The Harvest, the Kill

Transcription

1 The Harvest, the Kill Jane Rule I live among vegetarians of various persuasions and moral meat eaters; therefore when I have guests for dinner I pay rather more attention to the nature of food than I would, left to my own imagination. The vegetarians who don t eat meat because they believe it to be polluted with cancer-causing hormones or because they identify their sensitive digestive tracts with herbivore ancestors are just cautious folk similar to those who cross the street only at the corner with perhaps a hint of the superstition found in those who don t walk under ladders. They are simply taking special care of their lives without further moral deliberation. Those who don t eat meat because they don t approve of killing aren t as easy for me to understand. Yesterday, as I pried live scallops from their beautiful, fragile shells and saw them still pulsing in the bowl, ready to cook for friends for whom food from the sea is acceptable, it felt to me no less absolute an act of killing than chopping off the head of a chicken. But I also know in the vegetable garden that I rip carrots untimely from their row. The fact that they don t twitch or run around without their heads doesn t make them less alive. Like me, they have grown from seed and have their own natural life span which I have interrupted. It is hard for me to be hierarchical about the aliveness of living things. There are two vegetarian arguments that bear some guilty weight for me. The first is the number of acres it takes to feed beef cattle as compared to the number of acres it takes to feed vegetation. If there ever were a large plan to change our basic agriculture in order to feed everyone more equably, I would support it and give up eating beef, but until then my not eating beef is of no more help than my eating my childhood dinner was to the starving Armenians. The second is mistreatment of animals raised for slaughter. To eat what has not been a free-ranging animal is to condone the abuse of animals. Again, given the opportunity to support laws for more humane treatment of the creatures we eventually eat, I would do so, but I probably wouldn t go so far as to approve of chickens so happy in life that they were tough for my table The Harvest, The Kill from A Hot-Eyed Moderate by Jane Rule. Copyright 1985 by Jane Rule. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the Estate of Jane Rule.

2 The moral meat eaters are those who believe that we shouldn t eat what we haven t killed ourselves, either gone to the trouble of stalking it down or raising it, so that we have proper respect for the creatures sacrificed for our benefit. I am more at home with that view because my childhood summers were rural. By the time I was seven or eight, I had done my share of fishing and hunting, and I d been taught also to clean my catch or kill. I never shot anything larger than a pigeon or rabbit. That I was allowed to use a gun at all was the result of a remarkably indulgent father. He never took me deer hunting, not because I was a girl but because he couldn t bear to shoot them himself. But we ate venison brought to us by other men in the family. I don t remember much being made of the sacredness of the life we took, but there was a real emphasis on fair play, much of it codified in law, like shooting game birds only on the wing, like not hunting deer with flashlights at night, like not shooting does. But my kinfolk frowned on bait fishing as well. They were sportsmen who retained the wilderness ethic of not killing more than they could use. Strictly speaking, we did not need the food. (We could get meat in a town ten miles down the road.) But we did eat it. Over the years, I became citified. I still could and did put live lobsters and crab in boiling water, but meat came from the meat market. Now that I live in the country again, I am much more aware of the slaughter that goes on around me, for I not only eat venison from the local hunt but have known the lamb and kid on the hoof (even in my rhododendrons, which is good for neither them nor the rhododendrons) which I eat. The killers of the animals are my moral, meat-eating neighbors. I have never killed a large animal, and I hope I never have to, though I m not particularly tenderhearted about creatures not human. I find it hard to confront the struggle, smell, and mess of slaughter. I simply haven t the stomach for it. But, if I had to do it or go without meat, I would learn how. It s puzzling to me that cannibalism is a fascinating abomination to vegetarian and meat eater alike, a habit claimed by only the most vicious and primitive tribes. We are scandalized by stories of the Donner Party or rumors of cannibalism at the site of a small plane crash in the wilderness, a boat lost at sea. Yet why would it be so horrifying for survivors to feed on the flesh of those who have died? Have worms and buzzards more right to the carcass? We apparently do not think of ourselves as part of the food chain, except by cruel and exceptional accident. Our flesh, like the cow in India, is sacred and taboo, thought of as violated even when it is consigned to a

3 mass grave. We bury it to hide a truth that still must be obvious to us, that as we eat so are we eaten. Why the lowly maggot is given the privilege (or sometimes the fish or the vulture) denied other living creatures is a complex puzzle of hygiene, myth and morality in each culture. Our denial that we are part of nature, our sense of superiority to it, is our basic trouble. Though we are not, as the producers of margarine would make us believe, what we eat, we are related to what we harvest and kill. If being a vegetarian or a moral meat eater is a habit to remind us of that responsibility, neither is to be disrespected. When habit becomes a taboo, it blinds us to the real meaning. We are also related to each other, but our general refusal to eat our own flesh has not stopped us from slaughtering each other in large and totally wasted numbers. I am flesh, a flesh eater, whether the food is carrot or cow. Harvesting and killing are the same activity, the interrupting of one life cycle for the sake of another. We don t stop at eating either. We kill to keep warm. We kill for shelter. Back there in my rural childhood, I had not only a fishing rod and rifle, I had a hatchet, too. I cleared brush, cut down small trees, chopped wood. I was present at the felling of a two-thousand-year-old redwood tree, whose impact shook the earth I stood on. It was a death more simply shocking to me than any other I ve ever witnessed. The house I lived in then was made of redwood. The house I live in now is cedar. My ashes may nourish the roots of a living tree, pitifully small compensation for the nearly immeasurable acres I have laid waste for my needs and pleasures, even for my work. For such omnivorous creatures as we are, a few frugal habits are not enough. We have to feed and midwife more than we slaughter, replant more than we harvest, if not with our hands, then with our own talents to see that it is done in our name, that we own to it. The scallop shells will be finely cleaned by raccoons, then made by a neighbor into wind chimes, which may trouble my sleep and probably should until it is time for my own bones to sing Notes and Definitions Jane Rule ( ) grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey. She moved to British Columbia in 1956 and began to write lesbian-themed fiction. Her books include Desert of the Heart (1964), later made into the movie Desert Hearts (1985); This Is Not for You (1970); The Young in One Another s

4 Arms (1977); and A Hot-Eyed Moderate (1985). Rule received the Order of Canada in 2007 in a ceremony held, at her request, on Galiano Island, where she had lived for more than 30 years. herbivore: creature that eats only plants. (para. 2) deliberation: thought, consideration. (para. 2) untimely: before they are fully grown. (para. 3) hierarchical: organized in order of rank or importance. (para. 3) equably: evenly, fairly. (para. 4) condone: forgive, excuse. (para. 4) indulgent: the opposite of strict. (para. 6) venison: deer meat. (para. 6) codified: written down as rules or laws. (para. 7) does: female deer. (para. 7) rhododendrons: large, flowering bushes common in B.C. gardens. (para. 8) taboo: forbidden. (para. 10) violated: abused, dishonoured. (para. 10) consigned: delivered, handed over to. (para. 10) omnivorous: creatures that eat both animals and plants. (para. 14) frugal: saving, conserving. (para. 14) midwife: assist in the birth of animals. (para. 14) Structure and Technique In this discussion of vegetarianism, Jane Rule alternates between the personal, particularly her childhood, and the philosophical. By personalizing her discussion of a contentious subject, she makes the origins of her own position clear. Her essay is more persuasive than argumentative, in that it relies on a strong appeal to our emotions. Rule begins by dividing her dinner guests into vegetarians and moral meat eaters. She uses paragraphs 2 through 4 to discuss the various motivations for vegetarians and her response to those motivations. She then goes

5 on in paragraphs 5 through 7 to discuss the moral meat eaters and to place herself in this camp. She waits until paragraph 6 of the article to reveal her own position. By adding cannibalism to the discussion (paragraph 9), Rule adds a deliberately shocking element to the piece. Topics for Discussion and Writing 1. What are the two vegetarian arguments presented in paragraph 4? Do they appeal to the intellect or to the emotions? Do you find either of these arguments persuasive? Why is Rule not a vegetarian herself? 2. What is a moral meat eater? Does Rule herself fit into this category? 3. What childhood experiences contributed to Rule s adult views about the morality of harvesting and killing? 4. According to Rule, why is there such a strong taboo on cannibalism? (See paragraphs 9 through 11.) 5. According to Rule, what do humans deny about themselves that leads to an absence of responsibility for the natural world? How does she relate this denial to burial rituals? 6. Paragraphs 12 through 14 illustrate how we exploit nature, consuming far more than we return. What, according to Rule, do we need to acknowledge before we can correct this imbalance? 7. Write an essay persuading the reader to adopt (or give up) a vegetarian lifestyle. Appeal to your reader s intellect and emotions in your attempt to convince the reader to give up (or eat) meat. 8. Do you agree or disagree with the contention that wearing fur or leather clothing is a violation of animal rights? Write an essay in which you convince your reader of the reasonableness of your opinion.

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