One Bad Day
After writing this post, I felt the need to predicate it with a reminder about life and death. We cannot have life without death. Herbivores need to kill plants in order to eat; Carnivores need to kill herbivores in order to eat; Plants needs plants and animals to die in order to eat. This all sounds very dreary I know but the point that I am trying to make is that death, in general, isn’t as terrible as it seems for it brings new life. If you eat meat, you shouldn’t feel guilty about the death of the animal; you should feel happy that your demand is what gave life to that animal (all the more reason to purchase meat from places that raise happy animals). You should also be thankful for the sacrifice of that animal. I know that meat does not volunteer to be sacrificed but I mean it in the more literal sense, “to make sacred”. What could be more sacred than turning death into new life?
This is why I think the anti-meat movement is really the anti-life movement. This isn't intended as a dig against vegetarians. If you are against the way animals are raised and treated by a particular farm, I understand why you wouldn’t want to patronize them; however, if you don’t want to eat meat because it means that something had to die, then you are either naive or anti-life. Even when you eat a salad, plants had to die, seeds had to die, insects and amphibians died during the harvest, and other life forms are denied an opportunity to live in the environment that was replaced by a mono-culture of greens. There is no avoiding death when we eat. And that’s okay.
Conventional agriculture does not treat animals very kindly. Often livestock are mistreated and probably don’t live very happy lives. I don’t think chickens fed a vegetarian diet are very happy and I don’t think pigs getting their tails cut off while living on concrete floors are very happy. Here at Apollo Acres, we care about our animal’s well-being. We started getting livestock because we loved animals. Why would we want any of them to be unhappy? Sometimes I think conventional farmers hate their animals.
There are many reasons why we care about the well-being of our critters. Happy animals taste better, have better suvivability, and are a joy to watch. We also believe that one of the best ways to honor the Creator is to treat His creations with respect (for more on this, read The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs). Raising animals in such a way is good for the soul. When raising livestock however, the good times must inevitably come to and end.
Processing days are exciting because they mean we finally get to harvest the fruits of our labor but these days also have a bit of solemness about them. Slaughtering an animal that you have spent months caring for is not particularly pleasant for the slaughterer nor the slaughteree. No matter how much I improve my processes, I cannot guarantee a painless death. The obvious point that I am morbidly trying to make is that the day an animal ends up in the kill cone, is a bad day for that animal.
“One bad day” is a mantra the wife and I often repeat to one another on processing days. This reminds us that we do everything practical to ensure that our animals live a good life. We want to protect our animals from predators, provide shelter, a natural diet, clean water, and allow them to live true to their nature (chickens should be outside catching bugs, cows should be on grass, pigs should get to root around, etc.). Salatin would say, we let our chickens express their chicken-ness. We hope that these efforts make our animals happy so that every day is a good day - until their last.
We should all be so lucky.
