I was quite shocked when visitors walked out of the Boxing Day dinner because I asked my neighbour to come around with his rifle and shoot the fox that happened into the trap we set after some of chickens and a duck went missing.   I was shocked because this side of the family, while not country folk, aren’t as ignorant as most urban folk are either.   They come down to Devon three or four times a year to stay on their family’s hobby farm and aren’t entirely unaccustomed to the cycle of life.  But then you forget even how many hobby farmers and other country folk live in that same wonderful bubble that many of their urbane friends live in where you never have to look your meat in the eyes.  Indeed, it is a sign of the opulence or our age that most people get through a good portion of their lives without ever experiencing death of any sort until it suddenly hits them like the proverbial steam train.  When this steam train hits, it hard because it unexpected.

Humans are animals.  Unique in our ability to think ourselves separately from our corporeal existence, we are still driven by the same desires and primary motivators as any other beast.  Like all animals we exist on this planet and compete for its resources.  There is nothing we can eat, no where we can tread, and nowhere we can sleep without taking those resources from another living thing.   When we build a city, we build it over rivers and streams and fields and forests.  When we eat a vegetable it is grown in a field that has to be kept free of rabbits and moles and voles and insects.   When we store food, we have to ensure that rats and mice and cock roaches do not contaminate them.

We can debate the rights or wrongs of our existance, our consumerism,  and our love of meat but even a vegan living on a permaculture can only do so by taking that land from other people and other animals.  While we are debating the rights and wrongs of killing animals, we still have to keep rats and mice from our kitchens and foxes from our livestock.  We still have to kill flies,  midges,  and poorly situated hives.  If we want we can keep our heads in the sand and let our local councils kill the urban pests, and farmers kill the rural ones, condemning them both from the smugness of our couch.  Alternatively, we can go the route of the Pollyanna and trap a mouse in your kitchen, drive out to the “countryside” and release it there where, alone and in a totally foreign environment it will become an easy target to birds of prey or will just starve to death.

But The Art of Being Human is too avoid moral cowardice and embrace all aspects of life, even death.  It is for this reason that I haven’t shied away from raising birds for meat and it is for this reason that I don’t shy away from controlling my pests myself (although I must admit to shying away from buy a rifle simply because of the costs and paperwork involved).  I am not saying that everyone should go out and shoot a fox or raise their own chickens, but not confronting the reality of our existence is to avoid the very nature of our existence.

Pest control and killing for meat is a dispassionate affair.  There is nothing personal or vengeful about it,  it is simply taking part in the circle of life.  I like to think that taking part in the circle life in this way will also help to prepare me for the death of friends and loved that stalks all of us.  Death is as much as part of living and life is, and as long as we hide behind moral cowardice we deny ourself one of the most vital aspects of life.

The Early Purges

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.

‘Sure, isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.

Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:

‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Seamus Heaney
(from: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-early-purges/)