February/March 2007
By Bryan Welch
I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should raise their own meat. But it’s perverse, isn’t it, that many people in our society seem to consider it more civilized to eat animals they don’t know? Meanwhile, industrial agriculture treats meat animals as nothing more than cogs in the machine, without regard for their happiness or basic well-being.
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From the time I could walk, I was invited to help my relatives care for their livestock. I was about 10 when a neighbor hired me to milk his goats and feed his rabbits. I took to it. I enjoyed the animals and I enjoyed the people. I found that people who shared their lives with livestock were, on the whole, caring but not sentimental.
There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the lives of the animals, and that we should provide as much simple comfort and dignity to our fellow creatures as we can. After all, aren’t simple comfort and dignity among the most important things we wish for ourselves and our children?
So we’re careful, on our little farm, to let the animals live in ways that seem natural to them. None of our creatures lives alone. For any social animal, to be alone is the worst thing. All of them have access, every day of the year, to natural food and clean water. They reproduce just as they were created to reproduce. They live their lives on healthy, familiar pastures where they feel secure. When we handle them, we handle them as gently as possible. When we can’t be gentle, we try to be quick.
Even though I’m proud of the happy, healthy lives we give our animals, I feel a profound twinge of sadness as I watch them grazing in the colorful autumn grass. But it’s a feeling I want to embrace, rather than avoid. It’s the sadness associated with life’s astonishing richness and vitality. It’s the sadness associated with mortality. It’s the sadness we feel as we consider our own impermanence and the impermanence of everything on this planet, everything mortal we hold dear, the sadness that makes life poignant and sweet.
It’s sad when animals I know well and care for reach the end of their lives. But it would be far worse if I didn’t feel this profound connection, this profound gratitude, this profound mortality.
