M&M&HP (cont)

[Guest guest]

V. MAKING MEAT

 

 

The sense of elation didn't last. Less than an hour later, back up on

the ridge, I found myself in a much less heroic position, embracing

the pig's hanging carcass from behind to steady it so Angelo could

reach in and pull out its viscera. I was playing the nurse now,

passing him tools and holding the patient still. Using a block and

tackle and a stainless-steel hanger with two hooks, we'd managed to

raise and hang the pig by its rear ankles from the limb of an oak

tree. A scale attached to the rig gave the weight of the animal: 190

pounds. The pig weighed exactly as much as I did.

 

Angelo worked with a small cigar clamped between his teeth; the smoke

discouraged the flies and yellow jackets, which had taken an avid

interest in the dead animal. There were also a pair of turkey

vultures circling high overhead, patiently waiting for us to finish.

Whatever parts of this pig we didn't take, the local fauna were

preparing to set upon and consume, weaving this bonanza of fat and

protein back into the fabric of the land. Using a short knife, Angelo

made a shallow incision the length of the animal's belly, moving very

slowly so as not to pierce any internal organs.

 

Angelo talked while he worked, mostly, if you can believe it, about

food: prosciutto, pâté, ventricina, sausages. The pig was splayed

open now, all its internal organs glistening in their place like one

of those cutaway anatomy dolls from biology: the bluish links of

intestine coiled beneath the stout muscle of heart, beribboned with

its map of veins; the spongy pink pair of lungs like outspread wings

behind; and below, the sleek chocolate slab of liver. The pig's

internal organs, in their proportions and arrangement and colors,

were indistinguishable from human organs.

 

I held the cavity open while Angelo reached in to pull out the mass

of organs, saving only the liver, which had a jagged tear across it.

The bullet had apparently crossed the rib cage diagonally from upper

left to lower right, tearing through a lobe of the liver. But Angelo

thought the liver was salvageable ( " for a nice pâté " ), so we dropped

it into a Ziploc bag. Then he reached in and pulled gently and the

rest of the organs tumbled out onto the ground in a heap, up from

which rose a stench so awful it made me gag. This was not just the

stink of pig wastes but those comparatively benign smells compounded

by an odor so wretched and ancient that death alone could release it.

I felt a wave of nausea begin to build in my gut. The clinical

disinterest with which I had approached the whole process of cleaning

my pig collapsed all at once: this was disgusting.

 

Since it was my plan to serve and eat this animal, the revulsion at

its sight and smell that now consumed me was discouraging, to say the

least. That plan was no longer just a conceit, either, since the

moment I killed this pig I felt it descend on me with the weight of a

moral obligation. And yet at the moment the prospect of sitting down

to a meal of this animal was unthinkable. Pâté? Prosciutto?

Ventricina? Just then I could have made myself vomit simply by

picturing myself putting a fork to a bite of this pig. How was I ever

going to get past this? And what was this attack of revulsion all

about, anyway?

 

Disgust, I understood, is one of the tools humans have evolved to

navigate the omnivore's dilemma — the elemental question of what we

should and should not eat. The emotion alerts us to things we should

not ingest, like rotten meat or feces. And surely that protective

reflex figured in what I was feeling as I beheld these viscera, which

no doubt did contain microbes that could sicken me. Our sense of

disgust, as Steven Pinker has written, is " intuitive microbiology. "

 

But there had to be more to it than that, and later, when I did some

reading on disgust, I acquired a better idea what else might underlie

my revulsion. Paul Rozin, a cultural psychologist at the University

of Pennsylvania, points out that many of the things that disgust

people do come from animals — bodily fluids and secretions, decaying

flesh, corpses. Beyond the sanitary reasons for avoiding certain

parts and products of animals, these things disgust us, Rozin

suggests, because they confront us with the reality of our own animal

nature. So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing

ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that

remind us that we are beasts, too — animals that urinate, defecate,

copulate, bleed, die, stink and decompose. Rozin tells a story about

Cotton Mather, who confided to his journal the powerful revulsion he

felt at finding himself urinating alongside a dog. Mather turned his

self-disgust into a resolution of self-transcendence: " Yet I will be

a more noble creature; at the very time when my natural necessities

debase me into the condition of the beast, my spirit shall (I say at

that very time!) rise and soar.. . . "

 

Exactly why we would strive so hard to distance ourselves from our

animality is a large question, but surely the human fear of death

figures in the answer. What we see animals do an awful lot of is die,

very often at our hands. Animals resist dying, but, having no

conception of death, they don't give it nearly as much thought as we

do. And one of the main thoughts about it we think is, will my own

death be like this animal's or not? The belief, or hope, that human

death is somehow different from animal death is precious to us — but

unprovable. Whether it is or is not is one of the questions I suspect

we're trying to answer whenever we look into the eyes of an animal.

 

From the moment I laid eyes on my animal straight through to the

moment Angelo sawed off her head, her eyes remained tightly shut

beneath her disconcerting eyelashes, yet everything else about the

episode asked me to confront these kinds of questions. What disgusted

me about " cleaning " the animal was just how messy — in every sense of

the word — the process really was, how it forced me to look at and

smell and touch and even to taste the death, at my hands, of a

creature my size that, on the inside at least, had all the same parts

and probably looked very much like me. The line between human and

animal I could discern here, gazing into that carcass, was nowhere

near sharp. Cannibalism is one of the things that most deeply

disgusts us, and while this isn't by any reasonable definition that,

you could forgive the mind for being fooled into reacting as if it

were — in disgust.

 

In this, I decided, was one of the signal virtues of hunting: it puts

large questions about who we and the animals are, and the nature of

our respective deaths, squarely before the hunter, and while I'm sure

there are many hunters who manage to avoid their gaze, that must take

some doing.

 

so we are left standing there in the woods with our uneasiness and

our disgust, and disgust's boon companion, shame. I did not register

any such emotion in the moments after shooting my pig, but eventually

it dawned, or fell on me, like a great and unexpected weight. It

happened late that evening, when, back at home, I opened my e-mail

and saw that Angelo had sent me some digital pictures, under the

subject heading " Look the great hunter! " I was eager to open them,

excited to show my family my pig, since it hadn't come home with me

but was hanging in Angelo's walk-in cooler.

 

The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an

unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater was

kneeling on the ground behind a pig the side of whose head has

erupted in blood that is spreading like a river delta toward the

bottom of the frame. The hunter's rifle is angled just so across his

chest; clearly he is observing some hoary convention of the hunter's

trophy portrait. One proprietary hand rests on the dead animal's

broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with an expression of

unbounded pride, wearing an ear-to-ear grin that might have been

winning, if perhaps incomprehensible, had the bloodied carcass

sprawled beneath him been cropped out of the frame. But the bloodied

carcass was right there, front and center, and it rendered that grin —

there's no other word for it — obscene. I felt as if I had stumbled

on some stranger's pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of

the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could. No one

should ever see this.

 

What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that

picture feeling? I can't for the life of me explain what could have

inspired such a mad grin, it seemed so distant and alien from me now.

If I didn't know better, I would have said that the man in the

picture was drunk. And perhaps he was, seized in the throes of some

sort of Dionysian intoxication, the bloodlust that Ortega says will

sometimes overtake the successful hunter. And what was I so damned

proud of, anyway? I'd killed a pig with a gun, big deal.

 

Like the image of the two filthy hunters I'd caught in the

convenience-store mirror earlier that afternoon, Angelo's digital

photo had shown me the hunt, and the hunter, from the outside,

subjecting it to a merciless gaze that hunting can't withstand, at

least not in the 21st century. Yet I'm not prepared to say that that

gaze offers the more truthful view of the matter. Angelo's picture

resembles in certain respects the trophy photos sent home by

soldiers, who shock their brides and mothers with images of

themselves grinning astride the corpses of the enemy dead. They are

entitled to their pride; killing is precisely what we've asked them

to do, so why do we have so much trouble looking at the pictures?

 

I've looked at Angelo's pictures again, trying to figure out why they

should have shamed me so. I realize it isn't the killing it records

that I felt ashamed of, not exactly, but the manifest joy I seemed to

be feeling about what I'd done. This for many people is what is most

offensive about hunting — to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or

allows, us not only to kill but also to take a certain pleasure in

killing. It's not as if the rest of us don't countenance the killing

of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we

feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of

view and without emotion, by industrial agriculture.

 

Perhaps there is a more generous light in which to view the hunter's

joy. Perhaps it is the joy of a creature succeeding at something he

has discovered his nature has superbly equipped him to do, an action

that is less a perversion of that nature, his " creaturely character, "

than a fulfillment of it. But what of the animal in the picture?

Well, the animal, too, has had the chance to fulfill its wild nature,

has lived, and arguably even died, in a manner consistent with its

creaturely character. Hers is, by the standards of animal death, a

good one. But could I really say that yet? What if it turned out I

couldn't eat this meat? Her death then will have been pointless, a

waste. I realized then that the drama of the hunt doesn't end until

the animal arrives at the table.

 

So which view of me-the-hunter is the right one, the shame of the

photograph or the joy of the man in it, the outside gaze or the

inside one? The moralist is eager to decide this question once and

for all, to join Cotton Mather in his noble quest for transcendence.

The hunter — or at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter —

recognizes the truth disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is

tempered by shame, his appetite shadowed by disgust.

 

The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously

good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You

certainly don't come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If

I've learned anything about hunting and eating meat, it's that it's

even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked

at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that's the

word) to eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that

envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the

tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are

just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its

own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in

failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing the force of

human will can somehow overcome it. " The preoccupation with what

should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been

exhausted. "

 

" What is. " I suppose that this as much as anything else, as much as a

pig or a meal, is what I was really hunting for, and what I returned

from my hunt with a slightly clearer sense of. " What is " is not an

answer to anything, exactly; it doesn't tell you what to do or even

what to think. Yet respect for what is does point us in a direction.

That direction just happens to be the direction from which we came —

that place and time, I mean, where humans looked at the animals they

killed, regarded them with reverence and never ate them except with

gratitude.

 

one more thatls it....bob