This last time the frigid mid-20s temperature proved awfully cold for the baby chicks, who had nothing but their own body heat to protect them as they huddled together in their little shipping carton. It wasn't surprising that there were already three dead chicks, who had been trampled underfoot during transit. We did our best to warm up the others, immediately dipping their beaks into warmed water fortified with electrolytes and then carefully placing them under a heat lamp one by one. Even so, we lost another five or six by the end of the day.
On a farm, you cannot escape from the fact that living things at some point cease to be alive. In fact, I've been studying different small-scale budgets put together by the N.C. State Extension, and I've found that mortality is written right into the project cost together with labor, fuel, electricity, etc., all things that one needs to anticipate subtracting from the net profit. The rule of thumb for broilers happens to be 10-percent mortality, which means we're doing pretty poorly with our loss of eight or nine of the original three dozen. Or perhaps we're still doing okay, as Hoover's reimburses for chicks that die in transit or soon after arrival. Even so, we've got at least 150 pounds of grower ration more than what we need. Anybody in the market for Reedy Fork organic broiler grower? It's pretty tasty, I'm told, at least if you're a meat chicken.
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On a farm, in any case, you cannot escape the reality that life ends in death, sometimes quickly and unexpectedly, sometimes slowly and excruciatingly; that our hold on life, however seemingly secure in the flush of youth, is in fact startlingly tenuous. We've lost a lot of chickens to the summer heat and to neighborhood dogs in these past few years. We even lost one of our expensive new meat goats to bottle-jaw a few months back. Although farm animals aren't people, death is an experience that we share in common with all living creatures, and the death of any creature is a reminder that death is real and life is short.
Memento mori is the ancient counsel in this regard: Remember death. The phrase originates in the great military parades--the "triumphs"--that the Roman senate would sometimes grant to its generals. The victorious military leader would enter the city of Rome in procession with his troops and all the spoils of victory, to the adulation of a cheering citizenry that would often be showered with coins, or perhaps with bread. But behind the triumphant general riding in his chariot would stand a slave whose sole task was to whisper again and again in the great man's ear, Memento mori; remember, o mighty conqueror, that in the end you too will be conquered.
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In last week's batch of baby chicks, there was one tough little fellow who survived the transit and the cold, but from the beginning he has been weaker than his peers. He has a gimpy leg, and he more or less flops himself from the food dish to the water, and then back to the warmth under the heat lamp. I would come in from evening chores and remark about how I should dispatch that poor chick with a quick hit of the shovel, making a merciful end to his suffering. But then the boys would protest; they were indignant that their father would even consider such a thing. So I relented, and I have continued to relent, figuring that nature will ultimately take her course.
Two days ago, however, I came home from school to find that the poor little chick now occupies a box in the living room by the fireplace. My seven year-old has taken the lamp from my desk and found an warm incandescent bulb to replace the fluorescent bulb that I had in it. He took the thermometer off the wall in the garage and began carefully monitoring the temperature in the box, ensuring that it wouldn't rise any higher than the mid-80s. There was a veritable gleam of triumph in his eyes that evening, like the gleam that surely marked the eyes of Roman generals during their triumphal processions, as he paraded before my own eyes his careful set-up. He had thwarted my murderous intent by his preemptive strike; against all odds, he had stayed the hand of death itself.
Any reasonable adult knows that this chick would be better off dead. Sure, it's no longer being trampled underfoot by the other chicks, and sure, it's cheeping happily and seeming to enjoy the attention being showered on it. But it's a meat chick. And it can't walk. And, well, I'm not sure quite what to do with a paralyzed pet meat chicken. I'd put money on it surviving another week or two.
I was probably heartless enough to articulate this truth to him. Okay, I admit it: I've heartlessly articulated my thoughts on the matter repeatedly. We are trying to farm, after all, and it's rather hard to farm when one's children protest the imminent demise of animals specifically raised for meat. A big part of the reason that my wife and I have chosen to farm is so that our children know where their food comes from; so that they are aware of, and comfortable with, the intertwined realities of life and death. I don't intend to have any child of mine grow up thinking that meat, and eggs, and milk, and vegetables, all magically appear on store shelves. It is one of our age's great tragedies, I think, that people have separated the food they eat from any real notion of where it comes from.
Yet I relented, and even now I am doing my best to bite my tongue about the semi-ambulatory meat chicken residing in our living room, because I know that the alternate tragedy lurking in the wings occurs when death becomes so commonplace, so ordinary, that we become inured to it and coarsened by its presence.
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Yesterday morning, sadly, I had to butcher one of our laying hens. In each of our two pastures we have a Great Pyrenees living with the goats. They are still young, however, and in training as livestock guardian dogs, and while generally they are good with the animals, one of them--her name is Leche--recently entered the final throes of puppyhood. So it's likely Leche who took a playful swat at this unfortunate hen. We're happy that she didn't actually kill the chicken and drag it around or eat it, mostly for her sake because doing so would have set her training back. But it is unfortunate nonetheless that she did enough damage to dislocate a wing and put the poor hen into shock.
So, I did what needed to be done: I heated a pot of water and then carried the hen to the butchering block. My youngest son, who is going on two years old, was outside at the time, and he watched with wide eyes.
And I let him watch.
I explained to him, as I butchered the chicken, that I was sad that she had to go; I explained that she was food, and that we would eat her. I'm sure he didn't get much philosophical nuance out of what I said, but I am also certain that he understood the solemn tone of my voice. It doesn't have to be dramatic or drawn-out; it obviously didn't involve prayers to Mother Earth or anything like that. Yet there is a certain decorum to be observed, I think, even in a confrontation with death so so commonplace as the processing of a chicken.
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How is one to live balanced precariously between being so distant from the reality of death that he forgets how it is linked with life, how it gives life, how it sustains life, and, on the other hand, being so inured to death's presence that he no longer views it with the reverence that is owed to something that in the end will come even for him?
That, I suppose, is the question that I'm pondering.
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
ReplyDeleteAmen!
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