Do you remember ecoTrain's Question of the Week? A while back when @eco-alex was still on Hive it was a regular thing: he would come up with an interesting question that would really make you think before coming up with an answer. He would offer this prompt to the ecoTrain community, where you could write a post trying to answer it, or at least offer your thoughts for further debate. Usually this got a nice discussion rolling in form of comments, and thus participants would get to know each other, and become familiar, and even comfortable, with ideas that may be different from theirs. Unfortunately, since @eco-alex left us, the QOTW has also been discontinued (as far as I am aware). We all miss you, Alex, and hope you are doing well, wherever you are!
Important Questions Remain
Even though there hasn't been a QOTW event for quite some time, the important questions of life that we're dealing with almost constantly have not gone anywhere. Sometimes they come to us very indirectly, other times, someone will actually ask you something, that you know you won't be able to answer in a short reply. That's what happened to me this morning, when @fenngen asked me in a comment to my recent post the following life-and-death related question:
On another slightly related note, today a fish almost hit me in the face when it jumped from the stream. Considering I've gone hungry many times on this journey it gets me thinking I should do some fishing but I don't like the particular act of killing. So my question to you is if you have killed for feed, what was your first experience like and did it bring any moral issues with it?
Let Me Try To Find An Answer:
I'm sure this has happened to most of us at one point: You're riding your bicycle at decent speed, and suddenly you feel something in your mouth: A bug flew into it! You could spit it out, but it remains doubtful whether it will survive, so you might as well crunch it up and eat it. Even my friend who's ethically vegetarian wasn't bothered by swallowing the result of this accidental killing and the subsequent protein consumption. But the important aspect here is that it happened inadvertently, which I'm sure most of us will agree that it's completely exceptional. (Though @fenngen 's fish example comes awfully close to this, I must admit.)
Intentional Killing For Food
When I first decided to explore the world of permaculture, organic gardening, sustainable farming, and all similar things by volunteering for a few weeks on various sites, I had a number of places lined up. Incidentally, the very first farm on the list was in Arizona, which was fully organic, but not permaculture. That meant, they didn't use any herbicides, pesticides, or chemical poisons like that, but they also did not establish a stable ecosystem that would maintain its own balance. As you can probably guess, this resulted in creatures of all types coming from the surrounding area to partake of the abundance they were growing. And to discourage them, the farmer resulted to the old-school methods.
"If Ya Wanna Have Breakfast You Gotta Shoot It First"
These were the words the jolly old man greeted me with on my first morning, handing me a rifle. 'Feeding right into the gunslinging American stereotype', I thought, but decided to give the place a few shots (pun intended!) that was going to be my home for the next four weeks. The rifle was a very benign .22 caliber, merely one step above the bb gun. So we sat down on the porch to have some hot coffee, our loaded arms in hand, and looked out at the fields of vegetables. "Look at 'im run, over yonder!" my host pointed into the distance. It was a rabbit. He aimed, shot, then jumped up and ran over to the rabbit writhing on the ground. A quick knock on the head ended his suffering, and he brought the furry critter back to the porch. It was small, probably under two kilos. "That ain't gonna be 'nough for two tacos. An' I bet ya're more hungry 'n that!" he said, and I agreed. So we sat down waiting for the next rabbit, whose ears I could already see behind a cabbage.
Your First Kill Is Always The Hardest
Isn't that a quote from Schindler's List? Although in that movie it had to do with killing humans, it was not much different for me killing the rabbit. I had never killed anything before, and the mere concept of taking a life was not easy to accept. But then I was thinking about why I was here: to learn something new, which included accepting difficult situations. And part of it was to get to know organic farming. And that whole notion made me think of another farmer, who would be just like my host in every aspect, except for poisoning his field with chemicals. Rabbits would still eat from his crops, but then die an excruciating death, suffering for much longer than from our gunshot and subsequent head trauma. Eating those vegetables, which I no doubt have done, I'd become an accomplice to that type of killing. This way I felt much better at taking aim, and shooting.
The Closer You Get, The Harder It Is
After hearing the rifle clack (a .22 doesn't make an impressive sound) I saw the rabbit collapse on the ground. So I jumped up and ran over to it, the farmer right behind me. The poor rabbit was still alive, but his hind legs unable to move. Blood was oozing from a tiny spot on his back into his fir. "C'mon, ya gotta hit it! See how it's suffrin'?" the farmer was yelling, obviously concerned for the rabbit's pain. Still, it was me who shot it, so it was my responsibility to finish the job. This was harder than I thought, but there was no going back. With a wooden club I gave a heavy hit onto its head, hoping that one would be enough. It was. The rabbit had stopped moving. I felt the farmer's hand on my shoulder, congratulating me with an approving nod.
The Responsibility of Killing the Right Way
We went back to the porch, had some more coffee, shot two more rabbits, then went about preparing breakfast. The farmer was quite skilled in skinning the rabbits, pulling their entire skin off with one quick move, while mine came of in bits and pieces. The skins that were intact he placed in a bucket of salt, to give to his friend at the farmers' market for tanning. Then, with more well practiced moves he cut off the meaty parts, and gave the rest to the dogs. A few minutes later we were breakfasting on some tasty rabbit tacos.
During all this time we had a great conversation about eating and killing. First of all, how detached we as a society have become from killing, even though we're eating more meat than ever before. Also, the lack of sustainability in the meat industry, its impact on the environment, and how superior wild meat is for our health. Even for vegetarians, the indirect killing the production of their plant based diet involves, raises the question of hypocrisy. Finally, the matter of a functioning ecosystem, where herbivores rely on carnivores to control their population and thus prevent starvation on the grand scale, but also keep them from suffering due to disease, injury, or old age on the individual level. When humans remove the carnivore from the ecosystem, it will become their responsibility to step into their place.
A Lesson Learned
Thus, I was confronted with the very first lesson on my long wwoofing journey. And though his farm was not set up according to permaculture principles, my host had a great deal of wisdom to share, including this part about living, AND killing, in order to let live. Even though I had not done much killing since then, my attitude towards it has not changed much since. Being stewards of the land includes these decisions about life-and-death. And standing up to take responsibility is a huge part of it. By the way, after my first rabbit I overcame all of my fear of killing, and shot a good number of rabbits for breakfast.
What About You?
To conclude this post, I really would be curious to know your views on this question. I am certain you will have different opinions, and I really would love to read them. So I'll be happy about comments to this post, but since this whole issue is so multi-faceted, I would instead encourage you to expand your ideas in separate posts. Just drop me a link to them in the comments! And hey, if we get the discussion going... well... maybe we can even revive the old Question of the Week. What do you think? I'm super excited to know!