The Chicken Harvest

The word 'harvest' is full of impact. It has its visceral, sensory connotations, its associated logistical and intellectual challenges, and it has moral and spiritual implications.

The act of gathering is, of course, as old as life. Plants gather sunlight, microbes gather minerals and residues (among zillions of other things), starfish gather clams, humans and bears try not to gather the same berries at the same time; the implication is that the individual comes upon a resource and commences to acquire it for its own purposes, whether that resource is in favor of the acquisition (as in the case of fruits), neutral (water), or opposed (clams). An ethical and spiritual purist could make the case for eating, drinking, or using only those products of living organisms which are intended by the organisms to be consumed, or which are regarded as waste (dead grass or wood, or petroleum, peat, etc.). Whether such consumption actually accomplishes the goal of morally inconsequential living would be a matter of debate, but for now I shall let it stand.

Agriculture on any scale is a tad more complex in all respects. With agriculture, an individual doesn't simply come upon a resource, but rather knowingly tinkers with the circumstances to promote the appearance of their favored resource. The implications have been and are profound. Certain other species perform similar processes according to instinct, but clearly no other species than we ourselves has ever made such a flexible and spectacular success of the project. It turns out that we can master this discipline so thoroughly as to catapult ourselves into populations that are remarkable in both their intensity and in the variety of ecosystems they have managed to occupy. The vast majority of humans in the world are now almost 100% dependent upon the continuation of their particular brand of dominion (or, unfortunately, on someone else's).

At the heart of this process--the part that is necessary to all the varied forms of manipulated nutritional gain--is harvest. The retrieval of the increase. It's as if a person threads a fingerling gently onto their hook, sits on the bank of the stream for six months, and then reels in a salmon. The fish does the work of wild gathering and growing, and is caught from the start.

Is this fair? If one person were to do this to another person, the answer would be obvious. It's even hard to argue fairness in the case of the doomed fish.

You may be able to guess where this is going. I butchered chickens this week. Lots of them, it seemed to me. Some of them were chickens we had held and played with as chicks this spring. Some were older birds that had been in our neighbor S's flock for 2-4 years. These were creatures that knew us as individuals. We had a relationship.

I'm reminded of Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." The old fisherman, speaking to the great fish against which he is competing for the fish's life, professes his love and admiration for it. He then wonders if it is better to kill something that you have first loved, or whether it is worse. I don't know between better and worse, but it's definitely more complicated emotionally.

Kali really got into it. She enjoyed the plucking, and although watching the chicken die was not something she wanted to do (I empathize completely), she seemed fascinated by the structure of a chicken's body as it was laid bare before her wondering eyes, and also seemed thoroughly appetized by the notion of lots of fresh, homegrown chicken meat, even while complaining of the smell of it in raw form.

How can I explain my enjoyment of butchering? The only word that makes sense to me is 'harvest.' Our neighbor K surmised that the selection process might be worse for me than the moment of the chicken's death, and this is true in the sense of it being an agonizing decision. But because I am going to attempt to breed these chickens, most of the mental anguish comes in the form of hoping I've made the most advantageous selections, with the rooster lives hanging in the balance being a weighty subscript.

What I hate is the notion that my chickens should suffer at my hands, even at the end. I take such care to treat them with dignity and care as they grow and develop--how can I abandon this posture of care in administering their death? I am still working on a technique I can really believe in, but I feel o.k. about the method I currently use.

Once the life is gone from the chickens, I get such pleasure from seeing the carefully removed pieces of their nutritious flesh accumulating in the icy water near the butchering surface, to our future benefit. We make use of all the protein we feel we can reasonably harvest from the birds, freezing larger pieces and boiling down the remaining bony portions for soup stock, which we process into canning jars with bits of meat picked off the bones. Is it just my imagination that my consumption of meat has taken on a spiritual depth and dimension that far exceeds what it would be without this intense and detailed participation in the whole process? Maybe I'm just getting older and it would have happened anyway. All I know for sure is that in our home a meal that includes meat feels like something special, and we all enjoy it deeply.