Backyard Butchering: Loving Animals to Death

Yesterday I received the following comment to my post, All Meat is the Product of Cruelty and Exploitation… “How can you argue with those whose response is: ‘In the natural world animals kill other animals for food and in a most painful and cruel way and if I choose to raise my animals on my own property allowing them to live in a free and natural manner just as they would live in the wild that only differs in that they have shelter from the elements should they choose to use it and they are not kept in pens or tied but in large open barns and that at some point they will be killed as quickly and humanely as possible to be eaten by my family and the excess sold to others. I love animals but choose to eat them as well. I believe that how I treat them and kill them is better than they would live in the wild and their deaths much less horrible than being ripped apart alive as is the case in the wild’. What can you say to that?”

…to which I replied: First of all, it sounds like someone has been watching too many “nature” programs that revel in prolonged scenes of wildlife predation. Most cases of natural predation happen much faster; in many cases the prey are killed instantly.

In my book, Exposing the Big Game, I wrote about a wolf kill I witnessed in Yellowstone: “Suddenly they tore out after a young mule deer who had risked leaving the cover of the forest for the lure of an open meadow. The inexperienced doe didn’t stand a chance against the incredible, greyhound-like speed of the determined wolves. One quickly caught her by the hind leg, bringing her down, and a split second later the other had her by the throat. In less than a heartbeat, a living, breathing deer was reduced to a lifeless carcass.” Not a pretty sight, but much more the norm than the horrible scenarios depicted for entertainment on cable T.V. shows.

The hypothetical argument you spelled out (above) begins by raising the naturalist fallacy, which I covered in the post, Top Ten Retorts to Hunters’ Fallacies (just substitute hunter for animal farmer/rancher):

# 9) Animals kill other animals, so we can too.
That’s an example of what’s known as the naturalistic fallacy—the notion that any behavior that can be found in nature is morally justifiable. But wolves and other natural predators need to hunt to survive, humans don’t—for them it’s nothing more than a thrill kill. Human beings have moved beyond countless other behaviors such as cannibalism or infanticide, so why can’t some people tear themselves away from hunting?

A quote from author Robert Franklin Leslie adds to this:
“It is not important that a hawk takes a robin, that a bear robs a grouse nest. That is Nature’s own salient way even if we don’t understand it…Wilderness life has gone on that way since the beginning, and the prey has withstood the predation. But when man steps in…the very soul of Nature cringes for having endowed one of her creatures with intelligence disproportionate to responsibility.”

Backyard animal farming is nothing but the revival of Old World animal husbandry, from which modern-day factory farming is an unfortunate upshot. Both the factory farmer and the backyard butcher breed animals for the sole purpose of killing them when the time is ripe. They don’t raise the animals just because they love them and want to give them a good life, and raising them does nothing to eliminate any suffering that might go on in the wild between natural predator and prey (unless a person’s intent is to eliminate all natural relationships between wild animals, and there would be a lot of suffering on the predator’s part as the human strives to eliminate them).

Killing farmed animals “quickly and humanely” is easier said than done. At some point the animal knows that the human they trusted intends to hurt or kill them, as they probably would have seen it happen to one or more of their herd-mates. And the act of ending a healthy animal’s life so you can eat their flesh is cruel no matter how you slice it, especially since people do not have to eat meat to live a long, healthy life. And in fact, a lifetime of meat-eating is unhealthy for the human primate. Also from the Top Ten list mentioned above:

8) Humans are carnivores, look at our canine teeth.
Human teeth are designed primarily for chewing plant-based foods, like our primate cousins do. Humans “fangs” are teensy compared to those of gorillas, who are strict vegetarians and only show them to appear fierce. Also, our intestinal tract is long to allow for the slow digestion of high-fiber foods, while true carnivores have short intestines as needed to process meat and dispose of the resulting toxic wastes quickly.

7) Wild game (or free-range) meat is health food.
All animal flesh is rife with cholesterol throughout, and the protein in animal flesh is acidic, causing bone calcium losses as it is metabolized. According to the American Dietetic Association, a diet high in animal products has been linked to obesity, diabetes, colon and other cancers, osteoporosis, kidney stones, gallstones, diverticular disease, hypertension and coronary artery disease. New studies have found that another culprit in causing heart disease may be a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the intestines after people eat meat.

Again, wolves and other predators need to eat meat to survive—modern humans do not. Natural predators don’t hate their prey, but they don’t pretend to love them either.

Forget the 4-H Club—you can’t really claim to “love” an animal you plan to someday kill, butcher and consume.

Love the Country, Hate the People

“Love the country, hate the people.” I heard that thought first put into words by Sea Shepherd’s Captain Paul Watson and I’ve never forgotten it—no doubt because I’ve so often shared that sentiment myself.

Captain Watson was referring to coastal New Brunswick, Canada (where he grew up) and the type of people who club seals to death without a second thought. I have had the same kind of reaction many times over the years I’ve spent living in rural America, especially this time of year when camo-clad, orange-vested A-holes troll up and down the roads hoping some hapless deer or elk will step out of the lush, verdant forest and into their kill zone.

I had another kind of love-the-country, hate-the-people moment just yesterday during a walk with my wife and our dog on a dike that doubles as a narrow road bordering a river when a small, rattletrap freight truck pulled out of the driveway at a neighbor’s property. Unaware of the insidious, horrific evil the occupants of the vehicle had just been involved in, I raised my hand in friendly greeting (hoping they might stop so I could tell them their rig was leaking oil profusely).

Never again will I give someone driving by the benefit of the doubt. They waved back exaggeratedly and wore overstated smirks that bordered on malevolent. As it turns out, I’m glad they kept on going. When they passed by we noticed the cartoon drawings of a happy cow and pig and the name of their business, “Patriot Packing,” that were hand-painted on the back of the truck.

We knew instantly what kind of vehicle it was—a mobile slaughter service. Travelling abattoirs are an increasingly popular method among ruralites for killing the cows they supposedly took great care in raising. My wife then remembered she had heard cows bellowing (like they do when their young are taken away) and the sound of a power saw, but hadn’t put two and two together.

Touted as a more humane alternative to factory farming and conventional slaughterhouses, the down-home practice of “growing” your own cows is deceitful and in its own way horrendously cruel—especially when herd mates are forced to bear witness to such butchery right in front of them in their own pasture.

Though it’s an accepted part of country living for people to embrace or personally partake in the butchering of animals, it can hardly be called a “way of life;” it’s more a way of death—a culture based on killing.

Holocaust survivor and founder of Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM), Alex Hershaft, made this recent fitting statement:

“I see a striking parallel between the deceptive bucolic images of pigs cavorting in green meadows on Farmer John’s murals and the cynical inscription ‘Work makes you free’ over the gate to Auschwitz.

“And, I do see a striking parallel in the mindsets of both sets of oppressors: their self-image as upstanding members of their communities, their abject objectification of their victims, their callous use of cattle cars for transport, their continuous refinement of killing line technology, their preoccupation with record keeping and cost-effectiveness, their eagerness to hide and masquerade their horrendous deeds.”

Author Farley Mowat, another selfless Canadian animal advocate in league with Captain Paul Watson, ultimately came around to the “love the country, hate the people” sentiment in A Whale for the Killing. The 1972 book is an autobiographical account of Mowat’s moving to Newfoundland because of his love for the land and the sea, only to find himself at odds with herring fishermen who made sport of shooting at an 80-ton fin whale trapped in a lagoon by the tide. Although he had started off thinking folks around there were a quaint and pleasant lot, he grew increasingly bitter over the attitudes of so many of the locals who, in turn, resented him for “interfering” by trying to save the stranded leviathan.

Mowat writes, “My journal notes reflect my sense of bewilderment and loss. ‘…they’re essentially good people. I know that, but what sickens me is their simple failure to resist the impulse of savagery…they seem to be just as capable of being utterly loathsome as the bastards from the cities with their high-powered rifles and telescopic sights and their mindless compulsion to slaughter everything alive, from squirrels to elephants…I admired them so much because I saw them as a natural people, living in at least some degree of harmony with the natural world. Now they seem nauseatingly anxious to renounce all that and throw themselves into the stinking quagmire of our society which has perverted everything natural within itself, and is now busy destroying everything natural outside itself. How can they be so bloody stupid? How could I have been so bloody stupid?’”

Farley Mowat ends the chapter with another line I can well relate to: “I had withdrawn my compassion from them…now I bestowed it all upon the whale.”

Nature, Nurture or a Blow to the Head?

Johnny Depp has been quoted as saying, “You can close your eyes to the things you don’t want to see, but you can’t close your heart to the things you don’t want to feel.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be true for everyone. Some people can be taught to close their hearts as well, as this quote from a former animal-lover-turned-trophy-hunter illustrates: 

“You see, I didn’t grow up hunting and because I loved animals, I never wanted to hunt them. Any stray cat or dog simply became my new best friend. Any wounded animals became my patients, and if any of our animals looked cold in the winter, I would always ask my mom if we had any old coats or shirts that I could lay outside for them to curl up on. ….Dating Scot was a good thing back then, he taught me about hunting, trapping and conservation. He gave me all of the correct information I needed to understand how it was done…”  

Conservation by killing? Now that’s a funny way to express a “love” for animals. Heaven help any stray cat, dog or wounded creature she comes across now that she’s armed with a new understanding of “conservation” tactics. Not to underestimate her hunter boyfriend’s powers of persuasion (read: manipulation, domination and control) but there must also be some sort of shut-off mechanism involved to aid people who care about animals but want to fit into a society that decidedly does not—a society that in fact was built on, and continues to thrive on, animal exploitation. 

It’s a story that has played out over and over and over again throughout human history. Certainly the 4H club has “taught” a lot of caring young kids not to be “sentimental” about the pigs, cows, chickens and rabbits they lovingly raised when it comes time to send them to slaughter. 

Pigs are one of the smartest animals to grace the earth and have nearly hairless bodies, features that should help people relate to them (especially in this age of shaved heads and waxed backs), yet they are objectified more than almost any other living being. They’re even sold and roasted with their head still attached. How many young people in cannibalistic societies over the ages were put off at their first sight of a human on a spit? Chances are they could empathize with the person being slow-roasted over a bed of coals, but they were taught to objectify the victim as an “other” and therefore not worthy of their sympathy. 

Some psychopaths were simply born without a conscience; some may have lost the use of that part of their brain after a severe blow to the head. But many actually learn to shut off their emotions, their natural reactions, to adapt to a violent or abusive household—or simply to get ahead in the world. A number of psychopathic serial killers, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, grew up around pets, but eventually used them as victims to practice empathy-blocking techniques and hone their skills as callous killers. 

Thankfully, humanity has moved beyond cannibalism (aside from the five freak cases that cropped up during the last six days of May, of course). But as long as society condones killing and eating animals, people remain only a half a step away from likes of Dahmer or Luka Rocco Magnotta.