Pouring your Heart Out - Our Animal Harvesting Class

Plunging the knife and catching the heartbreak

The sheep’s eyes closed. Not in a wince, no pinched grimace of suffering. They closed in a surprisingly gentle embracing, a surrender, a bearing down and a letting up at the same time. It isn’t to say that being killed is gentle. Of course not. It is violent, no way around it, no matter how supposedly quick and painless you’ve been told it should be. Glowing hot life pouring out from her heart’s rhythm, strong Old fabric of song and tears holding circle around her, blessing her, thanking her, praising her, weeping in the sorrow of this moment together - that we are death eaters, and must eat to live, and that we have killed her, and she is now dying as we hold her. It isn’t often that I’ve seen an animal close their eyes as they die. I actually don’t remember any kills where this has happened before. They are usually open, sparkling with that ancient starlight. If you’ve killed animals before you know this glitter. There is a pronounced moment when that starlight dulls. Something happens, something so clear, though it is somehow so nuanced you couldn’t perceive it with cameras, I’m almost certain. I don’t begin to understand it. It is the life light, and it is there, and then it goes somewhere else.

And something happens to you too, when you look it in the eyes like that.

When you have to hold an animal down so it can’t run away because they want to live. When you feel the soft spot along the jaw behind the trachea, and place the tip of your knife there. When you take a breath and make the desicion to plunge the knife into the skin, into the meat, across both arteries, and the river of red explodes out onto your hands, the blade, the waiting blood catching bowl. When the wool fills with blood. When you sit with the contortions, the kicks, the gasps, the thrashing. When you feel the animal’s pain, the cut in the skin, the artery severed and pumping out the River of Life as their body realizes it is dying, no more blood to be pumped, the slowing slowing slowing. The shudders. And the light fading.