birds to prey

So much has happened the last three weeks it's hard to know where to begin. But I'll start with a most intense experience.

I helped butcher a turkey. not just any turkey; we called him Papa Turkey. He and Mama were the only two turkeys in a yard of twenty chickens. He dominated. He butted and bit hens and roosters out of the way when he was hungry; he even scared many humans away by biting them. With animals of many sorts and sizes, you can show your dominance over them or submission to them by the way you act. Same with turkeys. I didn't let Papa push me around; it just didn't seem right because he was only fifteen pounds perhaps. So I grabbed him a couple times and sat on him. That made our relationship clear.

He was a very entertaining piece of the chicken yard. He would keep his distance from me, but would stay close enough, eyeing me and making hushed, dissatisfied expressions, like he wanted me out. Who wants to be dominated on one's own turf? So he felt, I presume. Sometimes he would mount a hen (yes a hen!) to show his dominance to me. He had grown up here over several years, so some of the EcoVersity staff were sad to see him go. Papa Turkey was a jerk, and he even made some people bleed, but I miss him now that he's gone.

(warning: this paragraph contains explicitly bloody content) One warm Wednesday afternoon during the two weeks of Land and Garden, our teacher Joel quietly went into the chicken pen, grabbed Papa Turkey, and tied a length of plastic twine around his feet. He picked up and brought Papa to us. We stroked him and said goodbye. We all followed Joel a hundred feet, through the outdoor kitchen, to a stump in an open patch of land. Wasting no time, Joel held out Papa's neck on the stump, Jenny (a fellow classmate of mine) held his wings, and I held his feet. The others stood closely and watched. Holding Papa Turkey's neck out straight with a piece of wood, Joel brought the hatchet down deliberately and severed his neck. Papa fluttered his eyes and mouth, his wings flapped like wild, and the blood spurted in all directions. With his wings still beating, Joel picked headless Papa up and hung him from a hook to drain the rest of the blood (so I guess chickens really do run with their heads cut off). Then we scalded the body in a pot of boiling water so we could pluck out his feathers easily. After that Joel went to work, taking out all his insides. We started wide eyed and helped a little. We saved the heart, liver, and kidneys (which make giblet, a diced stew which sounds disgusting and tastes great), and buried the other organs and the head. Then we hung the corpse in a cool, dry room for a day, cut out the muscles the next day, and boiled the skeleton for a turkey broth. All that remains of Papa now is a couple ziplocs of meat in the freezer.

I was a vegetarian for three years until last fall, at which point I traveled to western Europe with my brother. There I felt it necessary to eat meat in order to eat well (many restaurants had few veggie options) and to experience local cuisine more fully. Since then I have been eating meat from time to time. When the option of butchering Papa Turkey came up, I felt a lot of fear. At the same time, though, I wanted to do it. For all the meat I had eaten up until then, I had never known what the animal was like; its living conditions; how it died. Usually I didn't even know where the meat came from. So I wanted to see if I could help take care of an animal, kill it, and eat it, and see how I felt.

I felt bewildered for a couple days after the butchering. While we were doing it, I was shaking a bit, and I was quite nervous right up until the chop. Everything felt so intense, and I wasn't quite sure what to think. Afterward, all the intensity of the experience sunk in, and that night the image of Papa Turkey's face right after the chop kept circling in my mind. It took a couple days for that to pass, and then another week or two to fully understand my feelings.

The feeling is different than I expected. I thought I would be sick to my stomach by chewing a piece of Papa Turkey, but I actually feel okay. In fact, I feel much better eating his meat than any old chicken breast or steak from the store. I feel connected to what I'm eating. And instead of feeling confused about the meat on my plate, I feel appreciative. No, I feel downright grateful - that this animal died for my well being.

Who would have thought that EcoVersity would make me a righteous carnivore?