As I write, my cousin and his fiancé, who happens to be one of my best friends since high school, are butchering a ram on my table.
I have been firmly excused from this process, after guiding them through the skinning and gutting. My cousin is a chef, and my friend is a physical therapist who knows a lot about anatomy, so they’ve got it from here. My broken collar bone and I are just on the sidelines, listening to the bone saw and the occasional reading from a book. Currently “split the sternum and measure the rib tails.” And “cut out and around the twelfth rib, leaving two inches for the tail of the rib loin.” My friend is saying; “but on a person, we count ribs from the other direction so that would be the second rib.”
We don’t raise lambs for meat, or sell meat, so this is a rarity for us, and there are always extenuating circumstances. In this case, this ram had become dangerous, as they sometimes do as they age. He’s actually the one who accidentally broke my collarbone, though no part of this was retaliatory. I felt nothing but sadness, resolve and focus throughout this process.
As she sat on a folding chair sorting caul fat from organs that will be cut into strips and dried for dog treats, making sure there was no waste, my Auntie told us a few things about the traditional way this process would happen on the Aina. The animal would be thanked with ceremony, and the parts of the animal not eaten by humans would be returned to the ocean in a group, that could contain many people. Sharks know the place where this happens, and as the parts are thrown in the sea, the sharks are visible arriving to devour them.
My Gramps growing up, and my partners now, have always been very prosaic and without ceremony about this process. The only part that has an air of tension is the kill. It must go perfectly. As soon as the animal has died, the atmosphere relaxes, and the process becomes more like a group craft project. Like many intense things in life, it is more alarming from outside it. Like birth, and fire, and disaster, when it’s occurring it’s just what’s happening, and people are remarkably composed and collaborative about it.
I’m always surprised that even when people who consider themselves squeamish or averse to any kind of killing at all are actually present, they accept the reality of what is happening smoothly in almost every case. When people do have strong reactions, giddy laughter is much more common than tears. Our deep brain understands that profound abundance has come to us, with a lot of attendant work.
I have had quite a few meat eaters, and some vegetarians, ask to participate so they would understand what it was like. For some people, it’s a deeply meaningful request. I rarely grant it, because I rarely do this, but I agree that everyone should witness death at least once. I think most people would be surprised how much our bodies accept it when we turn off our mind’s story about it.
The transition between caring for an animal, to an animal caring for you in the form of food and hide, can be a very difficult one. It’s actually not a transition I can always make mentally and emotionally, and I find myself going through the process of skinning and gutting still thinking of the animal more than my family’s bellies. Not cutting the hide while skinning is to respect the animal, not slipping on any cuts is to avoid waste, and the opening of the body cavity is an exploration of an interior terrain, a kind of ground-truthing in which my job as a shepherd and the animal’s true state of being have nowhere to hide. All is revealed, written in organs and muscle and fat. I can see exactly how I did as a shepherd, and exactly what the animals life story is.
This ram’s caul fat was gleaming and ivory, so thick that the leaf lard around his kidneys completely obscured them. He has lived an excellent life, had many lambs, had more than enough to eat, and converted inedible lignin into the most precious substance known to humans- fat. He is an evolutionary success story, as a sheep.
I will probably never regularly kill sheep. I have no desire to sell meat, and I have no desire to frame breeding and biology in those terms in my operations. My income from the sheep is primarily their grazing services, and secondarily their fiber. I could easily stop breeding altogether and still have a viable sheep business until they start dying of old age.
Even if I did that, I highly doubt that I will ever go a single year without causing a sheep’s death. As Cameron and I moved through the steps of hanging and skinning, we talked about our past experiences, and the names of the animals that came up, and why they met their fate this way. Tooth abscesses, horn dysfunction that caused the horn to grow into his face, a ram so aggressive he broke an employee’s knee, a ewe who was attacked by a dog and mangled but not killed. Kidney stones in aging males.
Domestication means taking responsibility for death. In this one way, though I don’t share their conclusions, I do agree with vegans that there is no way to participate in animal lives without also participating in animal deaths.
A friend of mine does this regularly enough that she has a pen system set up to calmly and efficiently move animals through a kill floor, one at a time. There is always one sheep, incidentally a sheep that I gave her, that goes along with the group. The old ewe knows the system, and can calmly lead the rest. She has a very practical purpose. The last sheep to be killed would otherwise be alone, and being alone turns a calmly resting sheep into a panicking sheep. Having an elder there means they are calm until the very last one. On a deeper level, she is there as a witness. She holds the shepherd accountable for what happens at the last moments of her fellows, because she will still be there the next day, and when she returns to the flock she can tell the others what happened as well.
Our mutual friend has been joking, as this witness sheep gets older and older, that each time she makes this trip she’s hoping it will finally be her turn to go.
I think all sheep know that their lives will probably end with some form of predation. As a human who has witnessed the long slow declines of my elders and the sudden tragic accidental deaths of my peers, I sometimes envy them the clarity of their evolutionary niche.
Some days, like when the meat and fat of the land is divided between my close family members, I feel the clarity of mine.