I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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A farm should be aesthetically, aromatically, and sensuously appealing. It should be a place that is attractive, not repugnant, to the senses. This is food production. A farm shouldn’t be producing ugly things. It should be producing beautiful things. We’re going to eat them.
I grew up in a village in southern Lebanon a few years after World War II, the “Big War,” as we called it. In that place nothing came between us and the world we lived in, and in that world there was always blood, lots of it. We slaughtered the animals we ate.
Yoineh Meir no longer slept at night. If he dozed off, he was immediately beset by nightmares. Cows assumed human shape, with beards and side locks, and skullcaps over their horns. Yoineh Meir would be slaughtering a calf, but it would turn into a girl.
A few minutes later the harpoon flew over our bow and just missed our boat. It rammed into the back of one of the female whales in the pod in front of us. She screamed, and it sounded like a woman screaming. It was really quite shocking. Then she rolled over on her side in a fountain of blood, dying.
There are gradations of certainty about animal suffering. It’s very clear that chimps feel pain, and equally clear that plants don’t. We can say with reasonable confidence that all vertebrates suffer, because they respond to stimuli in the same way that humans do when we are in pain. With invertebrates, it’s harder to know, although certainly they can be intelligent. Octopuses, for example, have shown remarkable abilities to solve novel problems. So I assume they are conscious and therefore can suffer.
My point is that, in our culture, in order to even entertain the idea of an ethical predator, the observer must approach the subject with an open mind. Ethical hunting is predicated on dignity and respect: Dignity in our private thoughts and public words as well as in our actions afield when, as hunter Aldo Leopold pointed out, nobody is watching us. And respect, not only for the animals we hunt, their habitats, and the greater natural world, but also for ourselves as hunters and human animals. Carry those two blessed burdens in your heart, and you will do no moral wrong as a predator.
I’m sitting in a darkened movie theater, watching as Helen Mirren, portraying England’s monarch in The Queen, happens upon the stag the royal family has been hunting. The animal’s so magnificent he brings a lump to my throat. Not a shot has been fired, and already I’m a mess, my tear ducts revving up at the mere suggestion this creature might get hurt.
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight. Albert Schweitzer
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.
Albert Schweitzer
The bear takes seven steps, her claws clicking on concrete. She dips her head, turns, and walks toward the front of the cage. Another dip, another turn, another three steps. When she gets back to where she started, she begins all over. This is what’s left of her life.
Even though the butcher section was in the back, I could smell animal flesh when I came through the doors, the faint stench that leaked through the plastic wrap and rose above the ammonia smell of the floors.