I killed a chicken once. Just once.
We had just moved to the farm, I was
toying with the idea of becoming a vegan, and I knew that if I was to continue eating animals I had to be able to kill them
myself. I didn't know if I could do it. I fully expected that,
knife in hand, I would have some kind of epiphany—that I would know
beyond doubt that eating animals was moral or immoral.
I should know myself better by now.
Children see things in black and white,
but have a remarkable ability to invert those colors on demand.
Killing things is bad, unless your parents say it's okay. Then
killing things is dinner. It's too much power, really—calibrating
your child's moral compass on the fly. As if you had any idea what
you were doing. But we do it every day.
Then we grow up. We figure out where
parents were right and where they went wrong, and we recalibrate our
compass however we want, fishing for clues in the murky gray puddle
of reality.
We make decisions: Christian! Atheist!
Democrat! Libertarian! Pro-Choice! Traditional Marriage! Vegan!
Omnivore! Decaf! Homeschool! We feel so confident in these decisions
that we end them all with exclamation marks. We blog about their
virtues and the moral or rational deficiency of their opposites.
My decisions all end in question marks.
So, as I tied the chicken's legs to the
laundry line, its toes branching out over the bailing twine, its feet
translucent and gold as wet hay, I did not throw down my knife and
slap a PETA bumper sticker onto my car. I stood under the impossible
blue sky and I stroked her feathers and I stared into the silvery
black fish eggs of her eyes, looking for fear or recognition or
intelligence. But you know what? I didn't see anything. I saw an
animal that was born to die, and I pulled her neck forward and I made
the cut.
You want it to be over then, but
actually you keep sawing and its not a single slice but a gruesome
few, and then in some unremarkable moment afterward you have a
lifeless chicken head in one hand and a carcass ready for plucking on
the line. After a few more steps, you have dinner.
And I still don't have the answer.
But, you have the question, an awareness that many of us never know. You will be absorbing answers throughout your life, and then one day your gray head will smile and say, "Ah, yes, ..."
ReplyDelete(love, mom)
Sorry, I can't seem to ever stop sounding like mom. What I meant to say is, I love this post and it makes me be more aware of my own world.
ReplyDeleteI need you to sound like a mom--you're my mom. ;) And thanks for both comments--they are both special to me.
DeleteA simple, yet powerful story boldly told. I want to be you someday!
ReplyDeleteNo! No, you don't! Just look at this mess of indecision. I would love to have your clarity and forthrightness. Maybe we can swap for a while, but then we'll have to go back to being our messy, beautiful selves. Thanks for reading, Will.
DeleteAw, I love your writing. I think it's so crazy how some answers can seem so obvious to us, while others leave us scratching our heads and hitting our knees. I only know a few black and white about everything people and sometimes I want to be them! But then I step back and have learned to appreciate the journey, perspective, and empathy/sympathy that searching can give to those who see more grey.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading, Betsy. I know we've talked before about how having your principles turned on their head can make us more sympathetic. I agree wholeheartedly. My priest once said something that has stuck in my brain ever since: It is more important to be kind than to be right. I think the reason I find that so comforting is that I'm never certain who's right! So I try to be kind instead. Actually, you've been a great role model for me in that regard...
ReplyDeleteUgh. so glad i don't have to kill my food.
ReplyDeletelast animal i dispatched (other than satan's spawn: earwigs) was a fish when I was a wee middle-schooler. Decided then and there, with an emphatic !, that i was not the huntin' kind. Odd thing is, though, that i am indifferent to the food that ends up on my plate. still, i try to walk the line of the conscientious omnivore. animals give their lives so that i can keep mine. pretty communistic of them come to think of it... but then, i try not to argue with my dinner.
oh, and: nice post by the way!