It was time. We couldn’t stall any longer. We needed the space. She needed to go. We led her out and away from the herd, around the corner, out of sight so the others wouldn’t see and mob us for it, and coaxed her into the trailer with a bucket of beet. It’s an hour drive with an animal in the trailer, taking it steady on our winding, potholed roads. I drove, focusing on the road, keeping my mind on the logistics of the task and away from the heaviness of it. The betrayal. The goat in the trailer, scared and alone.
She wouldn’t get out of the trailer. I pulled and coaxed, he pushed and cajoled, and she dug her heels into the straw and leaned her weight back so far against her collar she almost sat on her arse and we dragged her out, into the open air where she stood, sweat steaming, alert and wide-eyed, muscles trembling from the strain of her journey. I led her into the lairage pen where a couple of fat lambs skipped about nervously in the straw, and took off her collar.
I’m sorry. I offered her my hand as I backed away and she reached to sniff it, nostrils wide, eyes wild, pupils dilated into huge, black pools. I glanced over to my husband at the gate and he turned away to hide his tears. He takes it harder than I do. He, the huntsman. The man with the gun people call to put an animal out of its misery, or home-butcher a pig. He, the huntsman, hardened to killing. I don’t think anyone ever is. Not him, raised with a gun over his shoulder and a dog at his side. No, it still gets to him. Not even our butcher, who kills for a living. I’ve seen the sorrow in his eyes as he stood watching, waiting for the bodies of the sheep he’d just killed to still as their crimson life spilled down the drain. I’ve heard his solemn silence as he works. I’ve seen the gleam of appreciation for life in his splitting wide smile that only comes from facing death. No, I don’t see a man hardened to killing. I see a man softened and deepened and enlivened by it. Me? I’m not the one pulling the trigger but I am the one making the decision and yes, I feel it. I feel the tightening in the pit of my gut as the time draws near, my heart rising to my throat, heat pricking the corners of my eyes. But my pragmatism overrides my sentiment: we need meat; I want to know where my meat comes from, how it was raised, what it was fed, how it lived and how it died; our land must feed us; our resources and the carrying capacity of the land are limited; the herd must work together as a unit, all members having their place, all members given the space, care and resources they need; we just can’t keep them all. Justifications to ease the fundamental truth that for me to live, something else must die.
It’s not even the killing the gets to me the most. I have no qualms about my place in the great cycle of life. I am here to eat and be eaten, dust to dust, and I would rather know my food and look it in the eye than eat faceless meat from a styrofoam tray, raised and killed by someone else, out of sight, out of mind. We can kill them at home, on their own, familiar field, with a treat of their favourite food and an instant. A hard moment of sorrow and decisive action. Bang. Oblivion. And then it’s done, and there’s no time for regret because there’s work to do, meat to be cleaned and cut and hung, a feast to be put away, every blood-dripping, glistening morsel a gift of life for life, and the tears turn to gratitude for the nourishment they’ve left behind. No, it’s not the killing that gets to me. Death is part of life and I have made my peace with that. It’s this. Leaving them here.
We drove away in silence. Neither of us uttered a word the hour drive home. We were doing what we had to do, the right thing to do for the good of the herd but it was wrong, and we both felt it. And we were tired. It was late and it had been a long day. We put away the trailer with as few words as needed and went to check on the herd, already settled into their new positions, filling the space that had opened up. The little, lop-eared one, the one that took the hardest bullying, was stretched out as long as she could be in the best sleeping spot under the hay feeder that had been off limits to her, chewing her cud with a distinctly satisfied smile. Everyone was relaxed and content. We had done the right thing. We should have done it sooner. But it was wrong.
Let me tell you a little bit about our friend, the village butcher. He’s a quiet man. A busy man, always working, running about, running his farm and his butcher shop where he sells his own beef and lamb, and running his little, on-farm abattoir—a single-handed operation where he processes a handful of sheep, a steer, and maybe a pig or two per week. Sometimes, busy seasons, he has another man helping in the butcher shop or in the abattoir, but most times it’s just him. His face cracks into a wide, beaming grin as soon as he sees us, such that we’re never quite sure if he’s really happy to see us or laughing at us. We suspect it’s the latter, us being those crazy folk who come down off the mountain late at night to watch him work and take our animals’ heads, skins and offal steaming from his blood-stained hands. He doesn’t question what we do with them. We’ve spent many a night watching him work, enthralled by his expert skill: the skill of a craftsman born into his trade; the skill of a man who takes care and pride in his trade, every effortless stroke of his blade honed by a lifetime of practice. He works quietly. Methodically. Carefully. We trust him to handle and kill our animals.
Until we moved from our little, lowland homestead to our wild land on the hill, the village butcher was our neighbour. His little, on-farm abattoir was but a stone’s throw over the fields. We could drop our animals off in the morning just before the antemortem inspection. A five-minute trailer ride. Being familiar with the sounds and smells of the neighbourhood, not too far from home, our animals, used to being trailered to and from their rented pastures and sometimes being housed, would settle quickly into the straw bed—always a thick, clean, straw bed in our butcher’s lairage pens, unlike the bare, concrete floors we’ve seen in others—to obliviously await their fate. We could be present and watch the butcher process our animals.
But it’s different now. It’s too far. It’s an hour in the trailer to an unfamiliar place where no green pastures await. It’s a sombre journey. The wrongness of it sits heavy in our stomachs. Our minds run over all the justifications for killing, and all the reasons for not doing this one ourselves—she’s too big, our lack of hanging space, hoist, time, the legalities of it (we can legally kill our own meat, but to sell, trade, or share it, it has to be processed through a licensed abattoir). All the excuses for the betrayal, the trust earned and then broken, the responsibility shouldered and then shaken. At least we can make sure they always go in pairs, never alone. But this time we there wasn’t another one to go. We don’t sell livestock because I won’t put them through the stress, the separation, or reduce a soul to a transaction. So how can I send them away like this to end their life stressed and alone, to be prodded into a kill box to the clang of metal in an unfamiliar place that smells of blood and fear, by unfamiliar hands? For someone else to bear the weight of ending the life I worked so hard to raise right and carefully. We know and trust our butcher, but they don’t. He is not their shepherd. My husband can’t bear to look them in the eye and he hurries through the unloading and turns away as soon as he can but I don’t. I stay a little while. I make sure they settle into the pen. I thank them for the time they spent with us. For the body they will leave behind. I offer them my hand as if they might take some reassurance that this place is safe, they’ll be okay. I look into the fear in their eyes and I tell them I’m sorry. As if my sorry can somehow console a terrified goat. As if my sorry means anything.
It’ll be twenty-four hours before she’s killed. Twenty-four hours of sickening dread and regret and what-ifs and should-haves until I know she’s dead and gone and what’s done is done. A trailer ride and a night and a day of stress that could have been saved by a swift bullet through her brain on the land she knew. No separation from her herd, no fear. An instant, her soul set free, her blood returned to the soil she grew from. I have no words of wisdom or lessons learned or twist of positivity to end this with. Only a promise to do better. To keep getting better at doing the best I can.
I so appreciate the way you express what it is to bear the weight of killing something you’ve raised yourself. I struggled with this last year slaughtering my first ram, and I’m already dreading the slaughter date I have set for two of my lambs in a month. In Oregon it’s lawful to have a mobile slaughterer come out to the property to kill the animal, then he transports it to the butcher. It hurts contemplating which sheep I’ll slaughter, but like you say, I wouldn’t want that sting to dull with time.
Lately I've been reading a book called The Ethics of Beauty, and the author, Timothy Patitsas, makes the point to state the fact that even in instances where a war can be "justified," it is still a thing of ugliness, and one that leaves deep wounds in the souls of those who participate. This post, and the way you write about raising and killing your animals, makes me think of that fact. How, even in choosing the better way, choosing to understand where it is your food has come from, and know that the animal lived as well as it might have, and was killed as humanely as possible to give its life and body for yours -- even in knowing these things, there is a sobering sadness to this act. It is to me a reminder that we have not been given clean, black-and-white lives to live, but a world full of complexity, and compromise, where balance is hard-won. Good on you, Carly, for doing your darnedest to live well in spite of it all.