Whereby the machine is run, and the deed is done.
The following is a rather long post. Thoughts very much appreciated if you find the time.
I have, unsurprisingly, been thinking a lot about what it means to keep animals captive for my own advantage. I am trying very hard to think clearly, and to temper with reason my wish that it should prove a justifiable practice, since I find so much pleasure in the farming lifestyle - a pleasure that seems to be 'deeper' or more instinct/emotion-driven than the intellectual pleasure I found in the prospect of counselling, for example, as a vocation.
I am not talking so much about raising animals for slaughter, and the morality of killing animals for food. We've all discussed that plenty.
But what does it mean for a sheep to live its whole life out within a fenced boundary, even if it has a good life? Or rather, since sheep are flock animals and don't seem to really conceive of themselves as individuals but as parts of a whole, what does it mean for the flock to have its home on a farm, as opposed to 'out there'?
For the sake of this discussion I'm going to think in terms of a flock of sheep that is kept primarily for wool, not for production of year-old lambs for slaughter. So numbers are being kept fairly stable, reproduction is managed by the farmer at about replacement level as the older sheep die and are eaten (let's just pretend for a moment that there's a market for mature mutton [yum] and that this would be a financially viable enterprise). Compared to a meat enterprise, there is no need here for culling all but a couple of male lambs, because both genders are useful for fleeces, as long as the males and females are kept separate to manage breeding levels.
This is a mental stumbling block immediately, of course, because it doesn't seem very 'natural' or respectful or whatever, to control the flock's reproduction in this way, and, you know, to deprive sheep of their natural mating patterns. Of course, in the circumstances, it is arguably kinder than allowing an excess of lambs which the land can't support, so would have to be sent off to slaughter, or else everyone would go hungry. So it's an automatic limitation of a fenced boundary. The farmer's will replaces the 'natural' population levellers of the flock's natural habitat, since she is protecting the flock from predators and starvation, medicating diseases and injuries, assisting with births etc., only the flock is not free to expand its territory, migrate seasonally, or divide and move on if it thrives - which it obviously will in these conditions.
Some of us might feel that such managed breeding would be a good thing for humans, if our view of ourselves would permit it - to calculate the optimal population level for a given area, and breed selectively to maintain that population, allowing only the best specimens to reproduce. A responsible approach, at least. Obviously it takes all the romance out of it, as it does for the sheep I suppose. If we balk at this prospect for ourselves, why do we balk, can we overcome that reaction with rational thought, and is it different for other animals?
Or is it better to imagine a situation where the farmer actually allows both free breeding and, as it were, free dying? Stop saving them when they're sick or hungry or attacked or rejected by their mothers? Just leave them to graze, provide an environment in which the desired number can thrive in general, but keep the fences for the whole year solely so that they can be captured and shorn a couple of times a year with ease? And, I guess, to prevent other humans from claiming them. Though I suppose this could technically be done with tagging.
But animal welfare laws would not allow such an approach, of course. The prevailing view on the matter in our culture seems to amount to: suffering is something that should only occur 'in the wild' - never at the hands of humans. If animals are to be enslaved/enclosed, they must live a pain-free life, albeit at the expense of sexual freedom (or whatever term you'd like to use), and freedom of movement. Good trade-off? I'm not sure. How good are those things?
In Iceland it's done differently. The flocks of all the farmers in a given area are allowed to roam free in the hills for the warm half of the year, and thrive as they might. Then in September they're rounded up by the whole community on horse-back, and brought to a sorting facility, where each farmer claims his own stock (based on ear tags). Then they must be kept in barns through the winter (coz it's bloody cold and sheep come from the Middle East) until lambing time I suppose, so that new lambs can be tagged, and then sent out into the hills again. I don't know the precise reasons why this is done. I guess maybe the land is too poor to make it worthwhile to fence it in, because too big an area would be needed to support a flock, so it's easier to just let them find the best bits on their own, and only enclose them when it's necessary. In more fertile countries it might be less practical. Also, I do not know if there is any kind of fence around the whole [massive] area. Or maybe there are natural boundaries that sheep just wouldn't want to cross.
The difficulty with the whole situation of using animals in any way is that whatever benefits we might offer them in exchange for whatever use we make of them, it just isn't possible for us to ask for their consent for the transaction. Some kind of coercion is necessary to get what we want, and the best we can do is try to reimburse them.
Or is it? We can communicate with each other by our actions if our actions are free. What does a sheep do if it is set free? I can give a couple of anecdotal answers, since there have been a couple of escapes here in the last few weeks.
A 6-month lamb escaped - we don't know how - and was basically counted as lost. The area we are living in is basically just endless forest (some managed, some not) punctuated by small farming communities of a few families, where fields have been labouriously hewn out of the forest over generations. There are wolves and bears and foxes and massive sea-eagles 'out there', though seldom seen. I guess there is food for sheep, though the farmed areas would have the easiest food. Well, the lamb was found a week later by a local - or rather, by his dog, who attacked it. The man thought the dog had killed it, but it survive a couple more days, and ultimately died in our barn, perhaps of exhaustion, stress, hunger - hard to say - and was buried. (Luckily we're the only sheep farmers for miles around, which is how they knew it was ours.) Not really sure what conclusions can be drawn from this. It's quite odd that it wandered so far. Normally, my host tells me, a sheep that gets outside a fence will just hover around near the fence, because it won't want to leave the flock, and it will be grateful to be let back in. So perhaps our lamb just got lost. Or perhaps it happened to have a lower-than-normal flock instinct - in which case it probably wouldn't have survived to reproduce in a wild flock.
There was another escape the following week. A ram and his harem of 19 had been kept in a friend's field some distance from the farm, and it was time to bring them home for the winter. Most clambered happily onto the trailer, but 3 couldn't be persuaded, so we decided to get the others home and come back for the 3. When we came back, they'd gone. We eventually found them on a neighbour's property, grazing happily. To our immense surprise, one of the neighbours told us that these 3 had been seen regularly in this other field for weeks and weeks. They would climb through the fence, roam where they liked, then return to the flock, and would always be 'home' when Matt checked on them every day. We're not sure where the weakness in the fence was - whether they'd found somewhere where they wouldn't get an electric shock, or had perhaps learned how to brave electric shocks, or why the other 17 never joined them. Anyhow, they were clearly spirited beings one way or another, but must have considered they had a pretty good home on the whole. It took us a whole morning to outsmart them and get them onto the trailer.
But anyhow, the other reason for keeping animals captive by force is that they may be unsuited to the surrounding environment - especially if we have bred them to be different to their original form, or have transported them far from their native habitat (over generations I mean). So they might be either in danger themselves on the other side of the fence, or a danger to others. The automatic response to that is 'well we shouldn't have moved and changed them in the first place', but that's not really any help, because it's done. We could phase them out of existence where they don't belong, and bear the loss to our way of life, though it would have to be a society consensus; a lone boycott achieves nothing. And it would have to be enforced, because in a capitalist society the same thing would just happen again.
Ok, that is a lot of thoughts. As you can see, I cannot quite tie them together. There is obviously something extremely ugly about keeping animals captive. The tendency of my thoughts and feelings is, though, that it's just an ugly world, and all creatures do horrible things to other organisms to survive.
Oh, and the other thing I want to say is, it does strike me that sheep in a field are in a situation not so different to that of people born into the urban capitalist rat-race, brainwashed to think in certain ways, working their whole lives as cogs in the great machine, doing it 'willingly' because they're surrounded by easy comforts and protections from direct suffering which compensate the loss of dignity (which they may or may not feel) and the psychological traumas that creep in round the edges from living in ways to which their biological make-up is ill-suited. Generations removed from the knowledge of how to survive 'in the wild', they are trapped in their lifestyle, as a sheep is still trapped even when it gets outside the fence. Sure, they could leave, but few do, because it is too hard. And that's not mere weakness; the infrastructure is just not in place, because there aren't enough other people doing it, and the old habitats are long gone.
So, to come full circle: that's kind of how I feel about the prospect of becoming a person who keeps animals captive. I could try to get free of the whole system, but I would die, and I don't wish to die. I will, it seems, kill to avoid dying. If someone in our society must be a slave-owner to keep us all going, I guess I'll do it, since I enjoy the day-to-day tasks involved more than I enjoy other parts of the same whole process by which we live; and I shall try to do it as kindly and responsibly as I can. And I will probably strive with my soul about it most days. Which I'm sure the sheep will appreciate.
I have, unsurprisingly, been thinking a lot about what it means to keep animals captive for my own advantage. I am trying very hard to think clearly, and to temper with reason my wish that it should prove a justifiable practice, since I find so much pleasure in the farming lifestyle - a pleasure that seems to be 'deeper' or more instinct/emotion-driven than the intellectual pleasure I found in the prospect of counselling, for example, as a vocation.
I am not talking so much about raising animals for slaughter, and the morality of killing animals for food. We've all discussed that plenty.
But what does it mean for a sheep to live its whole life out within a fenced boundary, even if it has a good life? Or rather, since sheep are flock animals and don't seem to really conceive of themselves as individuals but as parts of a whole, what does it mean for the flock to have its home on a farm, as opposed to 'out there'?
For the sake of this discussion I'm going to think in terms of a flock of sheep that is kept primarily for wool, not for production of year-old lambs for slaughter. So numbers are being kept fairly stable, reproduction is managed by the farmer at about replacement level as the older sheep die and are eaten (let's just pretend for a moment that there's a market for mature mutton [yum] and that this would be a financially viable enterprise). Compared to a meat enterprise, there is no need here for culling all but a couple of male lambs, because both genders are useful for fleeces, as long as the males and females are kept separate to manage breeding levels.
This is a mental stumbling block immediately, of course, because it doesn't seem very 'natural' or respectful or whatever, to control the flock's reproduction in this way, and, you know, to deprive sheep of their natural mating patterns. Of course, in the circumstances, it is arguably kinder than allowing an excess of lambs which the land can't support, so would have to be sent off to slaughter, or else everyone would go hungry. So it's an automatic limitation of a fenced boundary. The farmer's will replaces the 'natural' population levellers of the flock's natural habitat, since she is protecting the flock from predators and starvation, medicating diseases and injuries, assisting with births etc., only the flock is not free to expand its territory, migrate seasonally, or divide and move on if it thrives - which it obviously will in these conditions.
Some of us might feel that such managed breeding would be a good thing for humans, if our view of ourselves would permit it - to calculate the optimal population level for a given area, and breed selectively to maintain that population, allowing only the best specimens to reproduce. A responsible approach, at least. Obviously it takes all the romance out of it, as it does for the sheep I suppose. If we balk at this prospect for ourselves, why do we balk, can we overcome that reaction with rational thought, and is it different for other animals?
Or is it better to imagine a situation where the farmer actually allows both free breeding and, as it were, free dying? Stop saving them when they're sick or hungry or attacked or rejected by their mothers? Just leave them to graze, provide an environment in which the desired number can thrive in general, but keep the fences for the whole year solely so that they can be captured and shorn a couple of times a year with ease? And, I guess, to prevent other humans from claiming them. Though I suppose this could technically be done with tagging.
But animal welfare laws would not allow such an approach, of course. The prevailing view on the matter in our culture seems to amount to: suffering is something that should only occur 'in the wild' - never at the hands of humans. If animals are to be enslaved/enclosed, they must live a pain-free life, albeit at the expense of sexual freedom (or whatever term you'd like to use), and freedom of movement. Good trade-off? I'm not sure. How good are those things?
In Iceland it's done differently. The flocks of all the farmers in a given area are allowed to roam free in the hills for the warm half of the year, and thrive as they might. Then in September they're rounded up by the whole community on horse-back, and brought to a sorting facility, where each farmer claims his own stock (based on ear tags). Then they must be kept in barns through the winter (coz it's bloody cold and sheep come from the Middle East) until lambing time I suppose, so that new lambs can be tagged, and then sent out into the hills again. I don't know the precise reasons why this is done. I guess maybe the land is too poor to make it worthwhile to fence it in, because too big an area would be needed to support a flock, so it's easier to just let them find the best bits on their own, and only enclose them when it's necessary. In more fertile countries it might be less practical. Also, I do not know if there is any kind of fence around the whole [massive] area. Or maybe there are natural boundaries that sheep just wouldn't want to cross.
The difficulty with the whole situation of using animals in any way is that whatever benefits we might offer them in exchange for whatever use we make of them, it just isn't possible for us to ask for their consent for the transaction. Some kind of coercion is necessary to get what we want, and the best we can do is try to reimburse them.
Or is it? We can communicate with each other by our actions if our actions are free. What does a sheep do if it is set free? I can give a couple of anecdotal answers, since there have been a couple of escapes here in the last few weeks.
A 6-month lamb escaped - we don't know how - and was basically counted as lost. The area we are living in is basically just endless forest (some managed, some not) punctuated by small farming communities of a few families, where fields have been labouriously hewn out of the forest over generations. There are wolves and bears and foxes and massive sea-eagles 'out there', though seldom seen. I guess there is food for sheep, though the farmed areas would have the easiest food. Well, the lamb was found a week later by a local - or rather, by his dog, who attacked it. The man thought the dog had killed it, but it survive a couple more days, and ultimately died in our barn, perhaps of exhaustion, stress, hunger - hard to say - and was buried. (Luckily we're the only sheep farmers for miles around, which is how they knew it was ours.) Not really sure what conclusions can be drawn from this. It's quite odd that it wandered so far. Normally, my host tells me, a sheep that gets outside a fence will just hover around near the fence, because it won't want to leave the flock, and it will be grateful to be let back in. So perhaps our lamb just got lost. Or perhaps it happened to have a lower-than-normal flock instinct - in which case it probably wouldn't have survived to reproduce in a wild flock.
There was another escape the following week. A ram and his harem of 19 had been kept in a friend's field some distance from the farm, and it was time to bring them home for the winter. Most clambered happily onto the trailer, but 3 couldn't be persuaded, so we decided to get the others home and come back for the 3. When we came back, they'd gone. We eventually found them on a neighbour's property, grazing happily. To our immense surprise, one of the neighbours told us that these 3 had been seen regularly in this other field for weeks and weeks. They would climb through the fence, roam where they liked, then return to the flock, and would always be 'home' when Matt checked on them every day. We're not sure where the weakness in the fence was - whether they'd found somewhere where they wouldn't get an electric shock, or had perhaps learned how to brave electric shocks, or why the other 17 never joined them. Anyhow, they were clearly spirited beings one way or another, but must have considered they had a pretty good home on the whole. It took us a whole morning to outsmart them and get them onto the trailer.
But anyhow, the other reason for keeping animals captive by force is that they may be unsuited to the surrounding environment - especially if we have bred them to be different to their original form, or have transported them far from their native habitat (over generations I mean). So they might be either in danger themselves on the other side of the fence, or a danger to others. The automatic response to that is 'well we shouldn't have moved and changed them in the first place', but that's not really any help, because it's done. We could phase them out of existence where they don't belong, and bear the loss to our way of life, though it would have to be a society consensus; a lone boycott achieves nothing. And it would have to be enforced, because in a capitalist society the same thing would just happen again.
Ok, that is a lot of thoughts. As you can see, I cannot quite tie them together. There is obviously something extremely ugly about keeping animals captive. The tendency of my thoughts and feelings is, though, that it's just an ugly world, and all creatures do horrible things to other organisms to survive.
Oh, and the other thing I want to say is, it does strike me that sheep in a field are in a situation not so different to that of people born into the urban capitalist rat-race, brainwashed to think in certain ways, working their whole lives as cogs in the great machine, doing it 'willingly' because they're surrounded by easy comforts and protections from direct suffering which compensate the loss of dignity (which they may or may not feel) and the psychological traumas that creep in round the edges from living in ways to which their biological make-up is ill-suited. Generations removed from the knowledge of how to survive 'in the wild', they are trapped in their lifestyle, as a sheep is still trapped even when it gets outside the fence. Sure, they could leave, but few do, because it is too hard. And that's not mere weakness; the infrastructure is just not in place, because there aren't enough other people doing it, and the old habitats are long gone.
So, to come full circle: that's kind of how I feel about the prospect of becoming a person who keeps animals captive. I could try to get free of the whole system, but I would die, and I don't wish to die. I will, it seems, kill to avoid dying. If someone in our society must be a slave-owner to keep us all going, I guess I'll do it, since I enjoy the day-to-day tasks involved more than I enjoy other parts of the same whole process by which we live; and I shall try to do it as kindly and responsibly as I can. And I will probably strive with my soul about it most days. Which I'm sure the sheep will appreciate.
posted by Kat | 10/25/2010 03:13:00 am
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8 comments
