animals and ethics

"The Main Course had an Unhappy Face" is the headline of Ariel Kaminer's article today on learning to butcher her own turkey.  The nod to a familiar vegetarian principle--"I don't eat anything with a face."--may have been coincidental, but the anthropomorphic identification between turkey and Times reporter is undeniable. The Bourbon red hen turkey Kaminer has selected for Thanksgiving does "not seem happy. Instead, with her almond eyes downcast, her subdued manner suggest[s] a kind of forbearance." Affect and empathy seem to be flowing back and forth between them: "Perhaps she sensed I was not there to make friends. In truth, I was there to kill her."

Kaminer's position on this curious new transaction--selecting both the bird for your Thanksgiving dinner and the butcher who will teach you to kill it--is wryly affirmative. She sees it as "all part of the broader cultural effort to escape the climate-controlled, linoleum-lined artificiality of supermarket shopping, in which meat magically appears all ready for your oven and animals are characters in children’s storybooks." Her point makes good sense to me, having spent some time rereading childrens' storybooks when I was writing Poultry Science, Chicken Culture--from the bird's eye perspective on the natural year in Elmer Boyd Smith's exquisitely illustrated tale Chicken World, to the gender-charged Little Red Hen tales of my mother's childhood and my own, and finally to a different kind of globalized vision with disturbingly neoliberal after-effects, in One Hen.  In fact, I'd push Kaminer a bit on where the responsibility ends. Just as no bread shows up in the oven without someone to pick the wheat, thresh the grain, lug the grain to the miller, knead the dough, and form the loaves (Little Red Hen taught us that), no turkey arrives on the Thanksgiving table without someone doing the work not just of killing it (which Kaminer did) but of scalding, plucking, and dressing the bird.

We learned this first-hand the day after I finished my book.  I was gazing out of the window just in time to see a hawk swoop down from the big tree and kill my Buff Orpington hen. (Yes, she was a little red hen.) I ran out yelling, and found the hawk just sitting there, claws into feathers, staring at me sideways until I ran straight up and forced it to flap up and away.  The hen, her neck broken, was floppy, soft, and still warm. (In fact, since chickens have a body temperature of 110 degrees, I mean very warm.)

Now that the hawk had done the deed, it felt wrong just to throw the body of our red hen into the garbage.  Stranger in a Strange Land, a book I've never much liked, came back to me: I wanted to grock her fullness (or at least that is the silly sounding phrase I remember from the book all those years ago--kind of a paying tribute by incorporation to a being whose life had worth and import).

So, we decided we would try to prepare her for that ceremonial meal. Having watched our own poultry processor Eli Reiff do the same cone-and-knife procedure that Kaminer learned with her butcher, we knew that we should cut the hen's head off and hold her upside down until the blood drained out.  So we did that: Gowen did the cutting, and we tied her legs with twine to the railing of our front deck so that the blood could drain into a bucket below.  And then we put a very big pot of water on the stove to boil, while we reread the section on butchering chickens in our Country Guide.  Once the water comes to a boil, and hits the right line on the thermometer, you dunk the bird in (holding her feet) and bob her up and down for about 60 seconds to loosen the feathers.  So we did that, and then put her on the floor (which we'd covered with a sheet laid down over some garbage bags to keep water off the wood boards).  The plucking itself was surprisingly easy; the feathers came off almost as if we were zipping her out of a chicken suit. The 'dressing'--gutting her and pulling out the inner organs, and cutting off the head and feet--came next, and I found that much harder. As he pulled the innards out, we were both shocked when out came a cluster of eggs, from tiny yellow balls to full-sized eggs with shells already on them. I stood near by, but protected by the camera lens, and documented the event while Gowen accomplished it.  Result? After the visual shock of the brightly colored innards, the very familiar image of a cleaned and dressed chicken all ready for the freezer.

We stewed the hen, with morels and red wine and onions, and the delicious dinner felt very meaningful, even (I thought at that time) ethical. Yet I return to that now by way of an essay I have been reading written one of my personal heroes--the biologist and epigeneticist C.W. Waddington--in his book The Ethical Animal.  Waddington's approach to ethics has a strongly biological basis, yet not in the reductive sense of so much contemporary sociobiology. Instead, he gives us biology in terms that resemble Donna Haraway's essay "Situated Knowledges: The Privilege of Partial Perspective."

 "Like all other products of evolution, [the human intellect] has been moulded [sic.] by the necessity to fit in with--or rather, to put it more actively, to cope with--the rest of the natural world. Its function is not to produce a God-like vision of the human situation seen from some stand-point above and outside the turmoil of actual life.  The intellect is an instrument forged--perhaps by a rather rough and ready village blacksmith, let us confess--for the specific purpose of coming to terms with things. The situation with which we find ourselves confronted, a world of social-economic revolutions, of wars, of mass scale technology, is the basic raw material by which the intellect is challenged. To discuss subjects such as ethical theory without specific reference to such problems is to run away to an ivory tower.  [ . . . ] What is demanded of each generation is a theory of ethics which is neither a mere rationalization of prejudices, nor a philosophical discourse so abstract as to be irrelevant to the practical problems with which mankind is faced at that time." (my italics, Waddington, 1960)

The intellect as a tool, and ethics as a situated theory, rather than a God-like vision from some abstract and unsituated standpoint: this sounds to me like a remarkable anticipation of Haraway's own critique of both standpoint feminism and positivist science, with its "God's eye view from nowhere." Strikingly, at the end of the introduction to The Ethical Animal, Waddington actually suggests that the very word "ethical" might better be replaced with the word "wisdom" which, he says, "remains . . . an aspiration and not an achievement."

Which brings me back to Kaminer's story in the Times. The rueful tone of her conclusion suggests that she has had a brush not with the clarity of ethics, but with something more like Waddington's notion of wisdom. "For those carnivores who are truly at one with the world, killing your own meat might feel almost like a spiritual act, a way to participate in every step of the life cycle. That’s not how it went for me. I found it upsetting and, on some very basic level, gross."

Despite Kaminer's fantasy that an unconflicted wholeness is available to some lucky carnivores, we know that very few people--meat eaters or vegetarians--attain the spiritual elevation of being "truly at one with the world."  In its complexity and imperfection, her troubling experience with butchering her Thanksgiving turkey, like our response to the hawk butchery of our little red hen, situates us solidly in the upsetting, even gross, "turmoil of actual life" (to borrow a phrase from Waddington.) To my way of thinking, that's a position well worth our collective thanksgiving.