These words are the spiralling thoughts that formed under a sleepless full moon as we enter harvest season and the closing of the shepherding year. I have left them raw, unabridged.
A pair of ravens circle overhead. We think they’ve moved into the forestry above us. He thinks there’s more, they have young. They dance spirals skywards, riding rising thermals high…until they are as small as common crows, and break off east, side by side, black shadows in an azure September sky.
We have seen them pass over our ground often, recently. Wing beats draw our eyes up to the imposing corvids as they pass low overhead, scouting, as though they know that it will soon be killing time, harbingers of death.
The last time we saw a raven was at the butcher’s yard. Perched atop the apex of the house, it watched our approach with gleaming black eyes and stretched its wings as though to proudly show its portentous presence, lord of the boneyard. Have you ever really seen a raven up close? They are a formidable bird, as big as a buzzard and black as coal. We laughed at the archetypal cliché of its haunt, trying to make light of the moment before returning to the heaviness of our task.
We brought two cull ewes marked for mutton to the butcher’s yard. Two ewes that had come to us a couple of years ago from the hills out west, wild and scraggy as mountain sheep can be, thin and half naked, their fleeces falling from the mange. They came tied in the back of a pick-up truck, wide-eyed and trembling, and I thought that I would never tame them. One aborted a lamb that we didn’t know she was carrying, and we barely pulled her through the sickness brought on by her fear. But they hefted to our hill and learned to trust me, to follow and be handled with handfuls of pocket treats. They grew thick new fleeces from the heather and they became integral, if infuriatingly independent, feisty and panic-prone members of our flock, with absolutely no regard for fences. Our first blackface hill sheep, they gave us beautiful, strong lambs born of rock and rain that will stay and add unrivalled hardiness to our flock. We tended them as they birthed and reared their lambs. They were our ewes, our ladies. Big Trouble and Little Sheep. And we left them wide-eyed and trembling in a pen full of straw with two big Suffolk sheep and three fat pigs that snuffled at their tails.
We turned away and left them.
I can’t do this anymore. Tears burn the corners of my eyes, my throat constricted as I pull the trailer out and away onto the hour-long drive home. He turns to me, surprised, we could have sold them. No. Not the killing. This. Leaving them here.
We could have done it ourselves, at home. It is better that way. No stress, no trailer ride, no separation from their flock, no unfamiliar place or handling, no fear. But the meat was promised. To sell meat legally we have to have them processed through a licensed abattoir.
It didn’t get to me like this before, when our licensed abattoir, the village butcher, was our neighbour, a stone’s throw drive away. Our sheep were used to travelling to and from their pastures and the sounds and smells of the butcher’s yard were not so unfamiliar, being neighbours. When we could drop them down early before the morning antemortem inspection instead of the night before. When I could be there late into the night to witness the processing of our sheep, to watch the butcher work, quietly, skilfully, carefully. Take the livers, hearts, hides and whatever other, glistening, offaly bits I wanted fresh and warm from the butcher’s hands. When I could be part of the process.
It is important to me to be part of these processes. My responsibility to my animals does not end with a trailer ride, but with ensuring them the best end possible. The kindest end possible. Dignified, if death can ever be. At least we can give them the kindness and dignity of killing on their own field, their own familiar, relaxed surroundings, quick and clean.
We have one more small batch to go, and then we will not sell meat anymore because our nearest abattoir, that quiet, careful, one man operation run by the village butcher whom I know and trust to process my animals, is now too far away. There are very few small abattoirs like his left, swallowed up by the same economic drive for growth and intensification that has swallowed up our small farms. It doesn’t bother us that we can’t sell our meat, we don’t make anything on it, that was never the aim of our game. We will set ourselves up to process our own and we’ll breed fewer ewes so we don’t have surplus to sell. But if we are to have a network of small farms feeding communities, to know and support our farmers, we need to be able to process our animals to sell meat with the same ethic and standard of care that we raise them with. Allowing on-farm processing for sale is one answer, but not the answer for all farms, small farms who may not have the resources to set that up. Or the fortitude to kill and handle death, and all its mess. I don’t know, I think that can be learned, and I think as keepers of livestock it is our obligation to be equipped and capable of swiftly and humanely ending a life we are responsible for, but I also know how hard it is and perhaps it takes a certain kind of guts, too. If we are to have local meat from local, small farms, we need local, small abattoirs.
We raise our own meat because I love animals—though I am loathe to use that simple, surface statement that does not begin to describe the ancient, earthing, tangible bond between human and beast—and I also know my body cannot thrive without the deep nourishment their flesh provides. We raise our own meat so that we know our food and how it was raised, with full provenance and gratitude for the lives that nourish ours from the land we live on. But what good are all our pocket treats and ear scritches and care if we send them off to end up on a factory killing line? All our heather and rain for stress tainted meat wrapped in plastic?
Ah, but it’s just one bad day, we tell ourselves, there is no other way. And we turn away.
I will not turn away. I bring them into the world, I tend them until their flesh nourishes mine, I will have the heart and capacity to usher them out in the best way I can. This I can do.
We killed our first sheep around this time last year. It was the humane thing to do. A choice between a trailer ride for treatment and meds to prolong the inevitable for a few more weeks until a final journey to the abattoir for someone else to pull the trigger and bear the weight, or a swift kill on his home paddock. No trailer ride, no separation from his flock, no stress, no tainted meat. Head in a bucket of his favourite food…Bang. No more. It wasn’t easy, it was the right thing to do. We saved his meat and hide and spilled his blood under the willow grove on the land he grew fat on and it felt right.
A humbling reminder that we are all made of the same flesh and salt, to eat and be eaten, and part of something unfathomably greater than ourselves, our fleeting lives mere specks of stardust. That death is ever-present and fertile, in the mud and the compost heap and the falling leaves, in the kestrel’s talons, the fox’s jaw, and in the raven’s call. Yes, it will soon be killing time.
Once again you've written a poetic piece that very clearly illustrates so much of what is wrong in our modern society. I too have felt this as a Shepherdess. Where I am located in the U.S. on-site processing is not allowed for meat to sell. Plus, we have laws against allowing mobile butchering (only a couple of states allow), and getting a date reserved for the dwindling number of small processors is impossible unless booking slots for lambs not even born yet. Although I grew up in a subsistence hunting/fishing culture, I became a Vegetarian for decades because I felt strongly that unless I was (as you say) "part of the process" of that final stage- (which definitely makes one appeciate ALL that goes into raising livestock the right way) then no, I would not condone an industrial system that treats all life w such distance and lack of reverence. I applaud you for keeping to your values, and I know how hard it is to witness, and be part of, life and death regularly on the farm. Keep going and keep writing, those who have never lived this life need to hear your stories.
Your beautiful post pulls on my heart strings and speaks to the center of a growing problem...the centralization of our food production. Government is yanking away processing from the small farmer and also the small local butcher towards corporate farming. The Amish farmer mentioned before, from whom I get most of my meat, is processing his meat, defying the local sheriff. He once used a USDA sanctified processor, but with substandard results. The meat was often mixed with other farms meat and was dipped in a chlorine preservative that alters the nutritional value. It was not worth the transportation expense to get substandard results after carefully raising the animals on grass with no hormones or corn. I visit him weekly and watch him work with his family. His operation is clean, humane and done with great care and skill. This type operation should be supported. We as consumers need to voice our desire for locally raised and processed meat.