Farming Animals for Slaughter

Today we are tagging and emasculating calves.

Strange for a buddhist farmer. A pragmatic decision.

The moment when I realised that I wanted to stop farming animals commercially is still very clear in my memory.

We farm. Part of our farm is raising cattle for slaughter. Even when we ran the dairy the ultimate fate of our goats was slaughter. The ultimate fate of almost any animal in a production setting (meat, milk, eggs, wool) is slaughter. It is simple accounting. Farm animals are only productive during the prime of their life - when they are growing and reproducing. After that they become a cost with no income. They are either sold to slaughter, or they are simply killed. They do not retire to live out their days.

In some circumstances they do not even get a short life. Our dairy operation systematically killed almost all of our male kids at birth. We did raise the males for meat for a couple of years but there was no real commercial market. At sale we earned less than 20% of what it cost us to raise them.

So why did I want to stop? One of the key aspects of 'appropriate livelihood', which is one of the key steps in the Eightfold Path, is to refrain from raising animals for slaughter. 'Appropriate livelihood' was certainly an important consideration.

However, it was much more than that. I came to farming partly to address my disquiet with the way western agriculture was separating people from their food. As a result people are increasingly isolated from the inevitable ethical decisions that are made in the food production process. I did not like a lot of the decisions that were being made on my behalf.

Farming was a way of facing those decisions head on. If I was going to eat meat (and even then I was largely vegetarian) then I was going to take responsibility for raising, killing and butchering that meat. It would be done in a way that I thought appropriate. That connection could be shared with everyone who ate our meat.

I spent 12 years confronting my philosophy of ethical meat production with the reality of breeding, raising, killing and butchering animals. In the end I knew that the animals had no desire to be killed, and that the killing was causing a deep undercurrent of suffering in me.

Buddhist philosophy met lived experience. It was really a non-decision.

I wanted to stop, but how to extricate myself from this dilemma - a farm predicated on raising meat; a farmer no longer interested in perpetuating the personal suffering caused by doing so; a family with a heavy investment of time, effort, money and emotion in that farm.

The farm is in transition - more of that some other day. That is the pragmatic part. That is why I am still emasculating and tagging. But I will not kill another animal so that I can eat meat. Soon no animal on our farm will face that fate. No person will be asked to take on that suffering on my behalf.