Man Kills for Food

A rumination on death, kinship, and what we choose to know.

I

A 22-caliber rifle doesn’t make much of a sound. A pop, if you are paying attention.

II

It started with a long-overdue call. My cousin, Peter, had reached out, and we had the sort of conversation one can only have with a kindred spirit - a chat where the ten years that have passed since the last one don’t seem to matter. It may as well have been a day.

Did I find the line? I think I caught it for a moment in the periphery.

Peter and I share the weirdness derived from a common lineage combined with the delightful improbability of psychic alignment. Some relatives act like you, some look like you, and some are spawned by quantum indeterminacy — a mirror-self born of a fleeting observation.

Peter and I also share the unfortunate trait of being bad at regular communication.

III

Why do we kill?

That may be imprecise. Why do we feel so strange about killing some things, but not others? Why is that line so fungible?

Of course, “thou shalt not kill,” and the idea of harming another person horrifies me. At a surface level, killing is unconscionable. I am a good person, right?

But the line is slipperier than it seems. I have boiled live lobster, crabs, and mussels without compunction. I have shot dove and quail.

Yet there is no world where I will eat octopus. I have seen the movie My Octopus Teacher and believe octopuses are sentient and aware. Their brains are alien, wrapped about their surface like an afghan blanket, but they undoubtedly move with intention, form bonds, and seek escape. Are these the conditions for identity? Who knows. But I will neither kill nor eat octopus.

I have also been eye-to-eye with an elephant. From this vantage point, it is obvious you are in contact with another spirit, one perhaps exhausted by its fate, but alive and aware. Killing an elephant is murder.

Where is the line?

IV

Peter lives on the edge of Great Falls, Montana, where he has raised chickens, sheep, pigs, and steers. The livestock began because his daughter participated in the FFA, and they are good parents. During our conversation, Peter mentioned they still had two steers he planned to slaughter in the fall.

There are reasons without reasons, when your subconscious demands satisfaction and resolution. This inarticulate voice motivated me to propose coming out to participate. I wanted to know what it meant to be responsible for the death of a large animal.

I understand that what I eat is killed. Speaking of vegetables and grains this way is trivial, as their death is inevitable and inconsequential. But I am neither vegan nor vegetarian, and my diet demands the end of a heartbeat and the last drawing of breath, whether I am present at that moment or not.

Is this meaningful? I don’t know, but I should at least try to.

I bought my ticket when he texted that the date was October 2nd. I do not want to characterize this trip as a belated Bildungsroman or indulge in a midlife crisis where I LARP as a rancher.

I was curious. And I wanted to see my cousin.

V

Peter and I grew up together, sort of. Our extended family was uncommonly large and unusually cohesive. In the universe of my childhood, there were the ordinary cosmic and atomic forces that bound the world together, and Grandma Lillian, the iron lady who bound the family through sheer force of will.

Peter and I spent what used to be called our formative years at Grandma’s summer camp in the suburbs of Rochester, NY. These weeks encapsulated the analog American dream, where Abba pleaded to “Take a Chance on Me,” media was what Grandpa read on Sunday, and phones were just plain dumb.

We grew up together in this exquisite boredom of 1970s upstate New York summers.

VI

What does one wear to kill a steer? It was not at all clear to me. Thirty million head of cattle are slaughtered annually in the US. Hence, it is reasonable to presume the sartorial options are well-defined. I know enough to avoid the ceremonial garb of the wealthy gentleman rancher tutored on the knee of Kevin Costner in Yellowstone.

Dressing a steer is work, and one wears work clothes. In our case, coveralls that would serve in a multitude of profane environments of effort and fluids, the garb of a mechanic, a plumber, or a painter. Work clothes for work.

VII

Peter and I were Millers, and Lillian was Grandma. We were also the children of mothers who were educated well beyond the expectations of their era, and the grandchildren of a force of nature.

Lillian was the type of grandmother who made you forget there was a generation between you and her. We were hers, and she was our coach, our boss, and our resident deity. She was a three-time all-American Women’s Lacrosse player and an inductee into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. If Lillian asked, you acted. She had an authority that was so self-evident it required neither justification nor force—it just was.

But Grandma, as she was addressed, created a perfect space for becoming. Peter and I, along with my brother and our age-cohorted cousin, Geoff, had the extreme freedom of Gen X, the lackadaisical, brutally irresponsible abrogation of parental responsibility. We explored our unbounded childhood and grew close.

The result of this perfect, imperfect world and its all-encompassing ur-mother was children who were perfectly independent and incapable of fitting neatly into the world. We had been granted the inexcusable luxury of freedom.

VIII

The two steers had to be separated before the first could be killed, and each was to be killed and dressed individually. My job was to separate them, coaxing the larger of the two out of the smaller enclosure so it would not witness its impending fate.

When the rifle cracked, it was not Ray Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder,” but a meek pop reminiscent of the crappy red and blue firecrackers of our youth.

Pop.
And the steer collapsed to its knees.
Pop. Pop.
And the mass was still.

Death should be louder. Perhaps.

Dressing a steer is a mechanical affair. The tractor bucket is a hoist, and the steer is hung by its forelocks. The hide on the belly is split, and the enteric column is carefully removed to avoid contaminating the meat.

A cow, it turns out, is a shell of beef encapsulating an impressively large digestive organ: the rumen. A fermentation chamber that resembles a small blimp and represents a disproportionate percentage of its bulk. This tract, a convoluted donut hole extending from the throat to the anus, is removed as a unit. The gargantuan heart is severed, and the remaining organs are carefully excised. The body of a large mammal is cavities and membranes filled with liquids and gases, like a steampunk extravagance.

My skin becomes saturated with a rich, grassy stench that will take days to leach out of my sensory memory.

Without heartbeat or breath, it is hard to acknowledge a carcass as life. Once the organs are collated, the magic of organic unity, of identity, is violated.

IX

Peter and I had very different adult lives, though the distinctions might be characterized as theme and variation rather than true divergence.

An Anthropology major, Peter became a licensed veterinarian before pivoting to his current life as an Irish Pub and hotel owner in Great Falls.

I, an English major, built furniture, then pivoted to becoming a tech entrepreneur.

Peter also makes furniture and runs a small farm. I rebuild cars and write. Neither of us can tolerate having a boss, and both of us are obsessed with repairing, or at least knowing how to.

We both think. Too much.

X

Dressing the steers takes a few hours. Another will do the butchering, but we have rendered living beasts into meat.

I wanted to witness the final breath of an animal that was to become our food and experience the final bloody exhalation.

I expected to feel regret or remorse, and I did not. Whether this is good or bad, I don’t know. I did the work, and the work was grim. There was no ambiguity about the outcome.

Did I find the line? I think I caught it once. In the periphery.