you can’t run away on harvest day 223would maddeningly hatch, and grow up bent on laying more eggs. It’s dirty
work, trying to save an endless chain of uneaten lives. Realistically, my
kids observed, she’d hire somebody.
Forgive us. We know she meant well, and as fantasies of the super- rich
go, it’s more inspired than most. It’s just the high- mindedness that ran-
kles; when moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fi ll
up a hot- air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke. The farm- liberation
fantasy simply refl ects a modern cultural confusion about farm animals.
They’re human property, not just legally but biologically. Over the millen-
nia of our clever history, we created from wild progenitors whole new
classes of beasts whose sole purpose was to feed us. If turned loose in the
wild, they would haplessly starve, succumb to predation, and destroy the
habitats and lives of most or all natural things. If housed at the public ex-
pense they would pose a more immense civic burden than our public
schools and prisons combined. No thoughtful person really wants those
things to happen. But living at a remove from the actual workings of a
farm, most humans no longer learn appropriate modes of thinking about
animal harvest. Knowing that our family raises meat animals, many
friends have told us—not judgmentally, just confessionally—“I don’t
think I could kill an animal myself.” I find myself explaining: It’s not what
you think. It’s nothing like putting down your dog.
Most nonfarmers are intimate with animal life in only three catego-
ries: people; pets (i.e., junior people); and wildlife (as seen on nature
shows, presumed beautiful and rare). Purposely beheading any of the
above is unthinkable, for obvious reasons. No other categories present
themselves at close range for consideration. So I understand why it’s hard
to think about harvest, a categorical act that includes cutting the heads
off living lettuces, extended to crops that blink their beady eyes. On our
farm we don’t especially enjoy processing our animals, but we do value it,
as an important ritual for ourselves and any friends adventurous enough
to come and help, because of what we learn from it. We reconnect with
the purpose for which these animals were bred. We dispense with all de-
lusions about who put the live in livestock, and who must take it away.
A friend from whom we buy pasture- grazed lamb and poultry has con-