I haven't eaten a bite of meat in over forty years. Yet today I killed an innocent animal.
A gray squirrel, which I mistook for a not-innocent California ground squirrel — who are continuing to drive us nutty (their newest trick is chewing voraciously on the bark of several much beloved trees in our yard, which could kill them if they're girdled.)
When my air gun arrived last year, I talked about how bad I felt when, as a pellet gun toting kid, I shot a songbird.
Today was no different when I found that the smallish squirrel that had been eating seeds on our lawn was a young gray squirrel — I couldn't see the white patch on its belly, and its fur wasn't as darkly distinctive as that belonging to mature members of its species.
After I shot the squirrel, it struggled for life until I finished it off. Burying it in the brush, I kept saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" while tears flowed. I don't cry often. But the anguish of causing pain to an animal who didn't deserve it overwhelmed my emotional circuitry.
Animal suffering is a central theme of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals," a book that I downloaded onto my laptop and read as a Kindle for the Mac test. (Verdict: pretty unsatisfying experience; but that's another subject.)
Foer says, "On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime." Since I only ate animals up to the age of 20, one quarter of a normal life expectancy, I've got about 15,000 unslaughtered animals on the plus side of my karmic account.
So maybe I shouldn't feel so awful about slipping up on the gray squirrel kill — especially since it met its end in a much more humane manner than chickens, pigs, turkeys, and other animals raised on factory farms do.
If you're a meat-eater, I dare you to read "Eating Animals." After all, If you're going to be responsible for killing 21,000 animals during your lifetime, you should know how they're raised and slaughtered.
Here's an excerpt from a review of Foer's book:
As in Dante, Eating Animals’s most powerful moments come in
hell: Foer’s depiction of the factory-farming system is brutal and
thorough—strong enough, I imagine, to win some converts.He describes
genetically freakish animals, some of whom can’t walk or mate, living in
tiny cages in windowless sheds, suffering ritual mutilation and sloppy
slaughtering (many of them end up getting boiled or skinned alive).Unprofitable babies are immediately disposed of: electrocuted, thrown
into a chipper, bashed headfirst into a concrete floor, or (in the case
of irrelevant male dairy calves) sold to veal farmers. Slaughterhouse
workers go crazy with sadism; toxic lakes of manure poison the
environment.None of this is new, but, as Foer puts it, “we have the
burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of
factory farming broke into the popular consciousness.”The sheer
brutality of the system seems to have pushed our centuries-long
stalemate to a tipping point: Factory farming has become its own most
powerful counterargument. And that transcends all cutesiness.As Foer’s
guide at the turkey farm tells him, “The truth is so powerful in this
case it doesn’t even matter what your angle is.”
No time or inclination to read "Eating Animals"? OK, then take just a few minutes and read Elizabeth Kolbert's review in The New Yorker. It might make you pause at the meat counter before throwing your usual package of animal into the grocery cart.
Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States
own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of
more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these
creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually.…Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly
twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five
million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three
billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen
million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine
billion birds.Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions
that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not
to know—barbaric.
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You could deal with your squirrels with a live trap which is what we do; then I carry them about 1/4 mile away, which is a lot of work but I am not into killing when it is not needed, before I release them to the back of our property. It works but just takes time. It has the advantages of being able to be certain it’s the species you had in mind.
As for the beef and lamb, it is not all raised and sold as you indicated. Some do what we do, which is raise them, have them killed on the property (one shot to the head) by the local meat processor, and the buyer has grassfed beef without the factory aspect and a lot healthier, in fact as healthy as wild salmon (farmed salmon is not healthy at all).
If more people, who choose to eat meat, would be more selective in how they buy it, there wouldn’t be the evils of feed lots. It is not needed. For the argument that the animals die for us to live, well that’s life. I am not sure the carrot wanted to be eaten either and instead of a merciful death, you probably ate it while it was alive!
Rain, we do use a live trap. We’ve caught quite a few ground squirrels in it. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been working lately. Either the gray squirrels or the ground squirrels manage to set it off from the outside (reaching in for the peanuts), or we’ve hypothesized that the gray squirrels are so large, their tails stick out past the trap so they can get out when the door closes.
Yes, buying humanely raised and slaughtered meat is a great thing to do. However, in “Eating Animals” Foer points out that 99% or more of animals are raised in factory farms. It simply wouldn’t be possible for Americans to eat animals who were raised and slaughtered humanely (assuming this is possible, which is a philosophical question).
We’re fortunate to have more options in Oregon than I suspect most of the rest of the country has. However, so long as people want their meat, it’s going to have to be raised in factory farms to meet the demand.
I imagine more places could do it as we do it if more people knew to want it. It is more work and the buyer must buy more meat than they might think they want– like 1/4, but it can be done and small farms can do it which means pretty much anywhere in the country. Even just training Americans to eat grassfed and not demand the grainfed would help a lot for the feed lots is where the worst happens. And yes, there is a way to kill humanely as in happy and living one moment and dead the next. Just keep in mind if people didn’t buy beef, the animals would never get to live at all. Ranchers who are not in it for the big bucks can also let the cows live out a normal life as in get to old age and not be sent off for hamburger but live out their lives. I have no problem with people choosing to be vegans but just saying that food can be gotten that is done the right way. Even growing a lot of soy has its questions for use of land when the question of what a crop does for the environment is considered. Nothing is without cost.
Maybe try a bigger live trap? We have trapped some pretty big squirrels here but we don’t have the smallest size. It’s a tough one if they really get onto the traps because too many rodents in an area is a health hazard. When we did it, we sometimes got two in one trap. That was a tad heavy to carry to the back; but we really haven’t had a lot around the house since the summer of doing that.
Have you ever swatted a fly? Stepped on a bug? Used Raid on a hornet’s nest?
What makes the life of a squirrel more worthy of tears than anything else that is “alive?”
Is it because a squirrel is more like us (or what we perceive to be like us) than a bug is? It’s cute…it has fur…it gives live birth, etc?
I think you are showing selective regret, just for the sake of appearances.
Dan, there was nothing “selective” about my feeling, which was much more intense than what I feel when I swat a fly. (I try to save insects, by the way; yesterday I carried a miniscule spider to a house plant rather than step on it when I saw it scurrying across the floor.)
It’s natural to feel more empathy for creatures that have more capacity for suffering, like a squirrel. This is why killing animals for food is a different thing than killing pests/insects that pose a threat to property or yourself.
Emotions aren’t “for the sake of appearances.” They’re natural aspects of our humanness. Everybody feels differently about different things. I just wrote honestly about what I felt after I killed the gray squirrel. Your results may differ.
I’m not sure I follow your comment about “capacity for suffering.” Does a squirrel have a greater capacity than a fly? How do we judge that? What is the standard we use to measure?
Not trying to be difficult…as is usually the case. I’m genuinely curious.
The Myths of Vegetarianism:
http://chetday.com/vegmyths.htm
Not telling anyone to eat meat or not eat meat. Just grist for the mill.