Killing The Chicken

“Have you ever killed a chicken?” This is one of the questions that my good friend, Mike Hoover, likes to ask when someone is saying something particularly naive or insensitive. “Have you ever killed a chicken?”

On some level, Hoover divides the world up into, “Chicken killers.” and “non-Chicken Killers”, those who are connected to the world in all it’s brutal reality and those who are not.

Most people, in this country aren’t chicken killers. In fact, for most of us, the closest we get to killing is picking out our cuts at the local super-market. We don’t see the blood, or the suffering, all we see is a product, impersonally prepared and wrapped in cellophane.

I’ve never killed a chicken. My friend Jeff has and he said it was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do.

So, why does Mike Hoover, a very, smart compassionate man, want all of us to start murdering birds? What’s the big deal?

There was a time when we weren’t removed from death. If we wanted meat we had to kill. So, does that mean we were more callous about killing then, more cruel?

No. The opposite was true.

If you look at hunter gatherer societies, the animals they hunted were not hated or vilified, they were given positions of great respect in the community. The plains Indians did not hate the buffalo, they honored it, not only because it provided much of the raw materials necessary for their way of life, but also because, through the difficult process of hunting, they had come to know the animal. The buffalo wasn’t simply a walking dinner, it was a living breathing creature with a soul and a value. To hunt it honorably, and kill it humanely was the nature of their relationship.

However, to kill the animal and not use every bit of him was considered the cruelest kind of waste. Imagine, the horror the native Americans felt when this animal they respected, who played a key roll in their spiritual life, was hunted, almost to extinction, by ruthless men who were only interested in their hides and left the rest of the animal to rot in the sun.

However, somewhere Back East there was a buyer for that buffalo fur who never had to look into the eyes of the animal that died for him and thus had no pang of conscious for paying for the slaughter. It was a business transaction, nothing more.

I’m reminded of a question in Jedediah Purdy's book, Being America He asks, “Which American slaveholder treated his slaves with greater cruelty, the rich plantation owner with a thousand slaves, or the small farmer with only one?” My first instinct was to say the rich plantation owner. After all, he can afford to be generous, while the poor farmer can barely survive himself. Of course, the opposite is true. The rich plantation owner never really sees his slaves. He lives in a big house with every luxury and has no understanding of how his workers live. The poor farmer, on the other hand, lives much closer to his slave. He works side by side with him in the field. He eats the same food and wears the same kind of clothes. This proximity makes cruelty, if not impossible, far less likely.

Today, we are much further from the animals we eat than in anytime in history and, like the big plantation owner, our distance, our ignorance of where our food comes from, has made us cruel. It is a cruelty which manifests itself not in how our animals die but rather in how they live. Cows, living their whole lives, packed into industrial feed lots knee deep in their own filth. Chickens squeezed into cages so small they cannot turn around. We have become masters of efficiency, experts in turning grain into meat and meat into dinner.

We have separated ourselves from the killing fields because we abhor cruelty but the greater the distance, has made us far crueler than the hunter who kills the buffalo with his bow, or the rancher who slits the neck of the chicken he has cared for all his life.

However, it is not only the animals we eat who have been damaged by this separation. We have been damaged. In my last blog, I outlined how our industrial food system, has left us obese, malnourished, and vulnerable to new strains of disease, but this separation from the natural world, has consequences far beyond diet.

One Hundred years ago, 85% of the worlds population lived on farms or in small villages. Today, 85% of our, much greater, population lives in cities and that number is growing at a breakneck pace. Cities are ecosystems all their own, however, the needs of the urban ecosystem are in almost direct opposition to the needs of the natural one. Success in the city means following the urban paradigm, which is that consumption is success and greed is good. This philosophy has a direct, devastating effect on the natural world but the city dweller does not see the consequences of their actions and so they do not care. That this disconnected relationship damages the natural world is without question, but I believe it is equally damaging to modern man. Are we healthier in our regulated, manufactured, commercialized, and heavily branded urban existence? Are we happier? Are we kinder? Or have we, in fact, become more isolated, overworked, stressed, depressed and unhealthy?

Disconnection is the danger and a disconnection from death is a disconnection from life.

The modern world fears death in all it’s forms. We refuse to see it and this denial of one of the most fundamental realities of life is intensely destructive. There was a time when we died in our own homes, surrounded by our families. Today, death occurs in the sterile, industrial hallways of the hospital with the only human contact permitted during proper visiting hours. There was a time when the greatest concern at the approach of death was our spiritual well being. Today, the focus is on a thousand incomprehensible, medical tests. There was a time, when the bodies of our dead were cleaned and dressed by their families. Today, our dead are locked away in cold storage before they can be attended to by a professional. Which system gives better care in our last moments? Which system better prepares us to say goodbye? We have endeavored to protect ourselves from the pain of death but our lives are no less painful.

Does choosing not to see death make us less cruel or more?

Is a nation that sees an endless stream of mutilated bodies more likely to an end a war than a nation that chooses not to see?

The first thing we must accept is that death in and of itself is not cruel. Death is inexorably connected to life. It is all around us. Every living thing on earth survives on death. It is not cruel when the lion kills it’s prey. It is merely the natural order of things. Cruelty is a uniquely human invention. A sociopath is cruel because he enjoys watching the suffering of others with open eyes but the majority of cruelties, the vast atrocities of our times, are committed with eyes closed. The more we disconnect, the crueler we become.

By separating ourselves from death we have separated ourselves from life. We have created a system in which we are at odds with the natural world and so, at odds with ourselves. Perhaps the only way to save the planet is to touch the planet and perhaps touching the planet is the only way to save ourselves.

Does that mean we should all run out and start killing our own chickens? Not necessarily. It simply means we should begin the long and, sometimes painful, process of opening our eyes.