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.
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.
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.
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.
