Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain grips a spear awkwardly. His face twists up like he’s swallowed something foul– not an uncommon expression for someone with a food tourism show. But in this context it’s different. The rain continues to come down, the spear is dripping. He readjusts his grip, again, as he prepares to perform manken — to spear the ceremonial pig through the heart at the foot of the longhouse ladder for the Bornean celebration of Gawai Dayak. “Now?” he asks, hesitating. “Straight in?”
Despite a career spent cooking the products of animal death, slaughter is a foreign and disturbing experience for Bourdain. Shoulders hunched, eyes nearly closed, he looks on the verge of passing out when a Bornean man steps out from the crowd to help. The two cross arms across the spear like an ill-matched pair of dancers: the Bornean man placid, Bourdain white-faced and breathless. And then, suddenly, it is done. The animal squeals loudly. The pooling rainwater turns red. And the festival drums begin to play.
Feeding the human population has required some remarkable feats of ingenuity. We transformed 40% of our planet’s surface into farmland. We broke open the secrets of three grass seeds– corn, rice and wheat– which together now provide all 7 billion of us with nearly half the calories we will consume across our lives. We invented boats and giant refrigerators to ferry gigatons of produce around the world. And we mechanized the annual production and slaughter of tens of billions of farm animals.
But while animal death is baked into modern society at an unimaginable scale, there is little evidence of it in our day to day lives. Factory farms are tucked into the poorest, most rural corners of our country. There, pigs and cows live and die out of sight beneath metal walls and fluorescent lights. How we connect with and understand that death is hampered by its invisibility. But a growing movement of 21st century slaughterers is aiming to change that.
Born of the Spear
Killing animals has been a central part of our lives throughout our history. During the Stone Age, bands of Europeans drove bear and caribou into deep pits filled with sharpened stakes. Across the Atlantic, Prehistoric Americans like those of the Clovis peoples used volleys of spears to bring down mammoths, while other groups in America chased bison off cliffs.
During the agricultural revolution, our meat consumption shifted. We selected a handful of meaty mammals, birds and a rodent (the guinea pig) to undertake the experience of de-wilding with us; to live within our fences and walls thereby simplifying the process of procuring meat.
Since then, and up until quite recently, our connection to the animals that provide us with food has been straightforward. Our meat lived in our forests or our backyards, which is where we went to kill it.
But not anymore. While our species is eating more meat than it ever has, most of it now comes from animals in factory farms. As a result of this change, billions of people have passed the grim task of butchery on to a few unfortunate souls employed to fire bolt guns into the heads of cows or to machines that dunk chickens and turkeys into vats of electrified water. Butchery is not a task that someone could request to do themselves or, one might think, that anyone would want to do. But the thing is, increasingly, people do.
These “mindful carnivores” are challenging the scaffolding upon which we have built modern meat production, not by waging war against the factory farm or forgoing steak, but by taking back the spear from capitalist automation. These groups are, like Bourdain, interested in reconvening with the gory truth that brings food to their plates, on their own terms. In doing so, they are breaking the mold about what it means to be a butcher, a consumer, and human animal in the 21st century. And you can find them in some surprising places.
The Rebirth of Death
Wild Abundance is situated in a holler outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Each year, hundreds of students attend classes at the self-described “eco-homestead.” They learn how to harvest persimmons under the deer moon, build a tiny home from local lumber, and bond with the nature spirits of Appalachia. It’s all very flower-child, very Gary Snyder, very far out. But a few years ago, the group decided to offer a new kind of class. It’s name: “Cycles of Life: Butchery.” The goal: to sanctify the life of a sheep, and then slaughter it.
Almost immediately, the group came under fire. A Change.org petition quickly accumulated 13,000 signatures demanding that the “two innocent sheep” slated for slaughter be spared. The homestead’s director Natalie Bogwalker received death threats against herself and family. And a slew of what the course’s instructor called “militant vegan rhetoric” exploded onto the blogosphere, eventually percolating into the local news and leading the organization to abandon the idea. The course description: “This hands-on slaughter and butchery class covers how to kill a sheep (an older lamb) in a sacred way, skin it, butcher the meat and cure it”– clearly nicked a nerve in the animal rights community.
All the more surprising was that this vitriol was being directed at what was essentially an ally. Wild Abundance, an organization officially dedicated to battling the environmental scourge of “industrial society and patriarchy,” a group that offers consulting services in off-grid living, was being attacked as if they had lopped the top off their mountain home to build a strip mine. In the comments from the animal rights activists online, there was a palpable sense of betrayal. So what inspired this crunchy group to break with its confederates and explore hands-on animal slaughter, of all topics?
Meredith Leigh, author of the book The Ethical Meat Handbook: A Complete Guide to Home Butchery, Charcuterie, and Cooking for the Conscious Omnivore, was slated to teach one of the butchery courses before it was called off. She believes that if one chooses to eat meat there are better and worse ways to go about it. The worst way to do it, according to her, is to support the industrial machine that turns billions of pigs, chickens, cows and turkeys into cold cuts and steak to support America’s appetite for cheap meat. For the conscious carnivore, humane meat instead comes from animals you have raised, and slaughtered, yourself.
Many agree with her premise. Author Yuval Noah Harrari, for example, considers the modern treatment of animals on factory farms to be “perhaps the worst crime in history.” A recent editorial in the New York Times makes a serious argument that human extinction “might just be a good thing” because it would, in part, end the miserable life cycle of industrially produced animals. The factory farm is, in the same breath, a shining triumph of 20th century industrial efficiency, and a reminder of that century’s darker application of such efficiencies when applied to living beings. The modern food animal spends most of its life standing in its own excrement with nothing to do but eat, shoulder to shoulder and wing to wing with its dreary compatriots, if it’s lucky. The pigs of North Carolina are not lucky.
A half day’s drive from the Wild Abundance eco-homestead is the world nucleus of industrial pig farming: Duplin County, North Carolina. Duplin is home to 2 million hogs– more than any other county in the country. While Wild Abundance was arguing with its detractors over the fate of two sheep, hundreds of thousands of sows in Duplin County were suckling their young in gestation crates– a practice still legal in the state– and piglets were periodically falling through metal floor slats to meet a truly unimaginable demise in a sea of excrement and antibiotics.
The farms affect the human residents of the county too. The open pits that hold the waste routinely flood when hurricanes drench the region and the nauseating smell that permeates from the farms has made properties unsellable for the poor, largely minority residents of the county.
Acknowledging the problems with factory farms, what of Leigh’s solution– to make butchery personal again? Recognizing that factory farms are a problem and that people should be more considerate about where their meat comes from is one thing. But is it really a good idea for people to guillotine farm animals in their backyards? Leigh thinks so. Her book argues for a return to the way we raised and killed animals in the 12,000 year interval between the agricultural revolution and the establishment of the first McDonald’s 80 years ago. Doing so would reduce factory-farmed meat intake while increasing the visibility of the process that produces our steaks, she says.
She isn’t alone in this. The philosophy of compassionate carnivory has taken root among a certain tribe of urban hipster– the locavore foodie intent on having her backyard chickens and eating them too. “DIY” slaughter trainings have cropped up all over the country in places that, on the face of it, don’t seem like great venues for lancing the necks of fuzzy creatures– from Berkeley to Portland and Chicago to New York. In the Bay Area there are now abattoirs that will sell you a live “meat rabbit” or chicken that you can dispatch of yourself. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in on the trend, vowing a few years ago to only eat meat that he killed and helped butcher himself.
There is also a push to reclaim religious slaughter from its current, highly impersonal integration into factory farming. For example, Amadenin Eganwa performs Halal slaughter at a plant in Denver– facing east, reciting “bismillahi allahu akbar”– 900 times per shift on the unconscious lambs that are brought to him. Or take Andy Kastner, a “freelance” Jewish shochet that lives in New York City and is hired by farms to perform small-scale kosher slaughter.
Others in the modern slaughter movement are turning to perhaps an even more surprising pursuit: hunting. As participation in the hobby continues to decline across the country, hunting clubs are reaching out to, and finding some purchase with, a new demographic of young progressives interested in reclaiming control over their meat.
A recent outreach event by the Lee County hunting club in North Carolina targeted college students that had never been hunting. The group spent the day building deer stands, shooting rifles, and butchering a deer. Among the participants was Brianna Johns, who gets all of her meat from wild game in order to avoid supporting factory farms. Brianna and the other participants, many of whom were women, didn’t look much like the Wrangler-clad men showing them the difference between a .35 millimeter and a 12 gauge. But they were thrilled to learn.
Books like The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance or the 2016 documentary An Acquired Taste, which outlines three urban teenagers’ journey from locavores to deer hunters, are spurring a new sort of engagement with the hobby. There are locavore hunting classes, deer carcasses are being hauled around in Priuses and people are increasingly leaving the rack of deer antlers behind to carry home more venison. The 21st century hunter is looking less like Ted Nugent and more like Fred Armisen.
Another trend gaining traction is a sort of bizarre extension of dumpster diving– eating roadkill. Once a regionalist joke about the diet of backwoods southerners, “Roadkill Cuisine” has grown into a dead serious pursuit. Curiously an illegal act in most US states, the practice involves perusing country roads on cold nights to find freshly-killed raccoons and squirrels whose flesh has been (ostensibly) preserved in the freezing temperatures, like a meat fridge. Author Sandor Katz was one of the first people to tout the idea as a serious means of procuring food, in his 2003 book The Revolution will not be Microwaved. Since then the practice has gained enough prominence to boast a “Wikihow” article outlining the protocol for safe roadkill preparation. Even PETA penned a begrudging endorsement of the practice “if people must eat animal carcasses.”
Reclaiming Ceremony
But for people invested in participating in personal slaughter, it often isn’t enough just to kill the pig. Ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood argues, for instance, that ethical meat consumption must involve taking personal responsibility for an animal’s fate, “finding ways to acknowledge fully the animal’s ‘soul’ and its kinship, and to express gratitude and reciprocity, that is, to acknowledge a reciprocal availability as food for others.”
For time immemorial, ascribing ceremony to the profane act of slaughter has been a way to create a sacred, cleansing distance. The Cherokee, for instance, abstained from sex for four days before and after a hunt. The wives of the Inupiat whalers of Alaska walked slowly during whaling season, so as not to offend the animist gods of the deep. Cultures in early India banned the killing of cows, while early Islamic and Jewish traditions established strict protocols for humane slaughter by trained priests.
This practice continues today. As locavore groups get closer to the death of their food, they are also reclaiming (or inventing) ritual. Katherine Dunn of Apifera Farms in Oregon ritualizes slaughter day by hanging white prayer flags in the animals’ stalls and sitting down to verbally thank them “for their good work and sacrifice.” Wild Abundance takes the ritual a step further; an email promoting the slaughter workshop features a blonde-haired white teen smearing sheep blood on his face and arms as he crouches, eyes shut, in apparent reverence. Temple Grandin, an animal science researcher who, among other things, designs humane cattle handling equipment for factory farms, has said that animals should die in a “sacred” place. “The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence,” she says. “No words, just one pure moment of silence.”
Such gestures are, at one level, totally absurd. “Sanctimonious bullshit,” My uncle David Cooper calls it, who runs a sustainable living workshop in Kentucky called the Whippoorwill Festival. And he has a point. The sheep, for instance, certainly couldn’t care less whether they are “thanked.” And ascribing invented ritual to slaughter events can easily wade into cultural misappropriation.
And while reconnecting with slaughter and its ceremony may increase connection to your food, it is easy to romanticize such an act. For instance, up until just a few years ago, Nepal celebrated the Gadhimai Festival, at event where attendees spend three days beheading hundreds of buffalo one by one in an open field, while the other buffalos looked on in panic. This is personal slaughter, certainly. The animals are free range and presumably lived pleasant lives on grassy fields, up until that point. But that doesn’t make the day of slaughter any less brutal.
There’s also the obvious point that you don’t have to buy a hunting rifle or a backyard pig to reduce your consumption of factory-farmed animals. You can simply stop eating meat, a lifestyle that has the side-benefit of reducing your carbon footprint even more than buying a hybrid.
But ethical food consumption doesn’t stop with eschewing the factory farm. Modern agriculture is culpable in widespread habitat destruction and ongoing species extinctions around the world. Of late, the plight of orangutans rendered homeless by palm plantations in southeast Asia has brought this point squarely into the public conscience. As a result, palm oil has joined a litany of plant products to be avoided by the astute environmentalist. Modern agriculture, like modern meat production, is eliminating malnutrition at the expense of the environment and the humane treatment of animals. A myopic focus on the problems with meat consumption ignores animal suffering at the hands of other global processes.
Additionally, advocates of vegetarianism may be fighting a losing battle. While voluntarily reducing meat consumption is increasingly popular in wealthy Western countries, a burgeoning middle class in emerging economies in China, India and Nigeria is expected to drive a 25% increase in meat consumption by 2030, compared to turn of the century levels. Barring some fundamental change in human behavior: we like meat and it’s unlikely we’re going to stop eating it.
Reconciling the Modern Farm
The experience of being human is not what it used to be. The average American spends 93% of their life indoors, a sharp decrease from even a few decades ago. Modern adults now spend more time scrolling through social media in bed than having sex.
The percent of our population employed in agriculture has also declined, from 50% in 1850 to 2% today. And a fraction of a percent of our total population works in the meat processing industry that provides the rest of us with cheap protein. Our connection to natural landscapes is eroding, and with it, a relationship with the process that produces our food. Are there consequences for this? While eating roadkill and raising “meat rabbits” may be just the latest in a bizarre string of hipster food trends, the movement to reconnect with our food through slaughter may be something more. Giving the act spiritual meaning– even meaning expressly for the sake and understanding of humans– might bring empathy for the sacrifice involved in such an act into our conscience in a new way.
There might be value in that. While I have never seen a factory farm, I have engaged in a different sort of animal death that few other people experience, as a technician in a research lab. One of my main duties was overseeing our lab mice, which involved breeding, culling, and dissecting members of the colony at various times. Over the course of the summer, I was responsible for killing 159 mice, a number I tracked in a grim spreadsheet called “Graveyard.” Ours was a small operation compared to many other labs at the university, and certainly compared to the tens of millions of mice killed in the bowels of lecture halls all over the country each year for research. But it certainly felt like enough to land me in mouse hell.
And I felt conflicted about this. Not because it felt inhumane exactly– the mice lived seemingly pleasant lives in plastic tubs with required play items. I felt conflicted because of the irreverence of the act. At one point I remember a researcher saying something along the lines of “now it’s time to disassemble mom.” What he meant was, after euthanizing a pregnant female rat his team would cut her open and remove the half dozen unborn fetuses from her uterus. Something in the euphemism felt disrespectful because it wasn’t acknowledging the death of the animal. In response to gestures like this, I found myself audibly thanking the mice for their sacrifice in support of our health and understanding of the universe, before placing them in the “Euthenex” machine. I might have patted them affectionately if I weren’t so wary of their teeth. And, sanctimonious bullshit or not, I felt better because of it, despite the fact that it made no difference to the mice. We were still going to take their brains.
It is human nature to sanctify the act of killing. But large-scale factory farming disallows this by cutting slaughter completely out of our lives. This makes reclaiming the act hard. I have a friend named Jordan, who is a committed locavore and urban gardener. He once tried to sustain himself as long as he could by eating only what he grew, fished, or could find in the area around his home near downtown Pittsburgh. His diet ended up consisting of garden tomatoes, a handful of foraged mushrooms and three emaciated sunfish. At one point he was so hungry he convinced his wife to drive him into town so he could club a duck in a city park. By the end of a week he had lost fifteen pounds and was drinking himself to sleep each night on homemade pear wine after salivating over Youtube videos of people preparing steaks.
Jordan tried to live like most humans have lived throughout our history and lasted a week. But for a brief few days, for the first time in his life, he was completely connected to his food and the process and ritual that produced it.
Killing an animal for food, once a ubiquitous human experience, is now novel. It’s something one can easily go their whole life without experiencing. Something you would need a permit to do. Something “sacred” you can experience in a remote mountainside yurt. Somehow, in a country where 300,000 pigs are slaughtered each day for food, where the average citizen eats 71 pounds of red meat a year, where a sizable minority of the population consumes what it considers to be the literal blood and bones of its God once a week, killing of an animal for food is far removed from nearly anyone’s daily life.
We live in an era of large-scale, mechanized, automated death that is, at the same time, almost totally concealed. Tucked away in the basements of our universities, in warehouses in the poorest corners of our country, even in the arcane tangle of algorithms embedded in the autonomous vehicles that increasingly share our roads, is the systematic, programmable death that supports modern society.
Take the humble junglefowl which was domesticated into the modern chicken somewhere in East Asia more than 5,000 years ago. Since that time, the animal has spread its nearly flightless wings across the world and now outnumbers its domesticators 3:1; a remarkable genetic victory in evolutionary terms, but at a terrible cost to the individual bird. Half of the earth’s 19 billion chickens live and die in American factory farms alone, spending the entirety of their adult lives in a pen the size of a sheet of paper. How do we reconcile this?
PETA and my uncle would advocate that we simply stop eating animals. Companies likes Beyond Meat offer a technological fix: make artificial meat and complete our transition away from traditional carnivory. But if we have already decided on a culture of slaughter, what about diving headfirst into the act of killing?
The reality is that any solution should be scalable, something that vegetarianism may not be, and something that slaughtering pigs on your apartment lawn certainly is not. But if practitioners of sacred slaughter, compassionate carnivory, and roadkill cuisine bring the plight of factory farmed animals into public conscience in a new way, that may be a step in the right direction.
Re-engaging with the ritual of slaughter may help us build a more empathetic world where we understand the consequences of building the structures that sustain us. If we don’t engage with the bloody bits of modernity, we ignore who we are and, necessarily, who we might become.