A Confrontation With Carnivory

Maybe some of you more avid blog-followers might remember that a few months ago we wrote about buying a goat, Cena, to raise and slaughter for our farewell meal. This whole ambitious project came to a bloody climax last weekend, and it ended up being far more poignant than we ever imagined.

We said from the beginning that we wouldn't get too close to the goat. Everyone told us not to name him, but we thought that giving him the name “Cena,” or “Dinner” would keep us sufficiently estranged from him. We were wrong. The word “cena” became not a meal, but his name. As we walked him around town on a rope leash (yep, that happened), kids popped out of nowhere, shrieking “Cenaaaaa!” The whole town knew Cena by name; when we weren't with him, complete strangers would stop us and ask, “Where's Cena?” No one believed us that we were going to slaughter him, and we almost didn't believe it ourselves.

So it was that against all our best intentions, we did get close to Cena. He would sit there in his fence at the back of the yard making pitiful, annoying goat cries until we took him out for a walk. Sometimes we let him out in the yard, and he would run around eating everything in sight: basil, mangoes, and once even a lesson plan that he ripped out of our class planning notebook. He followed us everywhere we went.

This is a good place to pause for a disclaimer. Our whole idea to raise and slaughter an animal to provide food for a special occasion came directly from Nicaraguan campo tradition; people here slaughter chickens and pigs and cows for birthdays all the time. That's why we thought it was so fitting to do the same for our goodbye party.

But getting to know the goat changed everything, and everyone seemed to sense it. On the day before our party, just hours before we were supposed to do the “deed,” as we euphemized it, I went to order tortillas from our tortilla lady. “Are you really going to kill that goat?” she asked me. “That's so sad.” As if I didn't feel terrible enough already.

An hour before dark, the butcher showed up wearing a windbreaker and asking for a knife. Somehow, the fact that he would need a knife had completely slipped our minds. In a panic, we rifled through our collection of dull kitchen knives before Kyle, one of the new volunteers, produced his Swiss army knife.

I struggle to write these details plainly, but to deny them is to deny the impact of that night. The butcher strung Cena up upside down on the branch of a tree in our back yard, Cena crying helplessly until the butcher knocked him out with a rock. Then, very swiftly, he slit Cena's throat, and it began to rain. We all stood there for a minute, watching as the blood spilled and mixed with the urine of the goat's last pee. “Thank you Cena,” we murmured. Then it began to rain harder and we ran to the house to seek shelter as the goat died.

For a while I couldn't go back outside. I hid in the kitchen, dropping cupcake batter into cupcake tins (cupcakes suddenly seemed so innocent) and trying not to cry. But a strange fascination drew me back to the tree, where the butcher was mechanically and silently cutting the animal's skin off of its body all in one piece. Before it was dark, Cena was no longer Cena, but a tub of meat.

Davie and I have talked a lot about that night since then, struggling with what transpired. In Spanish, when a person feels squeamish about something, they say, “Me da lastima,” or “It gives me shame,” and this was exactly how I felt about Cena. I've never felt bad about eating meat before, but actually witnessing a living animal die so that I can consume its protein not only made me feel like, “That's a shame,” but also, “That gives me shame. I am ashamed.” There is something so selfish about taking an animal's life to incorporate that life into your body in order to continue your own life. I have to keep reminding myself that this is a natural phenomenon that has been happening between humans and animals for millions of years. It only means that as elevated and “civilized” as we think we are, we are still part of the food chain.

In many ways, this challenge that Davie and I set for ourselves of killing and eating an animal played out as the most difficult confrontation with eating meat that a person could possibly have. The easiest way to go about eating meat is to simply buy it in a grocery store, not knowing where it came from or what it ever looked like as an animal. Doing this in the past, I never had any qualms about eating meat. A step up in difficulty might be buying part of a cow, for example, that was raised locally. The carnivore in this situation knows in some concrete way that their meat was a living animal with its own unique story, but the details are all fuzzy. An even more difficult challenge would be to hunt the animal. In this scenario the meat-eater has to actually kill the animal but never spends more than a minute or two in its presence. By comparison, I would argue that our situation was one of the hardest to face. We spent three months with Cena getting to know him and then watched him be killed so that we could eat his meat.

I keep telling myself that there was nothing inherently evil in killing and eating Cena; it's only because this was the most difficult encounter I've ever had with eating meat that it gives me shame at all. I've eaten meat so many times before, and none of those times did I eat it any more nobly than this time – only more ignorantly. In some ways, because we got to know Cena so well and in such a public way, our goodbye party meal was perhaps the greatest sacrifice we could have made for our friends in San Nicolas, and I hope they recognized the significance of it.

In no way do I regret this grand challenge that we set for the end of our time in San Nicolas. Cena's sacrifice hasn't gone unnoticed; it has impacted completely how I think about eating meat. Neither Davie nor I has decided yet what we want to do with this new consciousness, but it is something that we will carry with us forever. And in the mean time, our friend Stephen is making a drum out of Cena's skin. The goat lives on in the music.