This piece describes culling an animal in graphic detail. You might not want to read it if you’re vegan, uncomfortable with killing, or eating lamb tonight. But I hope you will, and if you do, please read through to the end.
It’s more of a pop than a bang. An air-sucking, ear-splitting, earth-cracking pop. Exploding. Heart-stopping. Instantaneous. Pop. The animal crumples, lifeless. The gaping silence that immediately opens rouses me to action. I step in, knife wielded, to finish it. Not that it needs finishing. My husband’s aim is true (he is, after all, a seasoned hunter, and to possess a firearm in Ireland one must be licensed and trained to handle it). He uses a 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun with a 2¾ inch slug at close range. Which may be a little bit overkill. But we want to be sure. According to UK guidelines, this is the most humane way to dispatch an animal on farm (besides having the vet out to euthanise which would render the meat unfit for anything but the rendering plant, and what a waste of a life and all it took to raise it that would be). There’s little to no chance of missing. Death is instant. A neat hole in the centre of the now lifeless animal’s forehead marks the entry point; thick, pink blood and brain matter drip from the blown out exit. Tongue is lolling, mouth open, strands of half-chewed hay sticking out, mid munch. Expression frozen in mild surprise. But he always looked surprised; he had his mother’s wild eyes. An instant. Pop. No more.
Just to be absolutely sure, I quickly check the eyes for reflex—none—before I run my fingers through silken mane where the hair of his face meets the wool of his neck—the same curls I ran my fingers through admiring their softness in life when he came up to me for chin scratches—to feel for the jawline, lift his lolling chin and in two deep, firmly dealt strokes of my knife, razor sharp, either side of the animal’s throat, blood spills. Gushing. Sticking to my hands, seeping into my pores and thickening in the cuticles of my nails, staining the snow white wool of his throat crimson. I stand back. Blood drains, thickens, momentarily pooling bright red, garish, before soaking into the hungry, black soil.
The body begins to jerk and spasm. Disconcerting, still, even when we’ve seen it so many times. But it’s okay, we assure each other, it’s only nerves. Unblinking, unseeing eyes tell us the spirit of the animal we knew is gone. Gone before his carcass hit the ground. We watch and wait as the electricity that fired his body in life drains with his blood, body twitching, kicking, thrashing, sometimes violently, sometimes disturbingly as though he’s trying to rise (you’ve heard of headless chickens…). Death is violent. The body fights for life long after the soul has left it. It is hard to watch. And yet it is also peaceful. There’s a stillness that surrounds it, as though the Earth is hushed in reverence, life lulled to a choir of meadow pipits and song thrushes. In the past, when having our animals processed at our local, small abattoir, we have witnessed this same quiet reverence under the glare of fluorescent lighting, radio blaring, as our butcher stood solemnly watching and waiting for the bodies of our freshly bled sheep to still before he got to work. Minutes pass. Minutes stood silently watching the death throes of the body of a sheep that was born here, the blood of his birth spilled on this very soil, and raised here, fed of this land, made of this soil that now laps up his life blood. Finally, when it is still and the sickening heaviness of the task of killing has lifted, dispersed with his spirit on the breeze leaving only flesh and sustenance, I get to work.
I’ve written before on how we make decisions on who goes and who stays. On how resources are limited and the flock must ebb and flow with the seasons, in farming as in nature. On how the flock must feed us. This isn’t about that. This isn’t about justifying the taking of a life. This is just doing what we needed to do in the best, kindest, way we could. We don’t sell our animals to the factory, send them away to end up on a killing line, their senses overwhelmed with concrete and crowding and the clang of metal when all they have ever known is wind and rain and birdsong and the open sky. Our nearest small abattoir, run by a man we know and trust to handle and process our animals, because we have watched him work, is nearly an hour’s trailer drive away (and is one of just a handful still running countywide). We could have taken our sheep there. To be separated from his flock, alone, for his first and only journey off the land he was born on, to spend a night in lairage (albeit very quiet and comfortable, straw-bedded lairage—I wouldn’t send my animals anywhere less) in unfamiliar company and surroundings, to come back boxed and packaged in neat little bags, for his blood to be spilled by someone else’s hands. No. It breaks us every time. We swore we wouldn’t do it anymore. We will take them on the land they live on, under the open sky to a chorus of birdsong, with a pile of hay and a familiar face. I write this with awareness that on-farm slaughter is not practicable for everyone and nor does everyone raise their own meat. We need more small, local abattoirs and butchers like the man we know and trust to cater for small farms, backyard herds and local markets. Our small abattoirs and butchers (along with our small farmers) are struggling to compete against cheap, factory-line and imported meats and regulatory red tape; they need our support. If we’re selling the meat it has to be processed through a licensed abattoir, but when that’s an hour away and it’s one sheep that’s only feeding us it’s better, we think, to do it ourselves, on the land the animal knows, by familiar hands, no journey, no stress. And even, perhaps more so, when it isn’t food. When the animal has lived beyond the bounds of what is to our spoilt taste, given its life to the land and the continuation of the flock and the blood we spill will only feed the soil. Full circle. As it should be.
I write about it because it helps me process the experience. Because killing (let’s not beat around the bush here with words like “harvest” which I actually think is kinda creepy; if we are to harvest meat we must first kill the animal), ending a life we raised, knew and cared for, whether it’s for food or necessity or just that animal’s time, is profoundly humbling. Life-altering. I write about it because an unquenchable fire in me drives the experience into words that smoulder and swirl until I burn them onto paper and douse them with tears. I don’t think you ever harden to it. It becomes normal, as it should be, but never easy. But just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Life isn’t supposed to be easy. Living isn’t supposed to be easy—look at nature, see the struggle, the fight, the drive for survival that doesn’t give two fucks about our feelings. To feel, to care, that is the human experience. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it doesn’t mean we should keep it hidden, out of sight, it just means we’re human, and it means we can do it kindly, humanely. I share it because I believe we need to bring these processes into the light, to reconnect with our food systems, the land, the animals that feed us, the source of our sustenance, the natural order of being human. For us to eat and live, things must die. For us to eat meat, someone must kill it. That is the inescapable truth and I would rather look it in the eye and wear the blood on my hands in full knowing and praise and gratitude for the life that feeds me. For the life I brought into the world and raised and cared for until its end. Keeping it hidden only keeps us disconnected. Keeping it in the dark, blood on someone else’s hands, out of sight, out of mind, cheapens the profound act of taking a life to sustain our own and lets it corrupt, profit-driven, industrialised, covered up like a wound that festers. I put a warning on this piece but killing should never be comfortable. It is by facing the discomfort that we can do better.
I write about it because this is my lived reality. Because I have looked the death that feeds me in the eye, and told him I’m sorry and whispered a prayer of gratitude as I spilled his blood on my hands, his life for mine, his blood for the land he grew on, and I am humbled and deeply grateful for the flesh that feeds me and every drop of life sustaining nourishment returned to the soil I depend on. Full circle. As it should be.
Thank you for sharing this beautiful and moving piece, Carly!