Huffington Magazine Issue 66 | Page 33

OMER SUKRU GOKSU/GETTY IMAGES Voices still care, but I no longer feel it in my bones. I feel as if that deep, moving connection has been severed by the degree to which I need to dissociate myself from what I am seeing, doing, and experiencing in order to live through these often bloody, can-never-go-back moments. I have, as much as I hoped it would never happen, become inured by the sheer number of these disassociations, even if only slightly, to death and dying. The day I loaded the first two pigs I had raised, whom I had named Breakfast and Dinner to continually remind myself of their purpose, onto the trailer on a bone chillingly frigid February morning with my friend Zach helping me out, I noted my sadness, I noted my apprehension, I noted my sense of loss and longing, and declared that no matter what happened in my farming life, no matter how long I worked at it, no matter how many animals I had killed, killed myself, watched die, and found dead, I would never ever lose my lifelong sense of the transgression of the sanctity of life inherent in my actions. However, in spite of the strength of this desire, the dayto-day reality of livestock farming BOB COMIS has changed me. After taking part in the deaths of nearly 2,000 animals, death has become a shadow of what it once was to me. I now occasionally find myself meeting it with indifference, and even, once or twice, disdain. I have become, to put it bluntly, a killer, something I hoped to never be regardless of the fact that I kill for a living. Bob Comis is a writer and principal farmer at Stony Brook Farm in New York. HUFFINGTON 09.15.13 Throughout the years, Bob Comis has only used a gun once, and it was to end the suffering of two lambs.