfully, and viciously killed them over the course of a few days. The bright red blood oozing out of the holes in their heads onto the dark brown ground is emblazoned on my mind and the thunder of the shots still rings in my ears. That vision is a sort of engraving I carry around with me, a totem, a testimony about my farming life.

All of this death and dying still confronts me as a challenge. But, and this is an important but, my relationship to it has changed. I still care, but I don’t Care. I feel as if my connection to an Ethic of Care has been severed by the degree to which I need to divorce myself from myself in order to live through these bloody, permanent, can-never-go-back moments. I have, as much as I hoped it would never come to pass, become inured, even if only slightly, to death and dying.

In spite of my opening words about judgment, I will say only that the day I loaded those first two pigs on the trailer five years ago, on a very cold February morning with my friend Zach helping me out, I noted the sadness, I noted the apprehension, I noted my sense of loss and longing, and declared that no matter what happened in my farming life, no matter how long I worked at it, no matter how many animals I had killed, killed myself, watched die, and found dead,  I would never ever lose my sense of the transgression of the sanctity of life inherent in my actions.

I am writing today to say that in spite of the strength of this desire, the day to day reality of livestock farming has changed me. Death is merely a shadow of what it once was to me. I meet it now with a sort of indifference, and even on occasion disdain. I have become, to put it very bluntly, a killer, something I hoped to never be regardless of the fact that I kill for a living.