So in my last post, I described my run in with one unlucky squirrel and the heartache associated with taking a life to feed my own.
I froze my friend, and thawed him out when the time was right. It was right when I attended a local foods potluck at the linnaea farm program house. These kids are pretty into their local food, and especially the wild foods. I thought I’d be a hero for sure. And to some I was.
But some folks were “offended”, to quote my informant. Apparently, the vegetarians in the group didn’t feel that it was appropriate for me to have brought the squirrel. My informant tells me that they think it is wrong to take the life of a wild creature.
Having not the opportunity to respond to them, I have decided to vent my rage on my blog. Forgive me, this is what I do. .. I’m of course kidding, I feel no rage. But I am slightly frustrated by what I think is a lack of sound reasoning as well as being judged without having the chance to defend myself.
So: I have been exploring the boundary of a hunter/gatherer mode of subsistence and a ecological farming mode. I do not yet know how to life a happy, healthy life entirely without farming, but I do see that in an ideal world, it would not be necessary to cut down the glorious rainforest so grow sweet delicious vegetables and fruit and animals for food. Ideally, my life would be as little of an impact as a wolve’s or a bear, simultaneously taking and giving back to his/her environment. I guess it isn’t immediately obvious to people that to kill a squirrel takes one life, while a field of soy beans takes an ecosystem. I committed homicide, and farming is ecocide. These are the facts. I haven’t yet decided where I stand or what balance is appropriate, but I think the logic here is infallible.
I also believe that it is fairly anthropocentric to believe that to take a squirrel’s life is immoral and ripping off an ear of corn or cutting off a head of lettuce is nothing to even think about, much less think twice about. I know very little about plants. We all know very little about plants. Some people certainly believe that they are conscious, some believe that we can even communicate with them. Many indigenous people’s knowledge of the plant world comes from the plant world itself, the plants themselves. I have seen them struggle for life, stretching in the right directions for light, food, water etc. They are amazingly responsive to their environments. And they are alive and gives them certain rights to life. And yet we kill them without batting an eye.
I don’t think it is wrong to take a life to feed your own. That is living. But we should certainly give it a lot of thought.
And Kate raises the point that we also brought some canned chicken, the old laying hens from the farm, and this was not offensive. It is more acceptable to bring an indian jungle bird over and raise it in a house with imported feed from god knows where and god knows what’s in it, than to kill one squirrel in a forest teeming with them. I bet more squirrels died on the road under the wheels of the trucks that supplied the feed for those chickens for two years than I could kill with all the pellets in the world. But I guess that’s an external cost of farming not at linnaea and certainly not discussed.
And those are my thoughts.
L!fe is good.
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Some great points. I wish I was able to come out to Linnaea for the pot luck, but the timing just wasn't right.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the blog, hopefully we'll hook up. I'm still trapped in the working cycle, but am slowly moving towards a permaculture dream, and hopefully dragging as many people down with me as I can.
First a question. Do you think it anthropocentric to distinguish between life systems that feel pain and those that cannot?
ReplyDeleteIt is notable that if you prune a tree or bush it grows with new fervor due to the fact that more apical meristems are exposed to sunlight. When you 'trim' a squirrel, or another animal, it dies.
Post-vegetarianism is apologetics for taking a particular kind of life. While I don't personally oppose subsistence hunting, know that by professing these beliefs you just offer an opportunity to defend exactly the problem of mass farming that you mention in your last paragraph. Ideas like "you have to take a life to feed your own" are far too simple-minded to have a real meaning in our industrialized world. Rather than arguing for the benefits of taking life, you should focus on the benefits of becoming your own food supplier.
Consider your own logic: Hunting kills a single animal, farming kills a great number. Okay. So if you provide ALL of your meat by hunting and ALL of your vegetables by your own cautious gardening or gathering wild produce then this make some kind of sense. The moment you consider purchasing anything, your logic is rendered meaningless. If you buy vegetables, then you are the offender in your own example. If you buy meat, then you are not only responsible for the life of the animal you purchased, but also of all of those animals that were killed in harvesting food for your food. The logic you present is 'infallible' only on an extreme lifestyle of disconnection from any form of social food procurement. Given that such a lifestyle is not possible for the vast majority of the human population, your logic amounts to little more than apologetics and self-promotion.