On Violence and Living

Note: Portions of this post contain graphic descriptions related to birth and death.

My boss is a self-described violent communicator. He speaks loudly and passionately about everything from the importance of the global sustainable food movement to the proper usage of hoses (which, as anyone who’s ever tried to use a hose in a greenhouse will know, is actually not a crazy thing to go crazy about – hoses can be really dangerous to a burgeoning garden bed). In the fall, he attended a workshop on “somatic nonviolent communication” and shared with the group that his interest in violence is what led him to the workshop in the first place. His apparent violence stems, I think, from an underlying ardor for living an examined life. He points to the violence in the natural world.

Birth, Freud’s original trauma, is an almost universally violent event. I don’t think I need to go into the details of mammalian birth (which is good, because my most direct knowledge of it is from the movie Milo and Otis, which has a birth scene probably too graphic for 5 year-old cat and dog enthusiasts, or you know, most 5 year-olds). Though it has been on my mind lately. In early February, we had two cows give birth, far earlier than anticipated. The first birth, took place while I was away from the farm and involved heroic efforts to bring the calf and its mother in from the field, the single digit temperatures, and the blowing wind. The calf made it to the barn, the mother spooked and bolted, and the calf died from exposure an hour and a half later. For days, the mother, in the pasture across the street, lowed plaintively to the barn, a bovine lacrimosa. The second calf was found dead, frozen to the ground, a few days later. I carried it away in a child’s sled over the snow, and going down a hill, the still form overtook me and slid away, a macabre moment of excitement come too late.

We stored the frozen bodies with plans to skin them, to salvage something beautiful from something tragic. And a few weeks later when it came time to skin, one hide was unusable, chewed through by rats. The other animal was hung from a hook in the way of a slaughterhouse, legs fully extended and head facing the ground. I was uninvolved in the actual skinning, but the denuded, skinned carcass intrigued me after the fact. Fully exposed, stretched out, rib bones riveting the breast muscles, this calf was almost human. Its head, free from the trappings of its usual calf fur, transfixed me. Some brief spark of universality passed through my mind – the anatomical, phylogenetic connection laid plain. We are animals, after all.

I think back to the turkeys we slaughtered in November. An ice pick pierced through the roof of their mouth, straight into their brains, rendered them immediately dead. Brain dead, at the very least. The simple nervous systems of birds, such as turkeys and chickens, are decentralized, unlike in humans. The body continues to function without the brain – wings flap, legs sprint, the neck will crane the head up, and you feel like Thomas the doubter as you see their eyes gazing at you. I am dead. You have killed me. I am here, still.

Some friends, some visitors often respond with great sympathy, horror, perhaps some mix, when I tell them about these darker sides of farming. Mary, the veal calf I fed milk to daily since its birth, went off to the big house some weeks ago, and she’s been the recipient of many postpartum condolences. Some people will decline to eat our meat after seeing the farm – “how can I eat the same pig I met?” We blindly wish for our food to be anonymous. We don’t want to understand that our food was once living. But one of the great sadnesses, or perhaps wonders, of life is that it cannot propagate without death. In order to live, you must kill, at least indirectly. Cut meat out of your diet, and you still devour acres of once living plants to nourish your own life. Violence is inherent to existence. Is violence bad?

The honeybee survives on honey, a nutritious, energy-dense food transformed from the nectar of flowers. In the process of collecting this nectar, bees unwittingly collect and spread pollen, allowing for widespread germination of plant life. Bees do not kill. Bees do not even harm the flowers they harvest nectar from. Their industrious endeavors benefit all organisms they interact with, and the fruit of their labor is delicious, nutritious, and irreproducible. Look to the honeybee.

The mosquito species survives because of blood. Though they normally feed on nectar (without spreading pollen), the females need the protein blood provides in order to lay eggs. Bloodsuckers, parasites, they carry disease and give nothing back to the environment. They themselves are not a significant part of any other organism’s diet. A recent article in Nature cites that over 247 million people are infected by Malaria yearly. The article argued that the eradication of mosquitoes from the food chain would have no ill effects. Look to the mosquito.

What hubris, though, to play God, and declare “The world has no need for this creature! We will destroy it completely!”

Dom is no religious zealot, but in our kitchen he has fixed a biblical quote, in large print, to the bulletin board: Genesis 3:19, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out it was thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Spend enough time trying to grow food and you realize the glory of the carbon cycle. The divinity of nature. To say everything is connected is not abstraction. What is alive will die, and what is dead will give life, and to call that violent, with all its iniquitous connotations seems to me the greater violence.