Life and Death on the Homestead

Every human has a sliding scale of mercy when it comes to what we are willing to kill and what we are not.  Most humans will kill ants in and around their food.  House flies also die with great regularity in people's homes. Some people refuse to kill meat to eat, but will eat soy products, meaning they are indirectly responsible for thousands of rabbits and birds dying when harvest comes around and the big combines take to the fields, cutting down everything in their path. 

It seems that death is impossible to avoid.  Even plants have been shown to react when they are pulled out of the ground.

I cannot, as yet, shoot squirrels or anything larger, because their mammalian family hierarchy and tendency to frolic and play touches me, so I will relocate them instead of killing them whenever possible.  Squirrels also have the distinction of learning where I do not want them to go.  When I fill in a squirrel hole on our property, the squirrels do not come back.  So I let them have the lower 1/5 of our property, and patrol the rest to gently turn them away. So far its working, but I make no promises as to the future.  But I will, in general relocate before I kill, if I can.  I even catch house flies and turn them back outside, when possible.

I hated killing mice until they became a serious issue around the coops, and then I did so with a very grim efficiency, using a humane electrical trap that killed instantly. With country property comes a greater necessity to (and therefore exposure to) killing vermin.  I don't like it, but some creatures cannot be easily trapped and relocated. And if you have to kill, I think you owe it to whatever you're killing to dispatch it as humanely as possible.

This morning I shot a gopher in the chicken coop.  I went out and noticed the large hole and a small head popping in and out of it, and knew immediately what it was.  Gophers are vermin, carrying fleas, worms, mites, and disease with them, so allowing them near our live food source was not an option, both for the hens health as well as ours.  I stepped inside, loaded Big Ag's .22 with hollow-point rounds, and took it back outside to the coop, standing silently over the hole until the gopher appeared again.  And then I shot.

 The one I shot did not look like this.

It was a clean, quick kill, and I'm pretty sure there was not more than a second that elapsed between the gopher closing his eyes in this world and opening them up in Gopher Valhalla, or wherever gophers go in the afterlife.  I'd love to tell you that I felt regret, or sadness, but as I've done it more and more, I feel those things less.  

I did have the satisfaction of doing it in a way that was quick and humane, but to me there was no question that it had to be done. You cannot relocate a gopher or even trap them humanely.  It's impossible.

Even so, I'm kind of amazed that this city-born and bred girl is able to do something like this.  In the city parks where I grew up, a gopher would have been a curiosity, a creature we would have sat on the grass and observed, talking about how cute he was.  To go from that to being willing to stand over a gopher hole with a shotgun is coming a long way.  I'm not sure if its spiritual progress or not, however. But when your food sources are in danger, you do what you have to do, whether it's black ants in the sugar or a gopher in the chicken coop.

Life and death go hand in hand with growing or even just storing food, and I'm proud that even if I cannot avoid causing death, I can at least bring it to pass in a swift fashion.  Sometimes that's the best you can do, and it has to be enough.

Crazy

No, I don't think so.

Short photo series in Modern Farmer today hit a chord with me. (http://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/chicken-cannibals/ ) 

Somehow it seems totally creepy to spin livestock's story to where it's a tale of creatures who really enjoy being served as food and simply cannot wait to land on our plate. Doesn't it to you?

The other end of this story is the homesteaders who will butcher animals and then say things like "we did this with a hushed, serious reverence,"as if the animal somehow appreciated their taking the whole thing so seriously, or "we feel (enter the name of said animal here) would be so proud to have graced our holiday table and fed so many people," or something equally stupid.  No matter what you are eating, it's a pretty good guess that it didn't really want to die and be consumed, whether you were somber as you killed it or not.

Both mindsets stem from a fundamental need for modern people to delude themselves about their food, in my opinion.

Listen, if you have to die in order to feed something else, which most creatures on the planet do (excepting large carnivores) you probably 1) Do NOT want to die in the first place, as I said. Healthy, young, living creatures generally don't. 

Which leads us to 2) If you do have to die, as painless and stress-free (read: quick) a dispatch as possible is a kindness, even though you are not given a choice or preference.  The last one is just a guess on my part, due to biases about my own eventual demise.  If I had a choice I'd rather die quickly and painlessly than in a drawn out, uncomfortable manner.  So I also am transferring my own thoughts to the animals, but it seems like if it shortens pain and suffering, that is not necessarily a bad thing.  But I don't go further than that into my food's thoughts and mindset.

Because to start interjecting emotions into it -- animals gratefully climbing onto our dinner plate, or understanding and agreeing with the whole predator/prey cycle because their butchers are so freaking reverent about it, all those things seem both delusional and stupid.

Like my gopher post said yesterday, death in the food cycle is inescapable, but how we deal with that death says a great deal about how in touch with reality we are. 

Natural Born (Gopher) Killer

Maccabee gopher trap

Some people who move to rural environments find they enjoy hunting game and vermin, and even killing livestock for their personal consumption.  I am not one of them. 

Yet when the gopher population began to creep up in numbers here at the homestead, I went through a gradual process that, yes, has finally turned me into an unapologetic killer at times.  Sure, I may still save flies and put glass cups over moths and spiders who make it into the house, returning them all outside to live another day. But gophers have become to me what red fire ants have always been:  Something that doesn't need to be living anywhere close to where I work, walk or grow my food.

Yesterday, I successfully trapped and killed the gopher that had been making inroads into my potato, onion and pumpkin patch down in the field. It was a double victory for me, because I used a Maccabee trap to kill the gopher, which is the same gopher control method used at the winery we belong to.  That means no poison is used, which means the hawks, lizards, coyotes and other wildlife are safe from either finding the poison pellets or the poisoned gopher corpse and dying from ingesting either.  It also means that the same poison will not be working its way down through the dirt into the aquifer, as strychnine does .  A trap may be primitive and violent, but at least it only kills once, when it catches its intended victim.  You can't say the same thing about poison.

But it also occurred to me that if the winery uses these traps to keep their vineyards pest-free, vermin killings occur everywhere, whether it's in our food, the cotton that makes our clothes, or even the grapes that produce the wine we drink. There is, truly, no food we eat where something has not probably died in order that it could be brought to us.

I was a vegetarian for years and never thought of things this way.  Sure, I did not consume animal flesh, but that doesn't mean animals didn't die to bring me my grains and vegetables.

There is no getting away from this anywhere on Planet Earth, sadly.  If you eat food, mammals have been killed so that it can grow, be harvested, and brought to you.

So while I hate to think of myself as being a responsible party in all this, I am, whether I am the one placing the trap or not.  I eat food, I wear clothes, I drink wine. To believe I have no culpability in it all would be magical thinking.  

Perhaps in the next world killing will be a thing of the past, but in this one, it seems unescapable. Yet I have to say I never really realized it until I picked up that trap and held that lifeless gopher in my hands.  It's not the first gopher I've killed.  After all, I've eaten commercial food that was probably protected with traps just like this one.  But this was the first time I've actually realized my role in it all.  Natural-born killer.  Me.