Animal Ironies

For the past four summers I have worked as a camp counselor at a small farm camp. My day consisted 15 percent of running squirmy kids to the bathroom, 10 percent pulling kids out from behind kicking ponies, 6 percent screaming “hold onto the reins!”, 5 percent telling campers that the rabbits were just playing leapfrog, 30 percent landscaping in 100 degree weather, and 44 percent cleaning up animal shit, and I love the job nonetheless. However, there was obviously little time for me to spend bonding with the animals, and as a result, there were only a few that I knew very well.

One morning I arrived to find a particularly old and frail goat, Jeff,  laying with her legs tucked under her (a very normal position for goats to be in), but something didn’t seem right. I never spent any time with this goat, but I hopped over the fence, into the modest goat pen. I nudged the goat with the toe of my boot in the back of her thigh. She looked at me pitifully. I clapped my hands harshly in her ear, and she squirmed her legs a little bit under her, but she did not get up. I straddled the old goat and grabbed her under her armpits, hoisted her to her feet. She balanced for a second on her own, her legs splayed out like a newborn horse. She let out a mournful wail that sounded more toddler than goat, before she fell heavily onto her knees. I knew that she would not make it through the day. I pulled back her lip, an action that would make the average goat recoil, but she only blinked. Her gums were white, so I knew that she was laden with parasites; her immune system was extremely weak. I brought her a bowl of cool water, and I picked a pile of fresh grass for her, while trying to assure campers that she was perfectly okay at the same time. I sat the two bowls before her and she sniffed them timidly. Goats are not the type of animals that normally take the time to sniff their food before devouring it.  I took a single blade of grass and poked it between her lips. She nibbled at it and it disappeared like a dollar in a vending machine . I fed her grass blade by blade for nearly an hour. I didn’t want Jeff to be hungry when she died. Eventually she touched her lips to the water and sucked up a few gulps of it. I’ve always liked how goats drink water by sucking it up, as opposed to using their tongues like dogs or cats.  After she drank water on her own, something inside me churned with hope that maybe she would make it through the day. However, the heat was beating down, and she once again began to wail like a toddler before their bedtime.

She was in no significant pain, I had poked and prodded her entire body to ensure that. But she was terrified, she knew that she was going to die. With each pitiful wail she released, she seemed to have more troubled holding her head up. Her eyes flashed white with panic as her skull bobbled side to side like a baby trying to keep it’s heavy head vertical. Finally the goat’s thin frame slumped over, so that she was sprawled on her side. I had been sitting calmly with this goat all day, ready for her to die. I didn’t expect her death to affect me, but when she finally gave up, I couldn’t keep the tears from welling up in my eyes. I sat next to her for ten or so minutes more, I couldn’t leave her pen, I couldn’t let my campers see me cry. I laid a hand on her side feeling the last shaky breaths leak out of her. At this point life or death was indistinguishable, but if she still had life in her body, it was incredibly faint. I left her in her pen, incase her heart still had a few struggled beats left in in it.

    I tried to push her death out of my mind, but while reading about the suffering animals in slaughterhouses in Eating Animals, her panicked cries seemed to ring in my ears. If the death of an old goat, who lived twelve comfortable years could make me cry for an hour, then why when I eat an animal that has been mistreated for months and dies a horrible death, all I can think is,  “Hmm, so tasty,”? There is something incredibly wrong about this. If I cannot bear to watch an animal die, then I have no right to eat one that is dead. If I couldn't bring myself to even slaughter my own food, then how could I pay for meat slaughtered by a stranger. Humans are meant to consumer meat; we always have been.  However, we have an allusion that the neatly packed pieces of flesh in a grocery store were never living animals; they were never born and never killed. The distant that is placed between us, and the animal that our meat originated from has numbed us to the reality.  The hypocrisy of my eating style is slowly seeping in, it is not okay for me to cry for one animal, but pay for the torture of another; to sleep in the same bed as one, but tear another apart with a knife and fork with no second thoughts. Whether a person chooses to consume meat or not, the most crucial thing is that they need to think about what exactly it is that they are eating. How did their dinner die, and more importantly, how did it live? We should not let ourselves be blind to the origins of our food, regardless if the origins are good or poor, and regardless of our opinions on the fair treatment of animals.