Killing

Our Divine Right

Man at his best cares about all life Man at his worst wants to kill it

Every now and then, the long and often sandy beach I walk along each morning is peopled by killers, poking the sands for mussels with their long, killing sticks. Were I not a Buddhist I would carry a gun, I think, and kill the bastards.

Yes, I know, that’s not very Buddhist of me, but it does get to me, this human hubris: We are the Lords of all earthly creatures, to kill and eat (or just for pleasant sport) as we see fit. Beyond horrible, that’s my take.

That said, I grew up in a northern Sweden meat (and fish) and potato home. As a child, you don’t question what your mom (who, incidentally is an amazing cook) puts in front of you, you pick up knife and fork and dig in.

You never question where the meat or fish comes from because it isn’t meat of fish it’s food.

This, even though late one November morning I watched a traveling butcher kill a large pig (the butcher visited farms that had some animal or other to slaughter, as it were).

I think the pig knew the game was up because he was not very interested in getting to know the butcher up-close and personal, no matter how much the farmer pulled and pulled and pulled the pig’s leash (the large, heavy and obstinate animal put up good resistance). Finally, a fair enough compromise was struck, and the butcher did the final approaching, while the farmer held the pig’s head still — and whispered into pig ear not to worry for everything was going to be all right (for the farmer, that is).

An odd-looking gun, that butcher gun; short nozzle. The butcher put it to the pig’s forehead and without as much as a “how do you do” pulled the trigger. Not much of a bang, but the pig’s legs gave out on the spot and he hit the ground — right side up — in seconds.

At which the butcher took out a long, thin, flexible stick and probed the tunnel bored by the killer bullet. Don’t know why he did. The stick reached into that pig head more than a foot or so. The butcher moved the stick in and out a few times as if to clear the channel and then put it aside. Still don’t know why this stick business.

This killing didn’t affect me much (I was probably eleven or twelve). More than anything, I found it fascinating. And it didn’t affect me when a day later one quarter of this pig appeared in our house, put in an unheated room next to our kitchen we called “the sheet metal chamber” because that’s what constituted the floor. And there, parked on a table against the northern wall in this cold room lay one fourth of recently dead pig, wrapped in plastic.

The same butcher (or another, I don’t remember) appeared a day later and knifed this quarter pig up into recognizable cuts, the biggest of which was to become our Christmas ham this year. A lot of the rest would become thick bacon (we didn’t eat the thin, crispy U.S. variety at that time).

This quarter-pig, especially the Christmas part, was utterly delicious (mostly thanks to Mom the Wonder Cook).

Fast forward many years and I hear George Bernard Shaw say, “I don’t eat meat. Animals are my friends. I don’t eat my friends.” Then he adds, “The only downside to being vegetarian is that it won’t let you die.” I think Shaw was ninety-odd years old at the time.

I turned vegan in 1984, coming up on forty years soon. Yes, I cheat on the rare occasion — mostly dairy-wise (as in cheese) — but more and more seldom these days.

In the fall of 1984, a fresh and somewhat militant vegan and not keeping quiet about it, I’m at a corporate dinner, probing my salad opposite a Texan friend who is attacking a T-Bone steak the size of a small table.

“Did you know,” I offer between mouthfuls of green, “that you can feed seven times as many people per acre if they’d eat the grown grain directly rather than eating the animals fed by the same grain?”

“Is that so?”

“Yup.”

He thought about that for a few seconds then put his fork down and, looking straight at me, smiled and said, “It’s great to be an American, isn’t it?”

How do you not laugh at that? So I did.

I’m not militant anymore. I eat my vegan fare and I chew it well. Still, it irks the hell out of me to see those who assume the right to kill those who have done nothing to offend or threaten them at their killing whim and pleasure.

I don’t care what the Bible says.

© Wolfstuff