I haven't been posting much because I've been on break and, frankly, why bother? I don't even know who reads this. Also, I haven't done much reading this break, so I don't have much to report on. Actually, that's not entirely true. I've done a fair bit of reading, but because the books I've been reading are rather long, I simply haven't finished them. I hope to do so before school starts on Monday (fuck! fuck! fuck!) and it's back to the grind, and if I manage then I can share my thoughts on the latest batch of The Great Works of the Western Canon.
I would like to say, before going on, WTF?
Battlestar Galactica just keeps getting weirder and weirder. It's awesome, but dark and strange, like finding out you really like amputee porn.
On that note, I should report on the most important thing I've done over the holiday break, except for watching the inauguration and feeling an ambivalent mix of pride and anxiety at the regeneration of the dream of American exceptionalism, worrying about the fact that no matter how great Obama is, we're still a nation of greedy fools, finks, and TV-worshipping morons, and feeling disgusted by Israel's barbarically criminal violence in Gaza: killing a chicken. Yes, I killed a chicken. Cut it's head right off. I'm glad I did it, too.
The opportunity came up because my father-in-law has, since retiring and moving down the country, taken up raising chickens. He had his first batch of chicks this spring, and as the cute little things grew into more strutting feed-peckers, it turned out that three of them were roosters (or, as they say in Ireland with unabashed frankness, cocks). Well, it turns out you can only have one cock in a henhouse, because otherwise they fight and upset everything. So we had to get rid of three cocks and the options were abandonment or murder. My sister-in-law, a hardy proponent of DIY (she took up roadkill taxidermy for a hobby, and makes the most wonderfully strange puppets), decided that since giving them away would probably mean their deaths anyway (too many cocks is a common problem, it seems), she'd kill them herself.
I volunteered my services immediately. Why? Because I've very much enjoyed eating my fair share (and then some) of chickens, and I wanted to take part in the process that puts that lovely garlic-rubbed roaster on my plate. I wanted to see what went into the eating. My sis-in-law killed the first one, then me and her affianced killed the last two. We did it with a measured respect for the animals, as humanely as possible. It turns out, it's a fair job to kill and gut a chicken. You'd think its head would come off with a swipe of the hatchet, but in fact it took a few hits to sever the neck all the way through (We put the blade on the neck then hit the butt or poll of the hatchet with a mallet. I recall it taking four or five whacks with the mallet to sever the neck, but my wife insists she counted ten). Then, since before killing the chicken we'd tied its feet to a length of twine hanging from the roof beam of the unfinished barn in which we did the killing, we just let it hang and bleed until it finally quit moving. Then we plucked it. The first one we did slipped out of the loop (I blame myself, because it was my job to make sure he was tied. I had gloves on, I don't know anything about knots, and the twine was wet, but while all that might explain my lapse it doesn't excuse it) and fell to the ground, where it proceeded to do flips, jumps, and spins, spraying blood everywhere and running around... well, like a chicken with its head cut off.
The weirdest part wasn't the killing, or even putting the bag of heads in the garbage, but rather the gutting. You start by cutting around the chicken's "vent" (that is, its anus), then you carefully dislodge its viscera from its musculature by sticking your hand up inside the carcass and prying it all loose. There's a slimy connective tissue that makes this difficult if you don't know what you're doing, and you need to be careful not to squeeze or puncture any of the gastro-instestinal biz or you'll make a mess and maybe ruin the meat. So it was strange and difficult work for a first-timer.
As white-trash as my family is, I should have done this sort of thing much earlier. I should have shot a deer and gutted its carcass with my teeth when I was five or something, as my initiation into manhood. I'm from transplanted surburbanized white trash, however, and that one or two generations removed from the farm meant that the only gutting I got to help with was fish, which isn't that complicated. So I felt a seemingly belated sense of accomplishment at having finally killed and gutted something with my own hands.
A few nights later, we ate the chicken that my sis-in-law had killed (which had been affectionately named "Dinner"), and let me tell you it was good. The best chicken I've ever had. The meat was lean, rich, and flavorful. The skin was much tougher than I'm used to with store-bought chickens, but still edible and tasty.
This whole experience made me reflect on facts I already knew about factory farming, and made me realize that I couldn't in good conscience support the brutal and disgusting processes that resulted in mass-produced chicken, pork, beef, and fish. It's not the killing that turns my stomach, but the machinistic inhumanity of intensive meat production. So I've largely cut meat and animal products out of my diet, and I'm going to try to eat only free-range and organic animal products. It won't be easy or cheap, and it won't happen all at once, and it'll mean I eat way less meat, but I can't abide anymore the systematic cruelty of the meat production industry and the requisite blindness and self-delusion it takes to believe such behavior is acceptable.
I think maybe Elizabeth Costello is right: there is something of the Holocaust in the way we eat meat. Not necessarily in the killing and eating, but in the instrumental rationality behind industrial farming, in the total lack of respect for life the system requires, and in its demand for a complete disregard for egregious suffering.
So, happy New Year.
