I raise sheep. I feed them, provide them with shelter, care for them when they’re sick, and protect them from predators. I stay up nights during lambing season, checking on the ewes, pacing and hoping labor and delivery will go smoothly. I name all of the baby lambs. I love and nurture their growth and recognize each individual in the flock.
And yes, I eat them. These are my food.
“How do you DO that?” I’m often asked. This is my attempt to answer that question. I am proud of what I do, and it bothers me that nearly every person who asks me “do you eat them?” does it in a whisper. Why are we so ashamed of being meat eaters? And if it’s so awful, why do we do it? I don’t know, and I often wonder why we as a society act as we do. But this is my (first) attempt to answer why I personally have made the choice to raise my own animals (and vegetables and fruits and nuts and whatever else I can!) for food.
I was a vegetarian for quite a while when I was young(er). When I first realized that those packages in the freezer, and those delicious meals, were produced by killing animals, I was shocked. I thought eating cute and cuddly animals was evil, and that farmers who raised such animals with the intent of eating them must be cruel heartless monsters. But still, deep down it always seemed to me that eating meat was a normal and natural thing that humans were supposed to do, much like other animals that naturally eat meat. It would seem unnatural, to me, to put my dog or cat on a vegetarian diet! While being a vegetarian eased my conscience, it still didn’t seem right to me.
So I investigated our food production system to find out how these nicely shrink wrapped packages wound up on the shelves of the supermarket. I learned all about the sickening and abhorrent large scale factory farming techniques that are used to feed our unsustainably large human population. I was thoroughly disgusted. What ever happened to “Little House on the Prairie,” I thought? It’s not supposed to be this way! What happened to the happy image of the family cow grazing while chickens scratch around the yard and the pig relaxes in his mudbath, all framed by the big red barn and the waving corn and wheat fields in the background? That’s where meat and milk and eggs and FOOD is supposed to come from! But who does that these days? I’d never seen such a thing, except in books, television, and the field trip to the local historical re-enactment village.
My childhood was spent in what I would now call suburbia. I wasn’t a city girl, and I wasn’t a country girl. I didn’t know much about either urban life or rural life. I was poised to be an average American. Today, this thought completely horrifies me. Television, and most media, disgust me almost as much as the horrible large scale farming practices do. Our modern lives are filled with violent blood and guts images, whether broadcast as news or entertainment. Wars, gangs, crime, human-to-human evils, and even human-to-animal cruelties, are shown to anyone who wants to look, in the name of “keeping it real.” But try to show people how the meats that they eat every day are raised and processed - REALITY - and they are shocked and disgusted. And I’m not even talking about the methods used on the big factory farms, which I find personally disgusting, and which I think everyone SHOULD see! Witnessing ‘a day in the life’ of those shrink wrapped packages of meat you get at the grocery store would be an eye-opener for many.
Large scale meat factories are sickening to me. The thought of buying that slick generic package of ‘93% lean ground beef’ in the grocery store really grosses me out these days, when I KNOW that it could contain bits of meat from as many as 400 different cows. And who knows what those cows were fed or how they were cared for during their lives! I want to know all of my food, not just my vegetable garden. The amount and type of nutrients and care that go into my animals - my meat - is just as important to me as the amount and type of nutrients and care that go into my vegetable garden, and my fruit and nut trees. And ultimately into me and my family.
But it seems most people don’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss. I think it is tremendously sad that most meat-eating people would object to seeing how small farmers raise and process their animals into meat products for human consumption, broadcast on their television. We’ve raised a generation (generations?) of people that are disgusted at the image of the mundane, needed task of preparing their food. Take a domestically raised animal - raised from birth to be food for humans - and show it being humanely killed and processed into food and other products we use every day - and the fact that this is truly REAL does not seem to matter. People are disgusted. But they will still go buy their shrink wrapped meat products and happily consume them while doing their best to remain ignorant of how that package got to that shelf. And so factory farming thrives, and the smaller, holistic farmers disappear.
I always dreamed of someday finding that little idyllic farm, producing my own food and living in harmony with the land. All I needed to do was two things: find a nice chunk of land that I could afford, and get rid of the television. And I did. The idyllic vision is not quite realized yet, and probably never will be quite so idyllic. That’s reality. Life never quite happens the way we plan for it to happen, but to me, life has been blissful ever since those first two things were accomplished - even when it’s a struggle. I have a beautiful flock of sheep. I love them, and yes I eat them. I’ve had chickens and goats and llamas, vegetables and fruits and nuts, and years of happiness on my little farmstead. Every day I learn a little bit more, and every day I am thankful to be here, living this reality.
