But the decision sparks furious dissent. Mourners hold an earnest memorial for the geese in one of their favorite, goose-shit-ridden parks. Angry protesters show up at the soup kitchen after the birds have been served and threaten the manager. I’m baffled by these responses. Bend is not a town where it’s common to see public protests of any kind. Where do these activists think meat comes from?
Few of us bother to question our habit of eating animals, even as we question the killing of animals for other, less frequent purposes. Anthrozoologist Hal Herzog writes that Americans “kill 200 food animals for every animal used in a scientific experiment, 2,000 for each unwanted dog euthanized in an animal shelter and 40,000 for every baby harp seal bludgeoned to death on a Canadian ice floe.” Animal rights protesters target fur-coat-wearing fashionistas but let slide the thousands of grocery stores that crowd live lobsters into miserable, algae-covered tanks. In the United States, vegetarianism is, by all accounts, more popular than ever before. Still, the lifestyle is rare. While the exact number of vegetarians is difficult to discern, most surveys and polls produce estimates of seven to eleven million. That means we have about as many vegetarians as residents of the state of North Carolina. This is a tiny minority, a blip in the demographic chart. There are roughly two million more hunters than vegetarians in the country. Not to mention, one survey found that 60 percent of the people who identified themselves as vegetarians admitted they had consumed meat in the last twenty-four hours.
Animals kill other animals, of course, and we don’t judge them for it, we simply call them carnivores. Most vegetarians I know continue to feed meat to their pet dogs. Some wild animals kill with no intention of eating their victims. Wolves and elk, for example, are both known to slay members of their own species while jockeying for status during mating season.
Some animal rights activists argue that because humans no longer need meat to survive, we should all become vegetarians. It is an understandable, even noble desire to avoid unnecessary death or suffering. Yet even a vegan diet kills animals. “The grain that the vegan eats,” Michael Pollan writes, “is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate… If America was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops.” Cattle, elk, sheep and antelope, for example, can chew grass and turn it directly into protein. So in mountainous, rocky regions that are better suited for grazing than farming, raising animals for meat is often the most efficient way to reap food from the land. In other words, if our concern is, as Pinchot put it, the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time, then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical decision.
Arguments for or against meat eating almost always involve some definition of otherness, the drawing of a line that separates “us” from “them.” The precise geography of this boundary is determined by the individual eater. To some pescivores, for example, cows and pigs are too intelligent, too fuzzy or too reminiscent of humans to eat. Fish, on the other hand, are fair game.
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer draws a comparison between the arguments about meat eating and abortion. In both cases, he writes, “it is impossible to definitively know some of the most important details (When is a fetus a person, as opposed to a potential person? What is animal experience really like?) and that cuts right to one’s deepest discomforts, often provoking defensiveness or aggression. It’s a slippery, frustrating and resonant subject. Each question prompts another, and it’s easy to find yourself defending a position far more extreme than you actually believe or could live by. Or worse, finding no position worth defending or living by.” One person’s definition of an ethical meal can—and does—bow and sway throughout one’s lifetime. Perhaps that’s why, in the United States, vegetarians are outnumbered, three to one, by ex-vegetarians.
Philosophers pose stark hypothetical questions to help each of us understand where, exactly, to draw the ethical boundaries of our own eating habits. On one end of the spectrum, philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan argue that “speciesism,” or the exploitation and oppression of non-human animals, is equivalent to sexism, racism and the exploitation and oppression of humans. If we justify our treatment of animals—namely, eating them—by pointing to their inability to speak and their incapacity to think rationally, then why not, they ask, eat brain-damaged humans who are also unable to speak or think rationally?
But philosopher Cora Diamond counters that the rights of a person or animal are not the real issue. Her problem with the Singer-Regan argument for not eating animals is that it implies a vegetarian would have no qualms about eating the cow that has been struck by lightning. She writes, “There is nothing in the discussion which suggests that a cow is not something to eat; it is only that one must not help the process (of turning a living cow into food) along.” Diamond concludes that Singer and Regan are ignoring a critical difference between human beings and other animals. It is something else that makes so many of us willing to eat cows but not people (even people who die in car accidents), something that extends beyond eating. For example, a formal funeral and a published obituary are appropriate for a human baby who dies at two weeks old, but not for a dog—not even one that has been loved by a family for many years. Or, from another angle, just because an animal is capable of suffering doesn’t mean that we should do everything we possibly can to avoid its suffering. “That this is a being which I ought not to make suffer, or whose suffering I should try to prevent,” Diamond writes, “constitutes a special relationship to it.”
As a newspaper reporter, I am acutely aware that we measure tragedy, at least in part, by its relative closeness. The summer that I worked at the Hartford Courant, I wrote about a group of local firefighters who flew to Oregon to help fight a raging wildfire. The fire had ravaged thousands of acres, which seemed like a shame. It wasn’t until I moved to Oregon that I understood the serious threat of such a fire. A rampant wildfire isn’t just a shame, it is terrifying. The first time I interviewed a family who had to be evacuated from their home because of a wildfire, I saw tears well up in a young mother’s eyes and I understood what the fire really was: a tragedy. This shift was all because of closeness. A special relationship. That same reasoning explains why I can eat steaks from a cow and feel nothing, then fall to pieces when it’s time to euthanize a beloved pet dog. I never met the cow. But I loved that dog like a member of my family.
It also explains the ire over the deaths of 109 geese. Bend residents feel too close to these animals—why, a goose strutted past me in the park just the other day—to approve of their being cooked and eaten. But what does it say about us that we’re only comfortable with our meat being raised out of sight and out of mind? Thinking about it too hard points out our hypocrisy. “No other people in history,” Pollan writes, “has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat.”
This makes hunting an especially complex endeavor: The chase fosters a special relationship, a direct connection between predator and prey. Yet that closeness does not infringe upon the predator’s willingness to eat the prey. Instead, killing and eating the prey becomes an expression of that relationship’s specialness.
Hunting regularly reminds me of an enormous category of animal-human relationship that I otherwise ignore in my day-to-day life. My relationships with animals tend to fall under two broad headlines: Friends (my pet dogs) and Enemies (vermin mice).
But there exists a vast world between the two. The black bear who picked huckleberries from the same shrub just hours before I did. The chicken who lays eggs for my breakfast. The squirrel who lives in the tree in my backyard. The cow who produced milk for my cheddar cheese. The family of rabbits displaced by t
he construction of a new house on my block. The shrimp who wiggled into a net and landed in my stir-fry. The fish who also wiggled into that net and was thrown back, dead. These animals’ lives are intertwined with mine, whether or not I acknowledge them.
Most animal species on earth probably fit somewhere in this middle ground, and yet I have no words to express how I feel about them, how I treat them, what role they play in my everyday life. I have no category for them. Every once in a while, a pretty hummingbird who sips from my feeder slips into the Friend category. The squirrel who breaks the feeder scoots onto the Enemy side. The rest of the time, they don’t exist.
The problem with this binary formula is that, for more than twenty years, it has tricked me into thinking that I face an equally stark choice in my own treatment of animals. As a meat eater, I could:
Eat friends for dinner, or
Convince myself that dinner was an enemy deserving of death.
What reasonable person would choose the first? And after meeting an animal—almost any animal!—and looking into its eyes, how could anyone believe the second? For most of my life, I did the only logical thing: I chose instead not to think about my meat as animals at all. But to hunt is to confront this overlooked category of animals on earth. It is to stand up and admit: This is how the world works.
In one scene in his book, Foer witnesses the slaughter of a pig. The pig looks at him during its last seconds of life, and Foer is moved by this. “The pig wasn’t a receptacle of my forgetting,” he writes. “The animal was a receptacle of my concern. I felt—I feel—relief in that. My relief doesn’t matter to the pig. But it matters to me.” Indeed, our respect for animals is, in some ways, all we can offer them. Animals die whether we acknowledge them or not, whether we eat them or not, whether we participate in their deaths willfully or indirectly.
To me, hunting my own meat feels like saying grace before a meal and really, for the first time in my life, meaning it. I grew up in a household that said grace before supper: God is great, God is good. And we thank Him for our food. As a kid, I thought it was a little silly. It was the only time we ever mentioned God. And the imperfect rhyme bothered me. It is only since I started killing my dinner—watched it switch, in an instant, from living to dead—that I have felt truly grateful for a meal.
CHAPTER 11
YEAR OF DEATH
In October I grow nervous because back in early summer, I bought an elk tag. This means I have the right to kill one male elk in one particular area about a hundred miles south of our home. I don’t feel ready to put myself in a situation where it’s even possible to shoot something as big as an elk. The guilt might be too much to bear, not to mention—oh God—the guts.
“Elk guts,” one hunter tells me, “are the real test.”
I look for an excuse to call off the four-day hunt, and soon find one in our dog Bob.
Every evening, Scott and I come home from work and take our dogs on a walk. One day we are only a block from the house when Bob starts hopping on three legs. The next day, I take a long lunch break and drive Bob to the veterinarian. He is diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a bone tumor, in his right hind leg. The vet says this disease usually causes a swift but painful death. She prescribes a mild opiate and reassures me that “you’ll know” when Bob is in too much pain to go on. I drive Bob back home and call Scott at work to tearfully deliver the news.
Bob’s decline is steady. As October wears on, our walks get shorter, and then, to save Bob’s strength, we start dividing them up. I take Sylvia on an energetic jog around the neighborhood. Scott takes Bob on a slow, elderly stroll, letting him savor the smells that have provided the high point of each day since Scott adopted him nine years earlier. Elk-hunting season arrives and we stay home to care for Bob.
One Monday in mid-November, I arrive at work and open my inbox. The first email informs me that one of my co-workers, Jim Witty, died of a sudden, massive heart attack earlier that morning. Jim was the outdoors writer, and just fifty years old. He was beloved by the paper’s readers, some of whom will later tell me that although they never met Jim they felt he was their hiking buddy. Scott and I had just bumped into Jim three days earlier at a pizza parlor, with his wife and two friends.
A couple of days before Thanksgiving, we learn that our sister-in-law’s father, also named Jim—who helps run the non-profit where Scott works—has been hospitalized. The whole family was on the Oregon coast when he started feeling ill. His wife drove him back to Bend. A few miles from home, he fell unconscious, so she drove straight to the hospital.
“It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it,” Scott tells me.
On Thanksgiving Day, Jim’s children and wife gather around his body as a flight deck of life-support machines are switched off, one by one. He was an attorney in Bend whose primary client was the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. He was also a U.S. Marines veteran, so his funeral is elaborate, with American Indian blessings and a three-volley salute.
On our drive home from the funeral, Scott and I talk about the spiritual ceremonies we just witnessed.
“It really makes you stop and think…,” Scott starts.
“I know.”
“… about what we’ll leave behind when we die.”
“I know.”
“I need to figure out what I believe in.”
“Wait… what are you talking about?”
“I don’t necessarily mean religion, but…” He trails off and pauses before adding, “What would my funeral look like? I wasn’t in the military. I don’t go to church. I’m not Native American. So what will you do at my funeral, just throw me in the hole?”
I can’t help it. I let out a laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re right—you are.” I shake my head and try to turn serious. “It’s just, I thought we were talking about something else.”
“What?”
“I was just thinking, when you said ‘what we leave behind,’ that you were talking about kids. That, you know, we need to hurry up and have some… or there won’t be anyone at our funerals.”
Scott laughs.
“Good point,” he says.
On December 11, I come home from work to find Bob lying on his stomach, unable to stand. We’ve already arranged for the vet to come to our house the following afternoon, a Friday, to euthanize him. Now it’s clear that’s not soon enough. I call Scott in tears.
“It’s Bob,” I say between sobs. “You need to come home.”
He carries Bob into the backyard, which is where he appeared to be heading when he fell. We stroke his soft fur and then I go inside and call the vet.
While we wait for her to arrive, we pet Bob and feed him pieces of sausage that we had in our refrigerator. We tell him what a good dog he is. That we will always love him. That we were so lucky to have him.
Later that night, I tell Scott that it feels like this recent string of deaths is consuming our lives. I have no idea that it’s just beginning.
For Christmas, Scott and I fly to Washington, DC. We gather with my mother’s extended family at my parents’ weekend home near the Chesapeake Bay. The celebration is hectic and crowded, full of small talk with some family members and long, involved conversations with others.
My cousin Donna and her husband, Seth, are spending the night here with their daughter, Audrey, who was born a year ago in August. I haven’t seen Donna since before Audrey’s birth, and I’m curious to see her as a mother. For several years now, my life with Scott has paralleled Donna’s with Seth. We married within a week of each other. We both recently bought houses. Audrey represents this huge step that they have taken and we have not, a step that still makes me nervous.
When the other family members leave and my parents go to bed, Scott and I stay up talking in the living room with Donna, Seth and my sister, Gretchen.
I can’t wait to get into bed with Scott, and have some time away from the rest of my family. I lift the covers and crawl in, stretching
out alongside him and letting out a big sigh.
And then I hear a sharp shriek.
Scott and I look at each other.
“Did someone just scream?” I whisper.
Scott nods, his brow furrowed.
We sit up and hear it again. This time, it’s louder and unmistakable—pure agony. It’s Donna.
We leap out of bed and fling open the door.
Donna is running into the dining room with Audrey limp in her arms.
“Call 911!” she screams, then bends down and places her ear to Audrey’s chest. My parents and sister appear, stunned, in the doorway on the other side of the room. My father has the cordless phone in his hand. He has already dialed. “We need an ambulance.”
By now, Donna—who is an EMT by profession—is performing CPR, rapidly pressing her palm into Audrey’s tiny chest and then stopping to breathe into her pink mouth. Seth sits on the floor with Audrey’s feet in his lap, rubbing her legs.
My father gives our address to the dispatcher, then Audrey’s age. Donna lifts her mouth off Audrey’s and says, through tears, “I can’t do this.”
“Yes you can,” my mom says. “You’re doing it, Donna. Keep going, you’re doing a good job.”
Donna doesn’t miss a compression or a breath, even though it’s clear her heart is breaking. We can hear it in her wailing, see it in her tears. While all of this is going on, I’m standing helpless on the side. My body is in a state of hypervigilance; I shiver a little, acutely aware of how the scene looks, how my own saliva tastes, how my parents’ dining room smells. Scott returns to our bedroom and yanks on his clothes and shoes. I follow and pull on a pair of boots over my pajamas. We walk outside, to the end of the driveway. The neighborhood is dark and the streets are wet. In the distance, we hear sirens.
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