224 animal, vegetable, miracle
curred with us on this point. Kirsty Zahnke grew up in the U.K., and ob-
serves that American attitudes toward life and death probably add to the
misgivings. “People in this country do everything to cheat death, it seems.
Instead of being happy with each moment, they worry so much about
what comes next. I think this gets transposed to animals—the preoccupa-
tion with ‘taking a life.’ My animals have all had a good life, with death as
its natural end. It’s not without thought and gratitude that I slaughter my
animals, it is a hard thing to do. It’s taken me time to be able to eat my own
lambs that I had played with. But I always think of Kahlil Gibran’s words:
“ ‘When you kill a beast, say to him in your heart:
By the same power that slays you, I too am slain, and I too shall be
consumed.
For the law that delivers you into my hand shall deliver me into a
mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of
heaven.’ ”Kirsty works with a local environmental organization and frequently
hosts its out- of-town volunteers, who camp at her farm while working in
the area. Many of these activists had not eaten meat for many years
before arriving on the Zahnkes’ meat farm—a formula not for disaster,
she notes, but for education. “If one gets to know the mantras of the
farm owners, it can change one’s viewpoint. I would venture to say that
seventy-five percent of the vegans and vegetarians who stayed at least a
week here began to eat our meat or animal products, simply because they
see what I am doing as right—for the animals, for the environment, for
humans.”
I respect every diner who makes morally motivated choices about con-
sumption. And I stand with nonviolence, as one of those extremist moms
who doesn’t let kids at her house pretend to shoot each other, ever, or
make any game out of human murder. But I’ve come to different conclu-
sions about livestock. The ve-vangelical pamphlets showing jam- packed
chickens and sick downer- cows usually declare, as their fi rst principle,
that all meat is factory- farmed. That is false, and an affront to those of us