ava shannon

(Albeit not a complete one!)

I was a vegetarian for about two years after I moved away from home, between the ages of 17 and 19, while a university student in a small town in Ontario. I had been conscious of several concerns regarding the eating of meat – ethical, environmental, health, and more – but it wasn’t until I moved out on my own that I took the initiative to cut meat products out of my diet – although perhaps this makes me sound too active in the role. Really I just simply never bought them. (I wasn’t great at ensuring I was having complete proteins or anything else proactive.) I was clear from the start that my motives were primarily selfish. I didn’t have problem with the killing of animals for food, but didn’t want to ingest said animal products if they contained antibiotics, hormones, GMO feed, etc. I was also critical of some practices of people who called themselves vegetarians. Eating fish or gelatin, for example, seemed entirely inconsistent if the goal, whatever the motivation, was to not require the deaths of animals.

I returned to eating meat occasionally about halfway through my pregnancy, when eating well was hard to come by and the consequences less individual. I only ate meat on a few occasions in the few years that followed, though without a strict set of principles guiding me. I was trying to debate the implications of several things I had come to understand:
1. Animals that are raised for meat are not treated well.
2. Animals raised for meat are not healthy, and therefore not healthy for me to eat.
3. There is something wrong with animals being slaughtered en masse by faceless representatives of corporations, their flesh being wrapped up in plastic and styrofoam, and being sold under fluorescent lights alongside a million other products from hardly-dairy ice cream to hydrolized-cornstarch-god-knows-what.

My mostly-vegetarianism got challenged more than once in that time in a small semi-rural community in BC. The first was the opportunity to eat a chicken that had been raised on the property and had been slaughtered and cleaned that very morning. That seemed right. I think I still didn’t eat any because I couldn’t pin down why that was OK and other meat wasn’t, but it raised some questions. The second experience was the opportunity to actually help in the slaughter of a sheep.

Her name was Sheepie. She was getting old and lonely since she lost her goat companion, and there was a young woman in the community struggling with Lyme Disease, who badly needed sources of easily digestible iron, i.e. red meat. I help Harry, who had kept Sheepie on his property for many years now, to give her some feed to munch contentedly while he shot her in the back of the head. We cut the throat to drain the blood, dragged the carcass into the back of a pick-up, and drove over to the woman’s house. Harry was choked up as we drove, but when we arrived he was all business again. On a big sheet of plastic, we laid out the carcass and set to work. We used our hands to get between the skin and the warm muscle to remove it, and an exacto knife to open the belly and disconnect the organs from the walls of the cavity. Things were smelly, like you might expect the inside of a sheep to be, but hardly messy. There was no blood. In an hour or two we had cleaned the carcass up and were able to leave the butchering to the young woman, who was excited to try her hand at it, as well as to make use of several of the organs we’d saved including the brain.

The entire process was shocking for a single reason: it wasn’t shocking. Sheepie’s death was sad, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to pull the trigger myself then, but it was also clear that her painless death was literally saving someone else’s life. And then watching living muscles turn into meat turned out to be an amazing process, one that didn’t elicit disgust, sorrow, or even confusion. It just made sense. I had seen it a million times in the supermarket fridges or on a dinner plate, and had never truly understood what I was looking at.

This video I encountered last year depicts it best: (Not for the faint of heart.)

Why is causing the death of another animal difficult if it isn’t wrong? Why doesn’t it feel wrong?
I don’t think these are questions that challenge the legitimacy of eating other animals; I think these are questions that define us as humans. A huge part of being human is being challenged emotionally and intellectually by the struggle between life and death in a way that other animals don’t seem to be. So why does it still “just make sense” for our food to have to die? The answer is that it is unavoidable. In fact, it is intrinsic. It is a fact of life that life must end for another life to continue. It is possibly the most stunning fact of our existence. I can’t even call it a paradox because it makes so much sense; nothing comes from nothing, so the continuation of one life must require the end of another life. I don’t mean this in a philosophical way. Vegetarians’ diets require death as much as omnivores. But what I realized in my experience with the sheep was that industrialized meat production is not intrinsic to meat-eating, and my three points above were all entirely based on the industrial system of meat “production”. My experience directly addressed the third by teaching me: There is not something wrong with an animal being slaughtered and meat being eaten in a right way.

Unfortunately this answer raised its own questions for me. Perhaps most surprisingly I had to decline packaged organic meat. Organically-raised animals are slaughtered in just as industrial of processes as any other meat, especially because all retail meat in the Lower Mainland is legally required to have been “processed” in a provincially-approved industrial slaughterhouse. You’re also not allowed to slaughter your own animals on your own property unless your property has farm status or you’re outside of any municipalities (as far as I know).

The solution was easy and obvious; even your average animal-loving vegetarian hesitates to pass judgment on aboriginal peoples who hunted their own meat. So I got my hunting license with my partner in one summer, and last fall was our first adventure in stalking some of BC’s abundant wildlife!

1. Wild animals live the freest life you could wish for any animal – freer than your dog, I’ll add.
2. Wild animals are as healthy as you’ll ever find, due mostly to #1.
3. We conducted the entire process ourselves, from killing to gutting and skinning to grinding up all the scraps by hand. If you said to yourself, Well, aboriginal people used every part and that’s why it was OK, then first of all you’re being romantic, and second of all, when you butcher a carcass yourself you might be able to accomplish that.

The deer we got last year, lovingly posthumously nicknamed Phillip, wasn’t enough to supply our meat for the entire year, so we’ve been rationing it, only eating about a pound per week between three people (one of them three years old). We eat vegetarian the rest of the time (with a few exceptions such as when we are guests). We’re down to one roast now – this weekend we take to the hills!