Sunday, July 6, 2014

I Am Human!

A sustainable food supply that involves meat, involves death.  I've been blessed the last couple of years to contract my beef processing.  I still do the deer and chickens and will again do the beef, I would imagine, but for now, I'm enjoying the break.  Processing beef is not only labor intensive, but there is that moment in which, the memories of literally lifting them out of the back of the van and months of bottle feeding, all converge in my mind, on their last day of life.  I'm a practical woman, but a woman none the less.

In processing Daddy's deer, they are already dead upon arrival, and even when hunting, I've never been emotionally attached.  Although chickens are somewhat domesticated and easily held, I don't form the bond with them that I do with the mammals on the place.  I can identify the sex of new chicks, by day three, for the express purpose of separating what will end up on the table and what will provide eggs.  I can look at those fluffy little chicks and know they won't look like that when it comes time for chicken and dumplings a few months down the road.  Once in awhile, I do have a twinge about a particularly colorful rooster, but . . .

I used to process goats and sheep as well, but sheep raising was too much work and too hard on the pasture.  The hardest work I ever did was shearing sheep . . . and it would be cruel to put them through an Ozark summer without shearing, so I may raise a couple for a specific idea, but I will not own them, come shearing season.  I quit butchering goats when I started raising my own beef.

I wrote about figuring out how to load the two that just went to town.  My plan worked great, in that; within a week, they were coming when they heard the lid of the feed bin rattle.  I then added the morning coaxing, as they would be loading out in the morning.  That last night, as they were eating, I had forgotten to put the bucket in the feed bin, so when I rattled the lid putting it away, they both came running and as our eyes met, a momentary sadness washed over me.  I was so thankful that even though the next day was butchering day, I wasn't going to be doing the actual processing this time.  That same flood of memories that hits simultaneously at butchering time, hit me then.  Sometimes I get so busy doing what needs to be done, I am blessed with the reminder that . . . I am human.

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