A Carnivore's Responsibility

View from the Nest (tm Anya)

Yesterday I spent the late afternoon arranging the furniture in my Nest. I borrow that name from Anya as for the first time I have a small, cozy (the word of the year) space for sewing, spinning, and other lap fiber crafts. It's almost like a tower room as it is at the top of the house, a smaller mirror-image of the master bedroom and has three sets of windows. The bedroom faces east to the Missions, the Nest faces west towards the Flathead river and the Salish Mountains beyond. Dave helped me wrestle the new cozy chair purchased the other day in, and then made me a Negroni to sip as I watched the sunset from it.

This morning there is fog in the valley and sun up here and across to the mountains. I am, as usual, in the cozy chair in my nook in the dining room, enjoying an iced latte and a Croffle from Bayside Riser. My wonderful spouse went out foraging first thing this morning before I was even awake and brought me sugary goodness and caffeinated sustenance. 

Today marks a new point in life for me: I put my money where my mouth is and I am assisting in butchering and packaging half a steer this afternoon. I like to eat meat. I LOVE steak. I love beef, chicken, pork, duck, venison, elk, bison... the list goes on. I also believe in responsibly and humanely farming the animals. I could go to the grocery store (or, rather, Dave could as he does all the food shopping) and buy cellophane-wrapped, sanitized meat in a package without a care as to where it came from, or how the animal that provided it was treated during its life. I could pay money and support the factory farming system. Or I could pay more and trust the marketers who label meat organic, free-range, grass-fed, etc. Frankly, I don't trust those marketers. Every one of those claims could be "true" and the animal could still have had a miserable life and/or end of life. Being a control freak, I found a way to know about every step in the life of my food. 

There is local rancher who raises all his cattle completely free-range on grass. He supplements with hay and a bit of grain in the winter, but the animals are still out in the field, in their herd. They are hormone, antibiotic, and everything-else free. They are never jammed into cattle cars and trucked to a feed lot to stand in misery and filth, eating grain and not exercising so that their meat gets softer and fat, (the way most people like it) until they are killed one after the other by strangers whose only job is the slaughter and butchering. They live their lives free and as comfortable as living outdoors in Montana in the winter can be until they are humanely killed at home by a person they know and who knows them. No fear, no stress. I know it's weird that all of that makes me more at peace with being a carnivore, but it does.

I do not expect today to be easy. It is hard thinking that an animal that was living a week ago is now not living because I want to eat it. But if I want to eat it, I should own the rest of the process and take part in the rendering of that animal into food. As I do, I will give thanks to it for feeding us. Were I a better person, I would be a vegetarian or only eat meat from hunted--not farmed--animals. And I would also do the hunting myself. (I will not go into the necessity of humans hunting and our responsibility to keep down the prey populations since there are not enough other predators left to do it. That's a rant for another day.) 

However I am not yet that person. Maybe next year.