https://theamericanscholar.org/loving-animals-to-death/
Bob Comis of Stony Brook Farm is a professional pig farmer—the good kind. Comis knows his pigs, loves his pigs, and treats his pigs with uncommon dignity. His animals live in an impossibly bucolic setting and “as close to natural as possible.” They are, he writes, so piggy that they are Plato’s pig, “the ideal form of the pig.” Comis’s pastures, in Schoharie, New York, are playgrounds of porcine fun: “they root, they lounge, they narf, they eat, they forage, they sleep, they wallow, they bask, they run, they play.” And when the fateful day of deliverance arrives, “they die unconsciously, without pain or suffering.”
Comis’s patrons—educated eaters with an interest in humanely harvested meat—are understandably eager to fill their forks with Comis’s pork. To them, Comis represents a new breed of agrarian maverick intent on bucking an agricultural-industrial system so bloated that a single company—Smithfield Foods—produces six billion pounds of pork a year. Comis provides a welcome alternative to this industrial model, and if the reform-minded Food Movement has its way, one day all meat will be humanely raised and locally sourced for the “conscientious carnivore.”
Except for one problem: Comis the humane pig farmer believes that what he does for a living is wrong. Morally wrong. “As a pig farmer, I lead an unethical life,” he wrote recently on The Huffington Post. He’s acutely aware that he “might indeed be a very bad person for killing animals for a living.” Comis’s essential objection to his line of work is that he slaughters sentient and emotionally sophisticated beings. His self-assessment on this score is unambiguous. His life is one that’s “shrouded in the justificatory trappings of social acceptance.” To those who want their righteous pork chop, he asserts that “I am a slaveholder and a murderer” and that “what I do is wrong.” Even if “I cannot yet act on it,” he concludes, “I know it in my bones.”
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We had read Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds, a graphic look into the workings of an industrial slaughterhouse. In our discussion, one student—an elaborately tattooed Iraqi war veteran, Purple Heart, competitive weight lifter, and active Texas rancher—told his classmates, all of whom were disgusted by what they’d read, that there was a better way. There was, he insisted, an entirely different way to go about treating cattle. My colleague and I asked this student—let’s call him Mike—if he’d be willing to open the next class by describing how he handles slaughtering cattle on his family’s ranch, where they kill two cows a year for personal consumption. He generously agreed.
Mike began by explaining how horrified he was by Pachirat’s description of the way that the industrial operation’s cattle were treated. He was visibly angered. His hands were balled in fists. Having grown up around cattle and admitting that “I have this special thing for cows,” even more than his dogs, he said that slaughtering his animals with dignity was of the utmost importance. Mike described how his family cared for the calves, nurtured maternal bonds, made sure that the animals had access to open pasture during nice weather and shelter from storms, monitored feed, never had to administer antibiotics or vaccines, and showered the animals with physical affection. Lots of scratches and rubs. And then he took a deep breath, looked at the class with icy blue eyes, and began to explain how, to kill the cow humanely, you had to create a quiet atmosphere, make sure the knife was sharp, gather the whole family around, and … and then he paused. He looked shocked for a second as his voice caught in his throat. His eyes darted around the room at his fellow students, who were dead silent. He took another deep breath and began to talk about severing the spinal cord. And then he was overcome. I sensed that a cathartic moment was coming and so looked hard at his eyes as they began to fill up with tears. The only thing I remember thinking was that this rancher is seeking a new path that nobody is providing. And that there’s no way he is alone.
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