The Truth About Meat | Life in the Kingdom

My wife and I first got pigs in 2000, shortly after we purchased our land. At the time, Penny was an active vegetarian and I myself was in recovery from a five-year flirtation with a plant-based diet, to which I applied a rather flexible self-determined definition. This meant I ate meat only when I really, really wanted to. Still, my vegetarian-ish habit had culminated in cravings for animal flesh that seemed to grow more insistent with every passing day, until finally the temptation of the shrink-wrapped slabs of beef I eyed at the town grocery overwhelmed my assumption that eating meat was bad, an assumption that suddenly felt terribly fragile and unexamined, anyway.

At the aforementioned store, I began purchasing the poor-quality cuts that fit our budget. Chuck steak was a favorite, along with stew beef and the occasional package of hamburger. Each of these I prepared in precisely the same way, in a frying pan over an open fire, complemented by copious amounts of butter and salt to compensate for the lack of quality. Even so, I ate with gusto, ravenous for the sated feeling of a meat-full belly. For her part, Penny looked on with something akin to horror, due in part, I think, to my caveman-style approach to preparation and consumption, but also to her knowledge of my dinner’s origin. Penny’s journey to vegetarianism had not been based on fragile and unexamined assumptions; she’d done her research and knew well the depravity of the dominant meat industry. And she wanted as little to do with it as possible. But now, with land under our feet, we had options. And this, in short, is how we came to pigs.

The first pigs we got we named Big Girl and Little Girl. Penny had gone to pick up the pigs with a friend, who was also a vegetarian; both were unschooled in the art of pig buying. The farmer, perhaps sensing this unusual opportunity (two vegetarians buying piglets?! Surely it’s happened, and surely it will happen again, but the odds seem long), offered a small discount in exchange for taking the runt of the litter, the soon-to-be-aptly-named Little Girl. Nearly two decades and many piglet purchases later, I’ve come to understand that pigs rarely outgrow their runtiness; a small piglet at birth is likely to be a small pig at slaughter, and because the price of the piglets is only a modest portion of the overall cost of raising them, it makes little sense to bring home a runt, no matter the discount. But Penny and her friend did not know this (to be fair, I wouldn’t have, either), and so Big and Little it was.

I loved those pigs. There’s no other way to put it. I had prepared for them a sturdy A-frame shelter so commodious that when our dairy-farming neighbor, Melvin, saw it, he chuckled and said, “Looks like you built them a pig condo.” I knew he was heckling me, but so long as Big Girl and Little Girl were comfortable, I could take the ribbing. And they were comfortable, which I know because I visited them at least half a dozen times each day, often crawling into the condo with my body blocking the exit so that I might corner them and thus compel them to submit to my belly-scratching advances. It wasn’t long before my new friends would roll onto their sides when I approached, in anticipation of my affections.

Because these were the first animals we’d raised for slaughter, I did not yet know the golden rule, which goes something like this: It’s OK and even good to love an animal you plan to eat, but only if you know how much to love it. Because there is love, and there is love. And the problem was, I came to love Big Girl and Little Girl. I told them stories of my day and even sang them songs, some made up and some quoted from the annals of memory. Quite naturally, my favorite song to sing them was “Pigs,” by Pink Floyd:

Big man, pig man / Ha, ha, charade you are / You well-heeled big wheel / Ha, ha, charade you are

And then, mostly because I didn’t know the intervening lyrics, I’d skip to these lines:

Pig stain on your fat chin / What do you hope to find / Down in the pig mine? / You’re nearly a laugh / You’re nearly a laugh / But you’re really a cry

I had no idea what any of it meant, but in this regard I figured the girls and I had much in common, so I belted it out as if we all knew exactly what I was singing about.

I got to sing to my girls for nearly seven months, by which time Big Girl and Little Girl had become Big and Little in only a relative sense. In truth, they were Bigger and Big, and keeping pace with their fulsome appetites had become an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. And though I was entirely smitten, I was also committed to following through with the original plan: I was going to eat these animals. Even if I wanted to keep them as pets, we couldn’t afford to continue feeding them—nor could we afford the reputational hit we would take when Melvin got wind that we’d gone sentimental. The pig condo we would eventually recover from, but in rural northern Vermont, adding two adult pet pigs to the family was simply not a recoverable embarrassment. So I called the local itinerant slaughterer and made a date.

The night before the girls were scheduled for dispatch, I had a dream. In it, I’d taken Big Girl and Little Girl to work with me (at the time, I was working a few days each week at a sporting goods store in Montpelier). I had them in a cage, which I situated in an alley behind the store. Every so often during the day, I’d emerge from the basement catacombs where I was fixing bicycles to scratch and sing to them. At the end of the day—as this dream went on—I headed home on my bike, and it wasn’t until late into the night that I “awoke” with a start to realize I’d left the pigs in town; in my dream fugue, I imagined them marauding through the streets of Vermont’s state capital. At this point, I awoke to the sudden, sweet relief that I’d merely been dreaming. But the relief was short-lived, for I knew what morning would bring.

Since then, we’ve raised dozens of pigs, and from them, along with other species we’ve kept for meat, I’ve learned the crucial distinction between love and love. I love all the animals we raise for slaughter, but I no longer love them, and when I sing to them, it is not a full-throated serenade but merely a tune in passing. I still train our piglets to belly scratches, and often when I stop by the pigpen at chore time, I linger for a minute or two longer than strictly necessary, if for no other reason than it brings me pleasure to watch our animals. It is my belief that the moment one no longer derives pleasure from the animals under his or her care is the moment one should consider whether there might be better uses of one’s time and energy. Like so many aspects of working the land, the recompense must be counted in more than money, meat, or the materials one gleans, or it will always seem to fall achingly short.

More than once, I have been asked if it is hard for us to kill animals we’ve tended on a daily basis, animals whose quirks of personality and habit we’ve come to know nearly as intimately as our own. Yes, I answer. It is hard. But I believe that if it is our choice to eat meat (and for now, it is), it is also our responsibility to know the full truth of it. I realize that not everyone feels the same, and that is OK. I’ve learned that the world is big enough to accommodate a lot of different feelings.

Even as you read this, there are two pigs fattening on our land, perhaps three months shy of slaughter. Every morning, I fill a bucket with grain and milk and maybe a handful of questionable eggs from the tucked-away nests I occasionally find in the barn, the ones the chickens have been hiding from me for who knows how long. I carry the bucket down the driveway to the old abandoned pasture the pigs are generously helping to renovate, and I step over the two strands of electric fence keeping them contained. If I’m quiet, they won’t hear me until I’m nearly upon them, at which point they’ll rouse themselves from their nest of hay under the old truck cap that serves as their summer shelter (Melvin would approve, I think) and lumber over to their trough. I’ll scratch their backs as they eat, humming to myself and watching the sun rise in the eastern sky.