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.