Slowly, it becomes meat
[trigger warning: death, animal suffering, vegetarianism]
I always said that if we were going to have chickens, we needed to treat them as a source of food, not pets. We needed to be prepared to kill.
Last year we incubated some eggs from a friend. I built a coop. Five chicks hatched, only one was a girl. The boys grew up and became violent, and we needed to get rid of them.
Down the garden I go. I don't have experience with the neck-pull method, so I bring my axe. That method is certain, at least. Quick and clean.
A chicken will become very calm if held upside down. I catch a boy and dangle him by his legs. My heart is beating very fast. I've sharpened the axe and tested it on some thick branches. I am confident it will do the job.
After struggling for a few seconds, the boy goes very calm. He hangs in my hands, watching me out of the corner of his eye. I carry him to an out of sight spot. I place him on the chopping block and slip a noose around his head to hold it in place while I use my other hand to pick up the axe.
This feels like writing a confession. It is actually getting quite hard to write. I'm going to skip this next, most difficult moment. -- SNIP --
The deed is done. Each step from here makes the dead thing look less like an animal. Slowly, it becomes meat.
No head now. No eyes to watch me. I dunk the body into a bucket of hot water and let the feathers loosen then pull off as much as I can. The neck feathers first, clearing the flap of loose skin where the head once was. It is a thin little thing under the feathers. None of its color and splendor left. Much of the blood is gone.
In the kitchen I take the feet off first. It looks like a supermarket chicken now, if you ignore the long neck.
A careful cut around the vent to open the cavity, pull it wider so you can fit your hand, then slip your fingers inside. Warm, slippery, bumpy. The goal is to loosen the membrane that holds the internal organs to the inside of the bird. Pulling carefully, the oesophagus eventually loosens and slips free, and the whole lot tumbles out in one go. Humans look the same inside, I suppose. Just a tube, really. Food in, waste out.
I clean, chill and rest the bird. Bend the legs once rigor mortis has lessened so that it sits in that supermarket bird position. I make a soup. It's stringy and tough. I choke down every damn piece of it.
Over the coming weeks, that moment of death keeps coming back to me. The abruptness of it. One moment there is consciousness, a thumping, fiery life -- the next moment, nothing. Meat. A process ended that can never be restarted. The whole web of interactions it held with the world, gone, cut off at the root.
There was no sudden decision to become vegetarian. I killed three times in the end. It was harder each time. I stubbornly ate the other boys. As a meat-eater, how could I not? It would be inconsistent. I became aware of a tension that had always been there. A conflict between my sensibilities and my actions.
Shortly after the killings, I was watching my daughter perform in a primary school poetry competition. Almost all of the poems talked of global warming, and how it was hurting animals. It hit me that these children were the same as me, that they loved animals so much, yet looked forward to chicken nuggets for dinner. That all of us were afflicted by the same unseen internal contradiction, made possible by the fact that in our world, chicken nuggets came not from a chicken, but from Sainsbury's. A British chicken has no neck, no feet. It is a lump of meat. There is no feeling that it once was an animal.
I expect that most British people would not want to swing that axe. And I'm glad that we are so soft. I wouldn't want us to have the hard hearts necessary to kill our own meat.
We have built a world where we are so isolated from the reality of meat-eating that we are able to grow these sensibilities. We love animals, we do not want them to suffer. Yet others kill them on our behalf. Is this a stable situation? Can we sustain this tension forever, or will we inevitably slip back into hard-hearted meat-eaters, or soft-hearted vegetarians?
I don't know if any of this generalizes. It feels more like a karmic argument just for myself. I do not want to kill, I do not want to be the sort of person that can kill. I do not want to make others that sort of person. An easy, intuitive choice