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The day of the goat kid slaughter, we woke up to a misty Monday morning.
I am one of 10 interns at a farm south of San Francisco. We work in various parts of the farm, and live together. I arrived last September. One of the early intern classes is animal harvesting, which we anticipated with both uneasiness and fascination.
The milking goat, Cocoa, had given birth to three male kids the previous spring. We were going to be slaughtering and selling them to make space for new kids.
Steve, the animal husbandry manager, met us in the milk house, where he was disinfecting knives and setting clean towels on the counter. He explained that we would cut the main artery running up the side of the goat's neck, so the goat would bleed out and die of asphyxiation.
Many people choose to stun the animal first, either with a hammer blow to the head, or using a rifle. Steve said our method felt the least violent. Some of us went to choose which goat kid to slaughter. The rest set about sharpening knives.
"I don't like too much ceremony in slaughter," Steve said. "Sorry if you're someone that wants more, but I think it's best for the animal to just get this over with."
So two of us grabbed the goat's back legs and knelt at his side, and another intern straddled him, angling the goat's head up with her hand under his jaw, knife at his neck. She sawed through the fur and skin and slit deep into the side of his neck. His head jerked up; the blood was quick and heavy and bright red.
For the next minutes, we watched the blood dripping onto the grass. The goat was clearly alive, eyes blinking, legs jerking. Mostly he seemed calm, though clearly in pain. I looked around at all of us, crouching quietly, chewing on our lips and squeezing our fingers together. Occasional bleats pierced the foggy morning. The cows stood at their gate and watched.
I built this day up in my head for a while, expecting some sort of climax in my struggle to take responsibility for my food. I worried that I would embarrass myself with tears.
Instead, I found myself almost eerily detached and unaffected. I crouched right up next to the goat with my notebook, scribbling fast to record everything.
Reading back through those notes, I find none of my emotions, only detail -- the contrast of red blood against dying grass, the sound of knives sharpening, the contracting muscles in the goat's back legs. It felt both unreal and very real, hard but also quite easy -- a few cuts in the neck of a living animal and there's no turning back, no room for feeling guilty or sad.
We cut the other side of the neck to speed up death, and when the goat slumped over, we sliced the knife all the way through, severing the head. Someone reached over to shut the eyes, but they quickly sprung back open.
Two things surprised me: how blurry the line is between life and death, and how long it took -- close to five minutes -- for the goat to die.
From the time I can remember making conscious decisions, I stopped eating meat.
I vexed my mother with such extremes as refusing to share silverware with carnivores, or eat a dish cooked in the same space as lamb chops. When we dissected chicken wings in science class, I shared PETA pamphlets with my teacher and demanded to do an online simulation instead.
I was a proud and preachy advocate of animal rights, sure of my convictions -- that factory-farm conditions were wrong, that slaughter was violent and unethical, and that opting out of the meat industry was the only way to eat right.
My research and interest in food continued, eventually evolving at age 17 into a yearlong stint of veganism. But the more I read, the more I wondered if I could in good conscience eat anything.
I learned about the landscapes and habitats we destroy with our fields of monoculture crops doused in chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Michael Pollan's popular book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" convinced me that the industrial organic, Whole Foods-style diet -- even if I could afford it -- was only marginally better than conventional industrial agriculture. Cows fed organic corn in cramped quarters may be just as miserable as cows in feedlots with regular diets, and they certainly make just as much manure, which, in high concentration, runs off into streams and lakes and leads to other serious environmental problems.
Alternatives exist, of course, which was why I went to live at Hidden Villa, an educational farm and wilderness preserve in Los Altos Hills.
Hidden Villa is about as picturesque as you can get. Driving in, you pass seven acres of organic vegetables and fruits. Animals abound, grazing on pasture. Chickens roam a large area, intermingling with the pigs and scratching at the ground for bugs.
It's easy to forget about the integral role death plays in farms that look as peaceful and cozy as ours. But even farms where animals are kept purely for eggs or milk, slaughter lingers.
Half of hatched eggs will turn into roosters, but a flock of 40 hens only needs several males to keep them occupied. Male cows born to stimulate their mother to lactate are used almost exclusively for meat. Male lambs and goat kids are born with similar destinies.
We can choose to ignore it, but the death involved in our food cannot be avoided.
Googling "slaughter" turns up what you would expect, a plethora of animal-rights Web sites. Terror stories of what happens to cow udders on assembly lines, screaming pigs boiled alive, sheep suffering hours of agony. Another Web site declares that any animal you will ever eat was grown on a factory farm, in conditions that no one could possibly support or condone.
As opposed as I am to factory farming, it is hard for me to stomach this stuff. Besides focusing on only part of the truth, we miss the point. If the real issue here is improving the clearly unacceptable conditions of the majority of domesticated animals, then changing the way we farm is much more crucial than guilting a few people into abstaining from meat.
There is animal death involved in almost everything we do -- not just in our food and clothing, but in the uncountable habitats we pave over with our cities, suburbs and malls.
By making it out to be some sort of campaign of good against evil, we lose the opportunity to promote educated, meaningful thought about the wide range of choices we have, and the impact of those choices in the lives of animals and other people.
The hard truth of the world is that it is a finite place, where we only survive by consuming the bodies of other living things.
Plants or animals -- everything we eat was once alive, continuing on its singular mission of making more of itself. And even a purely plant-based diet costs countless animal lives though we may not see them on our plates -- due to shrinking wild habitats lost to farm land, creatures that depend on rivers diverted for irrigation, and insects and birds poisoned by the chemicals used in most of our fields.
This fall, not long after killing the goat, I started to eat meat. It seems clear that supporting farms that grow animals humanely makes more of an impact in the life of animals and farmers than simply opting for tofu. I eat some of the goat kid for dinner every few weeks, and also regularly have meat from the pigs and chickens on our farm.
But killing an animal is not an easy, happy affair. It is a pain-inflicting process that ends with one less being alive in this world. The last bleating calls of an animal are haunting, and the blood on your hands is just like ours: warm and bright red.
No matter how sure I was that this was right, that we were engaged in a real understanding of what life and death is about, I could not stop the questions and doubts playing uneasily in the back of my mind.
The evening after we slaughtered the goat, Steve met us in our kitchen to do the butchering.
Norah Jones sang softly from our speakers. We laid the goat out, its lean, dark red muscles gleaming. Steve explained that we'd cut the meat into five chunks, and then decide how we wanted to divide it. First we cut the back legs off, sawing in with the knife and trying to get at the joint between the ball tissue.
Cutting through the ribs was much harder than I expected. I used a mallet and pounded on the cleaver to crack them. Bone flecks spattered everywhere, and the cut was jagged, releasing the unmistakable smell of raw meat. I washed the bone flecks off the meat, and dried it with a hand towel.
I wondered what my 15-year-old self, who refused to pass plates of chicken at dinner, would think of me now -- a carnivore at age 20.
We covered the legs in Saran Wrap to prevent freezer burn. After that, several layers of newspaper. The pieces of its body were lined up on the dining room table, little neatly wrapped presents.
Some people stopped to read the newspaper we were wrapping with. Conversation circled to the price of beer that would be going up soon, due to changes in supply-and-demand and farmer politics.
I stepped outside into the night and walked the 15 steps between our house and the goat pen.
The three goats came right up to the fence and I struggled to open the gate. From the pen I could see the lights in our kitchen, where everyone huddled around the counter continuing to slice up pieces of meat. I knelt down and the last goat kid came right up to me and smelled my hands like he knew what I had been up to. In that dark night, it felt like he was haunting me, and also saying that it was OK.
We sat like that for a few minutes. I felt the artery where we had slaughtered his brother, and then the top of the ribs I just sliced open. He put his head against my legs and pushed me hard and steady. I wanted to believe he was nudging me toward an understanding of something. He lifted his legs, and kept jumping on me -- play or reprimand, I couldn't tell.
I wanted more than anything to understand something absolutely, to come out of all this having honestly made up my mind. There is only so much compassion you can have for another living being, I told myself, but didn't quite believe it, holding this warm, breathing body in my arms.
I tried again: Nothing is entirely simple and free of violence. Eating meat is a natural way of acknowledging our mortality and place in the world. Closer, but still too easy.
Like this whole process, like all of our journeys through food and love and life, the quick and easy realizations never hold. We are as messy as our blood, as solid as the shifting ground on which our houses stand, as mortal as the food we eat, and as eternal as what we are made of: rain, dirt, wind, sun.
I stood up and struggled to close the gate, and I thought I saw Cocoa, the goat's mother, glaring at me fierce and angry. I left quickly, hoping the moon shadows and a dancing imagination were messing with my mind.
