What one animal thinks
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Today in Works: a new chapter
of Disconnected. See below.
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I was reading a blog entry the other day about chickens, Kentucky Fried Chicken and PETA. The consensus among the author and most of the commenters was that chickens are stupid and/or soulless, that KFC is being unfairly criticized for its choice of chicken slaughterers and that PETA is “crazy.”
Now I come from a family of farmers, and I hold no brief for chickens. I had a pet chicken once, and he was stupid, not to mention the most unaffectionate pet I ever had.1 And I certainly hold no brief for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which I think could use much of its time more wisely and effectively.
But I cannot disagree with its purposes. All animals, humans included, deserve to be treated as kindly as possible, and I said so in my comment. You know, I’ve previously corresponded quite cordially with some of the people whose thoughts were in that blog entry, and I have great respect for them. So I want them to understand why I feel as I do — and have for some years.
I wrote about it nearly two decades ago:2
Charleston, South Carolina. January 22, 1989.
North of Charleston, where Route 17 expands to four lanes again, the highway is divided by a greenbelt that rolls wide and gentle like a golf course fairway. Except that here, the divots are caused by empty cans, bottles and any other detritus that was smaller than an open car window. One of the things I have learned from walking the highways of America is that roadside trash has become not only a permanent part of our landscape but apparently a permanent part of our consciousness. As motorists, we have become so accustomed to litter along our highways that we notice it only when it is not there. In fact, it’s not so much a matter of noticing it as it is a vague feeling that there is something different about a clean roadside. What’s different is that there is so damned little of it. That’s especially apparent when you walk rather than drive along our nation’s highways. There is no movement to blur the roadside into the landscape. Every piece of trash is there, fixed clearly in your vision.
This section of Route 17 skims between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Francis Marion National Forest, two of the most beautiful assets of South Carolina. Yet here, on their fringe, the trash spreads away from the highway and invades their wilderness, a wilderness that in the past three years has become part of my yard.
These bastards are trashing my yard. Just who the hell do they think is going to pick up their shit?
A final indignity: On the way back to the truck, in a narrow clearing at the edge of the Francis Marion National Forest, I find the mangled remains of a deer squashed into a garbage bag. It was apparently a small animal, and most of it seems to be here, but I can’t tell its gender. There are no antlers, although they may have been cut off, and the internal organs seem to have been gutted. A roadway accident victim? Maybe. But there’s also the other possibility.
I’m so tired of arguing with hunters. Sorry, boys, there just isn’t any sport in killing an animal at the height of its vitality and freedom. The hunters, of course, always counter with the argument that I eat meat that also has to be killed. Yes, I do, and too much of it at that.
Maybe we should reinstitute mealtime prayers by saying thanks not to some deity but to the animals we are eating. And to the fish we take from the sea and the plants we take from the earth.
Expressing gratitude and respect to the living things we put to death would force us to examine our reasons for killing them. Maybe we would eat less meat. And maybe we would raise the animals we do eat on farms that would treat them not like livestock but like demigods, ending their lives mercifully, sacrificially. Maybe we would stop poisoning our crops with chemicals. You don’t think this could happen? It could if we made farms rather than churches tax-exempt.
We could say thanks to the trees that give us air. And to the earth that gives us trees and crops and fish and animals.
Saying thanks seems so little, but as I look at the rotting deer and see the beauty that still shows through its gnarled corpse, I am grateful it has lived. And I realize that after I’m dead, the best I can hope for is that someone will thank me, in spirit if not by name, for having lived.
I pull the garbage bag away from the shoulder of the road until I find a hollow in the grass. I empty the deer’s remains into the hollow and cover them with pine boughs. The dripping, foul-smelling bag I drag away with me.
Within sight of the truck, I find a cluster of empty beer bottles and pick up one. With the beer bottle in one hand and the bag in the other, I return to where I have been parked since last night and deposit my totems in a nearby garbage can.
In the years ahead, I will rarely go for a daily walk without returning with a piece of litter in each hand. And I will never find a two-mile stretch of roadside America where there aren’t at least two pieces of trash. In fact, I will find many stretches where there is so much trash that hundreds of walkers like me couldn’t make a dent in it.
I suppose it’s like a religious ceremony. I know it’s virtually meaningless, but it makes me feel better.
And I do feel better. I guess I have decided there isn’t much difference between a person who throws trash out of a car and a person who stands on the roadside bitching about it.
Today’s new offerings in Works:
• Chapter Four of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected. Rachel joins family members for a Thanksgiving dinner that reopens old wounds and brings back the tensions and grievances that have alienated her from them.
• Chapter 13 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. As their weeks of living together progress, Tess and Brian begin bumping elbows and working out the more mundane aspects of their romance. But it is still there, its flames transforming into a glow.
• Chapter 25: Kentfield of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard and his friend Elliot move in together in mid-1968, and Ginny spends most of her time with them. But her old demons find her before Christmas, and they all go their separate ways, Ginny eventually into a hospital.
– Sid Leavitt
NOTES:
1. You know, old Cluckity was just doing the best he could, surrounded as he was by humans who eventually ate him. I’d had chicken dinners before, and I’ve had them since, but that one was different.
2. The excerpt is from Chapter 65 of Adrift in America, a book found in the nonfiction section of Works. The truck I lived in was camouflaged to look like a sanitation vehicle.
Posted in Uncategorized |
July 6, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Your Cluckity story brings back memories. I grew up on a farm and we raised, among other animals, sheep. They are absolutely the kindest barnyard animals you’d want to meet, but the sad fact of life is that their sole purpose for being on our property was to give us wool and mutton. Wool = easy. Mutton … not so much. And because of it, we rarely named the ewes.
The rams were different. We usually kept those for breeding, so we could get attached to them and name them. My favorite was Wally. He was a sweet, dumb galloot of a sheep. If I had read “Of Mice and Men” before he first came to us, I would have named him Lennie. The problem is that he had a huge head and most of his offspring took after him, which made it difficult for the ewes to deliver (I’ll spare the gory details.)
One fine early summer evening, after a weekend away at a friend’s house, I sat down to a supper of spaghetti and meatballs. And by “meatballs,” I mean the kind that are made out of lamb-burger. No big deal … we ate ‘em all the time. After supper, though, I trudged out to the barn only to discover that Wally was missing. And by “missing,” I mean … well, I’m sure you know. I sometimes wonder what the neighbors thought when they heard this echoing through their yards:
“Oh my God!!!! I just ate Wally balls!!!!”
July 6, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Like I said about the chicken dinner we had after Cluckity disappeared, it sure was different. Except in my case, I knew where my pet chicken had gone before we sat down to eat.
As an omnivore, I understand that animals are raised for food. But having a pet turned into food gives you a different perspective about what’s on your plate. I’ve found that it gives me a respect, maybe even a reverence, for animals that are sacrificed for me.
And as I said in the entry, it makes me want to say thanks.
I’m grateful to you, too, R.J., both for your writing and for your sense of humor. I feel a kindness beneath both.
July 6, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Well, Sid, I can’t speak for any of my commenters (and I was shocked at YOUR comment because I did not think anyone was being unkind but merely humorous, and there is a difference), but it is unfair for you to assert that the blog post’s author (that would be me) said or even implied that chickens are stupid and soulless. I did not say that. That’s totally not my style.
However.
Chickens are food animals. They are not known for their great brains because they do not possess great brains. They do not have souls. God created them, as He did many other animals, for our use, i.e., to eat.
My son raised chickens for 4H and the animals were so cruel to one another that I imagine their inevitable slaughter came as a great relief from their difficult life.
As such I do not believe it behooves me or anyone else to thank a chicken or any other animal — or plant — for giving its life in order for me to have food. For one thing, the chicken is dead before it gets to me and I will not speak to a dead chicken.
To say that because I do not pray to the dead animal or thank it for dying so that I could have food does not mean that I am being cruel or taking it for granted or taking advantage of it. It just means I understand and appreciate the reason the animal existed in the first place.
These animals were created by God and it is God Whom I thank each and every time I sit down to eat. I believe it is dangerous to advocate worship of the creation rather than the Creator.
If we properly worship our Creator Who created all things, our relationship to all things will come closer to being right than if we worship the air and water and sky and objects that God in His wisdom created for our use and enjoyment, and for His own glory.
If you go back and read my post you will find that I said that the method of killing chickens suggested by PETA sounds to me like an evil thing to do to a chicken. And I still think it sounds like an evil and perverse thing to do to any animal, to put it in a crate and remove its oxygen and gas it to death.
As far as the word “crazy” … what I actually wrote was a rhetorical question, to wit: “Is it just me or has the world gone crazy?” I did not apply that term to PETA but instead maintained that they are seriously misguided.
Which they are.
I also attempted to point out that it was specious of the KFC spokesperson to state that they are interested in the ethical treatment of chickens. They are in the business of selling cooked chickens for food and that can’t happen unless the animals are dead. I stand by my assertion that gassing a chicken is in no way more humane than quickly slitting its throat, and that the way they do it now is ethical enough as long as it is done with merciful quickness.
What happened to the deer was unfortunate but not a tragedy except in the narrow sense that whoever killed it did not respect its remains as they should have.
There are no hunters in my house and I myself can’t stand to see any animal harmed; I love, adore animals. See my recent post about squirrels and how I think they’re cute and don’t want anything bad to happen to them. The truth is, squirrels are very destructive to crops and must be controlled or people would starve. And THERE would be your tragedy: for human beings to be sacrificed for animals.
Food animals are just that: food. It IS respecting them to use them for the purpose for which they were intended by their creator. I believe they should be treated humanely while they live and that their inevitable deaths should be as quick and merciful as possible.
I hope we’re still friends, Sid, because you know I loves ya.
July 7, 2008 at 12:03 am
Of course we’re still friends, Jenny, and I love you, too. We just see things differently.
You see all animals except humans as created by a deity for our use. I see us all as animals with common needs — survival, yes, but also a need for kindness and respect.
I’m not sure what a soul is, or who has one, but if there is one, the only characteristic of it that I’m interested in is what it does in this life. I’m much more likely to believe in it if its driving force is kindness.
As for any other world, it’s not in my hands. I’m just trying to get through this one as decently as possible.
Anyway, thanks for your comments, and best wishes always.
July 7, 2008 at 10:14 pm
A couple of years ago here in Canada, a “splinter group” from PETA went out and injected poison into thanksgiving turkeys.
Now, consider: not only did these lunatics endanger the lives of innocent civilians, they actually led directly to the slaughter of even more turkeys, as the poisoned poultry was destroyed and a “new batch” of birds had to be “processed” to meet consumer demand during the holiday season.
PETA never really took much of an official stance, and I had, until then, been a supporter of the group. However, the fringe and extremist elements control the organization now, and it, like most corporate entities, is more concerned with self-promotion and perpetuation than it is with accomplishing any real good. In fact, given the way PETA’s behaved in the last several years, I seriously doubt they can accomplish more than cheap public spectacle.
And besides: if God didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them so tasty.
July 7, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Good points, Steve. As I said in the entry, I hold no brief for PETA because I think its energies could be better directed. I wasn’t aware of the incident you cited, but it’s a good example of misdirected effort.
As for the divine taste of animals, your irony is noted.
July 8, 2008 at 10:04 am
http://www.eldritchpress.org/tales/egg.html
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The above link is the latest message from Gerard Jones in its entirety. It may be directed at former chicken owners such as ourselves, but we recommend it to our general readership as well. Thank you, Gerard.]
July 9, 2008 at 11:11 am
as for the trash, i will never get it. coming from a third-world country, i reasoned the trash is part of the proof that people are poor and uneducated. i was in australia for a while before i migrated here, and i was shocked at how trashed the roads are here compared to australia, when both are first-world countries.
what is that about?
July 9, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I don’t get it, either, May.
It’s certainly not poverty. I was always struck by how much roadside litter comes from higher-priced, so-called ‘premium’ products — for some reason, I remember a lot of Michelob beer bottles.
Uneducated? No, unless we’re talking about education at home. Maybe parents are either picking up after their kids too much — or not forcing them to pick up after themselves.
The problem with roadside litter is that it’s a self-reinforcing phenomenon. Drivers and passengers who see trash along the road are less likely to keep theirs within their vehicles.
Anyway, always good to hear from you, May. Continued success at your weblog, about a nurse, which I continue to enjoy.