The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [169]
My own wager is that there might still be another way open to us, and that finding it will begin with looking once again—at the animals we eat, and at their deaths. People will see very different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a chicken or a steer: a being without a soul, a “subject of a life” entitled to rights, a receptacle of pleasure and pain, an unambiguously tasty lunch.
We certainly won’t philosophize our way to a single answer. I remember a story Joel told me about a man who showed up at the farm one Saturday morning to have a look. When Joel noticed a PETA bumper sticker on the man’s car he figured he was in for some unpleasantness. But the man had a different agenda. He explained that after being a vegetarian for sixteen years he had decided that the only way he could ever eat meat again was if he killed the animal himself. So Joel grabbed a chicken and took the man into the processing shed.
“He slit the bird’s throat and watched it die,” Joel recalled. “He saw that the animal did not look at him accusingly, did not do a Disney double take. He saw that the animal had been treated with respect while it was alive and that it could have a respectful death—that it wasn’t being treated like a pile of protoplasm.” I realized I’d seen this, too, which perhaps explains why I was able to kill a chicken one day and eat it the next. Though the story did make me wish I had killed and eaten mine with as much consciousness and attention as that man; perhaps hunting would give me a second chance.
Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look. No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians. Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers willing to raise and kill their animals transparently. Such farms exist; so do a handful of small processing plants willing to let customers onto the kill floor, including one—Lorentz Meats, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota—that is so confident of their treatment of animals that they have walled their abattoir in glass.
The industrialization—and brutalization—of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end—for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.
EIGHTEEN
HUNTING
The Meat
1. A WALK IN THE WOODS
Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete. Nothing in my experience (with the possible exception of certain intoxicants) has prepared me for the