Huffington Magazine Issue 66 | Page 32

Voices I am never more than a thought or two away from remembering that I kill for a living. Over the years, more or less, I have been able to hold onto my discomfort, my uncertainty, my anxiety about raising animals to be killed. I have maintained, to some degree, that little boy’s visceral sense of tragedy in the face of death, at the sight, for example, of a little robin gasping its last breaths as blood pulsed out of the BB gun hole in its throat while my friend Joe, who had shot it, watched and spoke about it with an exaggerated sense of bravura as the small bird died. Nevertheless, over the course of the last year or two, something fundamental changed, gradually, and almost imperceptibly. A number of years ago, when Izzy the Goat died, more or less in my arms, I bawled hysterically. I felt her death in the deepest parts of me. But, then, as the number of animals increased on the farm, I loaded more and more of them onto the livestock trailer for the trip to the slaughterhouse, and first one and then another would occasionally die on the farm, of old age, of disease, of troubled birth. I have dragged the bod- BOB COMIS HUFFINGTON 09.15.13 ies of full-grown ewes and 100 lb. pigs into the bucket on the tractor and buried them in the compost. I have picked up dead newborn lambs, limp, and still slimy and warm, wrapped them in some hay, and dropped them in the wheelbarrow to also be buried in the compost. More than that, I have used a gun, though only once, to end the suffering of two lambs that were in A number of years ago, when Izzy the Goat died, more or less in my arms, I bawled hysterically. I felt her death in the deepest parts of me.” the violent throes of what I was convinced was tetanus, which would have slowly, painfully, and viciously killed them over the course of a few days. The bright red blood oozing out of the holes in their heads onto the dark brown ground is emblazoned on my mind and the thunder of the shots still rings in my ears. All of this death and dying still confronts me as a challenge. But, and this is an important but, my relationship to it has changed. I