Duck Slaughter: beauty amid violence

Life, when looked at with our most basic and clear eyes, is a series of passionate events, one piled on top of the other, followed by long doldrums of boredom, followed again by overwhelming passion and love and violence. If lived and experienced will full awareness and awareness and the freedom that should belong to each of us, life takes on this amazing aspect of incredible beauty, even in the midst of extreme bloodshed and chaos.

I've been experiencing the juxtaposition of this beauty amid bloodshed, and love amid tears a lot the past few days. Helping out at a duck slaughter earlier today, I was struck by the beauty of the blood as it spurted from the neck of the duck I was killing. I had never killed anything other then a few rainbow trout and a very large frog I had stomped on to squish while hitchhiking, because the frog had been hit by a car and needed to be put out of it's misery.

This, however, was truely different. I was the one with the knife to the duck's neck, deciding whether she lived or died. The fish had somehow been easier to kill, I suppose because I buy into that idea that "fish feel little or no pain." I knew as I was cutting them up, that they where indeed feeling pain, because they did everything in their power to get away from us, but still, somehow, fish are much easier, in my experience, to kill then something with feathers and eyes similar to ours, a being which, seconds before you held a knife to it's throat, was waddling happily around the yard with it's comrades, quacking and looking fat and cute.

But the duck yard was getting crowded at George and Nikki's house (two of their breeding pairs had done very well this summer,) and since I do eat meat, as do they, we felt it would be a good and humane thing to kill these birds ourselves, to give them the sort of peaceful end we wish all animals that died to feed us would get. We prayed in a circle together before we began the killing process; we each prayed silently and held the duck gently as we killed it, thanking the creator for the life of the bird.

Yes, it was hard to kill...I hesitated for several minutes before finally aiming the knife into the jugular vein and watching the blood spray out...but I am glad I had this experience. Not only did I learn just how hard it is to judge whether eating meat is truely ethical or not as you've got a knife to an animal's throat...(part of me wanted to put the knife back down and pledge to go vegan, but I knew this wouldn't be being true to myself,) but I was also amazed at the strange beauty of the whole event...there was something so powerful and visceral about deciding to be a responsible meat eater and actually take the life of a duck I intended on eating; and to see adults in their forties, some of whom had been vegetarians most of their lives, breaking down but still making the decision to kill the duck in front of them; there is something remarkably powerful about witnessing a scene like that.

And, there was a strange beauty in the whole event too...even the blood held beauty in it, as it spurted from the duck's severed artery, so dark red, almost purple in the sunlight, so vibrant and liquid and alive...I've never seen such beautiful blood before. The child who was watching, George and Nikki's eight year old son, was enchanted by the beauty of the blood as well; he begged to be allowed to dip a stick into the bucket of blood sitting below where the ducks where killed. He wanted to smear the blood on things; and I well understood this impulse. It was almost the way I feel when I menstruate these days; I have a strange desire to paint with my blood, to let it soak through my clothes, to be conspicuous about the fact that I am bleeding...

Watching the light leave the duck's eyes was another beautiful event...you could almost tell the moment of death just by watching the eyes...one minute they would be light and alive, the next, you could already see them glazing over in death. "The soul leaving the body" George would say.

Love is what motivated me to kill...love and the desire to see an end of factory farms. If we can all learn to kill our own ducks, our own meat, to be responsible for our own food; what better way to show love then this?

The other day, while walking in the woods with my friend Ian, I was ranting and raving about things I'd been reading about in the book Endgame. I'd read that the Navy does tests with sound waves under the ocean; where the sound is turned up to such high volumes, it literally causes ocean creatures to die; whales' eardrums burst, animals go crazy and beach themselves in response to the sound. When I read things like that, I get very angry, I was telling Ian how angry I get and he said "what motivates that anger?"

"What?" I said, not really understanding.

"Well, I ask, because my anger is motivated by love...."

I think that says it all...love is a great motivator; sometimes it motivates us to pick up the knife (or sword, or gun, or Molotov cocktail,) and cause temporary pain in order to suppress larger and greater pain (the pain I caused that duck today was minuscule compared with the pain caused to ducks raised on a factory farm,) and other times, it motivates us to grab the person (tree, pet, animal,) next to us and squeeze them close with all of our might...

May we all love with the passion of poets,

Love ya,
Carrot

ps. I've been asking all of my friends lately which historic figure they'd chose for a lover, given the choice. I'd love to hear what historic figure some of you have had crushes on. Mine was always on the dashing (find a picture of him, he's really hot,) Jack London.

Historic figures some of my friends think would make good lovers...

1) Jack London; the daredevil anarchist who traveled the arctic and wrote an amazing anti-prison book about solitary confinement.

2) Emma Goldman; influential anarchist and writer.

3) Harriet Tubman; former slave who lead hundreds of slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

4) Isabelle Eberhardt; daredevil, writer, anarchist, gender bender, all around wild girl!

5) Frida Kahlo, the famous Mexican painter.

6) Walt Whitman; author of Leaves of the Grass...