Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
CONCLUSION
THE TURKEY I HAD SLAUGHTERED was not the last animal I ate. But, aside
from rare successes at fishing, it was the only animal that I had personally killed and
eaten. I was about twenty at the time, in my military service, and was overseeing a
group of soldiers for an off-camp activity. One soldier came up with the idea of pur-
chasing a turkey from a nearby breeder and slaughtering it later. I approved. After se-
lecting a bird from a farm and driving with it back to base, we circled it and pro-
ceeded to try to kill it. We used knives.
A turkey is a large animal. One gets a sense of how big it is when one needs to
approach and control it. The soldier who initiated the idea had promised that the
killing would be a piece of cake, and that he had often done it. He forgot that his ex-
perience was with hens, not turkeys. Moreover, the knife he possessed was blunt. This
meant that after we finally managed to restrain the turkey, instead of a clean kill the
agonized bird was struggling under us with a series of cuts in its neck, trying to get
away. It was not dying. At one point, someone suggested that we pin the neck down
on the ground, attach the knife to the bird's neck, with the soldier with the blunt knife
standing on top of the knife itself. That did it. The animal died, and we proceeded to
skin and eat it. Ironically, all this took place as part of advanced training in combat
medicine—we were all teachers of combat medicine, trained to alleviate suffering and
save lives.
I had virtually forgotten about this event. It did not turn me into a vegetarian or
prevent me from enjoying meat during that evening or the years that followed (I be-
came a vegetarian only about fifteen years later). But in conclusion, it is that memory
that prompts me to record it, and I allow it, because in writing this topic I have been
diligently avoiding all emotional appeals, or striving to establish empathy to animals,
or trying to horrify my reader into liberationism. So after cleansing this topic (perhaps
too thoroughly) from anything sentimental (“sentimentality” being a standard charge
leveled against the liberationist argument), I can close with this personal anecdote.
I find that relating this grisly confession is appropriate since it captures many of the
regrettable attitudes that this topic aims to transform. We first have the happy associ-
ation between eating meat and social pleasure. We then move to the quasi-ritualistic
attempt to upgrade a predictable barbeque by slaughtering the animal ourselves, along
with the excitement that this promises. Then we have the striking gap, the discovery
that the transition from a live entity into food is not smooth, and that it was precisely
our incompetence at killing that enabled the animal to powerfully register its resistance
and establish this gap.
