In the 1970's I lived on a farming commune of roughly twenty souls in Northern Vermont.  The ideas and metaphors which controlled and inspired our lives there combined a wish to end the Vietnam War, helping draft evaders get to Canada, and a yearning to transform social inequities, with a hippie Waldenesque desire to live a wholesome lifestyle, to return to the land, and to be pre-carbon fuel consumption self-sufficient farmers, maybe even Indians.  Ideals of egalitarianism, revolution, and self-sufficiency were centrally important to us.

We did manage to raise one-quarter to one-third of our food, including a vast vegetable garden, chickens, pigs, dairy and beef cows, and lots of maple syrup.  We also produced most of the feed necessary to keep our animals alive, although the profit margin was slim.  A popular self-mocking image we had of ourselves was that we kept a team of horses so we could take out and spread manure on the fields, so we could harrow and seed the fields, so we could harvest the hay and grain we grew for the horses, so we could take out the manure to spread on the fields we needed to harrow and harvest to feed the horses to spread the manure.  We were their servants as much as they were ours.

Periodically we slaughtered and ate one of our animals.  Inevitably these animals had been named pets and friends as well as dumb beasts.  The kids had cuddled and loved them.  Some we had raised from birth.  All had contributed to our sustenance with humor, some with milk, eggs, and now flesh.  We admired, respected, and needed our animals, their tolerance, strength, and beauty.

In advance of the decision to slaughter one of the larger animals we had only imagined we would eat, our group of terribly diverse and more or less hard working people would sit in meeting for hours we couldn't afford and didn't enjoy, trying to make an intelligent collective decision consistent with our diverse imagery and ideology about the kill.  As to the slaughter of animals it was agreed that only one person at a time would be responsible for the actual slaughter, that he or she would select the method by which they would dispatch the animal, that children would be allowed (not compelled or discouraged) to watch, and that we would then collectively butcher, skin, smoke, freeze, cure, or whatever it was we were going to do with often hundreds of pounds of meat.

When we killed our first large animal, a boar named Arnold, we selected as slaughterer the man who loved Arnold most, who had spent the most time feeding Arnold, cleaning his pen, moving him around, catching him, chasing him, helping Arnold breed the sow that produced our next litter of Arnolds.  He used a knife to cut Arnold's throat because local folklore emphasized the importance of bleeding a boar to death to insure good tasting flesh.  We also castrated Arnold immediately upon his death out of respect for more local folklore about the impact of testicles upon the taste of meat.  Nobody I recall particularly ate the organs of Arnold, though there was much talk of doing so and of wasting nothing.  We did make organ stew, maybe some folks tasted it, but it wasn't heartily eaten.  The flesh we cured and smoked and froze was mighty tasty as I recall.  I'm not sure how long it lasted.  We were twenty souls and Arnold had been but one.  When we dined on Arnold we often said out loud, "Thank you, Arnold," making a macabre joke out of the obvious truth that the creature we had known as Arnold was being transformed into the creatures we were.

We next slaughtered Wooly, a Scotch Highland steer.  We loved Wooly, a beautiful, maybe even magnificent, creature: longhaired like his keepers and long horned.  Standing in the field in summer Wooly was Ferdinand the bull.  Covered with snow in the winter he was Perseverance and Grace.  Frisky.  Friendly.  Our guy Wooly: never mean, but always dangerous.  We tried hard to preserve Wooly's hide after we took his life to sustain our own and worked diligently at salting and saving his hairy thick hide in an effort to honor Wooly and turn him into vests or moccasins, or some such utilitarian romantic image, but in the end Wooly's skin was just a hard and unmalleably stiff piece of cow folded over a fence rail, with flies buzzing around it, never attaining the level of leather or flexible afterlife we imagined.

I was selected (I selected myself?) to make the next kill, this time of Sophie, the first animal we’d bought on the farm, a smallish, quiet, sad looking, tired Jersey cow who had grown quite old.  Nice gentle creature she was: docile, breedable, easy to move around and easy to milk.  Willing to have dozens of strangers and kids squeeze her teats.  Black and tan and brown Sophie.  She had served us well, providing milk, butter, and even yogurt as we milked her twice daily by hand, taught the children to milk her, helped her become inseminated, watched the delivery of her new calves.  But Sophie was old and we were hungry.

By now, whenever we slaughtered an animal, some of the local folk inevitably heard of the event and came to ogle and offer instruction in long lost arts.  Slaughtering days were never ordinary days on the commune.  We needed to delegate much time and energy to organizing and carrying out the many tasks associated with the slaughter, to explaining what was happening to the kids, to dealing with the kids while we actually killed, butchered and preserved hundreds of pounds of meat in an edible fashion.

I wanted Sophie's death to be as quick and pain free as possible.  I had chosen to kill Sophie by shooting her through the forehead with a twenty-two-caliber rifle: small gauge, small hole, not a lot of noise or blood.  I led Sophie out of the barn by her halter to the lawn between the north side of our house and the sugar shack.  A hoist had been erected to raise Sophie up after death so we could gut and clean and skin her most easily.  About thirty folk stood around.  I moved a few feet in front of Sophie and sighted her forehead through the rifle barrel.  She bent down to munch some grass, changing the position of her head and the angle at which I wanted the bullet to enter her brain.  I lowered the rifle, walked over to Sophie and lifted her head up.  I let go of the halter and walked back two paces.  I lined her forehead up in my sights.  She lowered her head to munch.  I walked over and lifted her head.  I stepped back.  She lowered her head again.

A local farmer in his late twenties walked over to be helpful with Sophie.  He grabbed Sophie by the halter and lifted her head up.  He said to her with tight throated North Country humor loud enough for everyone to hear, "Come on you Christ killing Jew, stand up, its your turn."

I held Sophie in my sights.  The barrel of my gun was pointed at the exact center of her forehead.  The local humorist stood next to her, holding her halter with his right arm extended.  I looked at him, bigot and innocent.  I looked at Sophie, equally innocent.  I saw them both clearly.  I considered the options.  I suppressed my anger and judgments as I have so often in the face of mindless anti-Semitism and squeezed the trigger.

All four of Sophie's legs lifted from the earth at the same time.  There was literal space between the ground she stood on alive and the air she was suspended in at the instant of her death.  She crumbled to the ground.  I remember thinking Sophie wasn't really dead, that we could put her back together if we wanted.  I half believed that until I sawed her hooves off.

We ate Sophie's organs.  I don't recall a lot of pleasure in doing so.  Her meat was gamy and tough, though far better and longer lasting than the frogs we’d killed that summer at the local pond and tried to eat.  Dozens of dead frog bodies without legs thrown on the ground, scooped up and carried to the compost heap, picked at by crows, returned to the earth that mothers us all.