We, are killing animals.
We are, killing animals.
Growing up in suburbia, I was sheltered from this fact. I never had to personally witness deaths of animals. The first glimpse of it were nature documentaries that depicted hunting scenes — wolves tearing apart their prey, lions stalking and bringing down an elephant in the night, the hours spent slowly tiring them out and ripping into their thick, thick skin. The docs would usually cut to when the prey animal was already dead, but sometimes not.
My mother would shield her eyes from the screen, and say “oh that’s terrible! Why would you want to watch that?” — later on in the night I’d watch her take apart a fish, head still on, and roast them for dinner. I wondered if the fish had a quick death, or it had suffocated among all its peers, stuck in a net and thrown into a giant vat of ice.
Being Japanese, we always say “itadakimasu” before eating a meal. I will receive you now. Thank you for your gift.
When I got older I wondered if just saying those words was enough to reconcile just how enormous that gift was — the gift of life, given to me by thousands of fellow animals who did not consent to having their life taken. For a time I was vegetarian. Eventually I was feeling overwhelmed with work, and so I started getting into drawing wildlife more in pen and ink, and went on some trips to other countries to observe nature.
In South Africa, out in the bush, far from city dwellings, I was in awe. I watched the lions, hyenas and wild dogs hunt. And in turn, sick and dying predators were devoured by scavengers. So many bones, bleached in the harsh sun. So much suffering, desperation, pain…and life. The rawness of it all was a shock to my system, but humans there were very matter of fact about this. Death gave life. Every gnu, water buffalo, or even elephant shot by a wealthy sport hunter was divided up and cooked by local people.
It was eye-opening being reminded once again that yes, every day, we kill. We kill to eat, we trample over lives without realizing we are doing so, we kill as we grow our crops; worms split by shovels, herbicides and pesticides — organic and otherwise — slowly poisoning the soil and its millions of inhabitants. As it has since time immaterial, we are beings, as is every other being on this planet, who kill in order to live.
We have, over time, found new ways to get over this fact. We gave higher value to animals who are close to us, and bred them purposefully or inadvertently to suit our needs and for some to be just plain adorable. We treated fish and invertebrates— those we considered to be akin to unfeeling machines, like they were much lesser. Cows, sheep, pigs and chickens, we decided, were food animals and that distinction made it okay to not raise them as nicely as our pets. Humans were the pinnacle of creation, the most advanced species, and we were not animals in the same way. It’s fine to eat lesser animals. It isn’t a sin to take their life. Your path to heaven is safe.
That is not to say that I’m fully on board with feeding into the fallacy of Appealing To Nature by saying it is wrong and unnatural to have such thoughts. We are thinking creatures who also have big feelings, and having empathy makes it hard to kill when we know that those we kill could potentially go on to live full lives. I think it makes sense to compartmentalize and justify why we treat them how we do, so that we could keep on living at their expense.
In fact, I still compartmentalize things to make it easier for myself. My first venture into killing an animal for food were rabbits. I was not confident about breaking their necks so I shot them in the head with an air rifle. One of the first I killed was a sweet and docile doe. She went quickly — one second she was alive, and the next she was gone. I felt immense guilt. She could have been a pet and lived out her life, but instead I shortened it just so I could have some meat for a day. Even as I slaughtered more rabbits, I remembered her. She was special.
But they are, actually, all special and unique. Despite the value we give some animals, an individual isn’t more or less worthy of premature death than another.
This pesky and beautiful thing called empathy is something we humans — most of us — have in abundance. It often works against us when we have to kill. Owners of livestock often are discouraged to name their animals and form attachments. This detachment helps us hurt less when the time comes to slaughter them.
I was surprised that many people actually don’t abide by this common rule. When I went to slaughter a sheep for the first time, my mentor told stories of individual animals she has killed and formed strong bonds with — before and after the kill. How she still cries when certain animals die, even after hundreds of thousands of kills.
And when it was my turn to plunge the knife into the neck of the sheep, I felt an immense, but quiet, outpouring of emotion. It was akin to grief, but maybe a little different.
I — we — sung, stroked the soft fur of the sheep’s face, cradled her gently as she passed the threshold. I thought of how her death was like when I gave birth to my child; how the body moves reflexively and yet the brain cocoons you inwards; the slow and steady stages of the sensations that come with life (death) giving. Deep, deep, pain that is at once unbearable as it is a comfort.
Our bodies know how to die. It’s encoded deep in our brain and our muscles.
The brain undergoes rapid change when it is deprived of oxygen as we die. In a matter of seconds, consciousness is lost and brain cells begin dying within 1 minute. More neurons degrade in the next several minutes, as complete brain death approaches around the 15 minute mark.
Recent studies reveal a surge of gamma brain waves occur in the final moments of life. Occurring in the temporo-parieto-occipital junction, an area used for memory processing, it is thought to cause one to see their old memories played back, as well as auditory and visual effects and bright lights and altered spacial awareness. Even after the heart stops pumping, brain activity persists for several seconds
The stages of dying for the sheep were gentle. The reflexive pumping of the legs came first, it slowed down into a trot, then a walk — finally, with a short shudder, the light in her eyes was gone. Her blood, caught in a big bowl under her throat, was still hot, just like her final breath.
The grief I had felt had melted into a deep sense of empathy, and thankfulness for the opportunity to feel so close to the threshold. I imagined how my own dying will go. Would I have the opportunity to experience that last journey, crossing over to the realm of death? That great unknown didn’t feel as vast now.
A few people since then who experienced this have told me privately that it all still seemed unnecessary and cruel. That it was wrong to kill the sheep at all, or any animal in fact, and dressing it up in a ritual of gentleness and communion was just a way to appease ourselves and make us feel less guilty. Or maybe it is best if we just took a bolt gun or shotgun to its head and killed it quickly, shutting everything down in a second — here one second and gone the next.
People equate a quick death with a compassionate one. Perhaps it is in some cases, but I wonder if that is true in all of them.
Death in nature often takes a long time, sometimes even days. And in dealing with this, most cultures have death rituals. Well known guides to this were known as Ars Moriendi — the art of dying. They were books penned in the Medieval times that contained advice to help people pass on in a dignified manner. Around the world, communion in the days leading up to a death seemed common; group songs, prayers and rituals happening while tending to the dying person. It feels like we have forgotten about this in modern times, in wealthier countries because we often don’t have to confront death in this way. The focus is almost always on prolonging life, which is a wonderful thing…but it has led to people not being able to accept the natural process of death in the same way as we used to.
The lack of balance leads to people embracing the idea of the sanctity of life, but not of death. There is as much sanctity in death as there exists in life, as it is the crossing of that threshold that helps us all to exist. It happens thousands and millions of times, all around us, every second of every day.
