I would like to learn how to raise and butcher my own meat animals. I would like to eat only creatures that I have raised and killed for myself. I've felt for a long time that in order to be an omnivore with a clear conscience, I need to be able to do this. As I was walking home from work tonight, I got to thinking about this moral stance of mine, and about killing in our society in a wider context.

How many of us have ever personally killed anything more self aware than a wasp or a dandelion? And yet, people are killed, in war, by the death penalty, every day in our name. Animals are killed for our consumption constantly and their lives and subsequent deaths are a miserable affair. All we see of these things are a neatly wrapped package at the supermarket meat counter, a statistic, or maybe a feature on the news. Even a hundred years ago, most of us would have personally slaughtered a chicken at some point in our lives, or hunted wild game. Now the majority have, what, maybe hit a deer accidentally with their car?

We're weirdly sheltered from killing. Distanced from it, by images of meaningless violence, by technology and tools. And I think that the ubiquitous violence in the media *does* lead to violence in reality. TV and movies and video games and the evening news show us death in all of its poigniency and terror, over and over again, without broader meaning attatched. I think a large part of the meaninglessness comes from the fact that it's the deaths of strangers. Humans have a strong tendency to care about their own family, their own tribe, their own clan first.

Professionals who kill are distanced from it in other ways. By tools and jargon and the psychological buffering necessary for them to do those jobs (like defining those they kill as "other" from their clan). Or, in the case of slaughterhouse workers, by sheer repetition. After a while the staring eyes of one more cow lose all significance as anything but a unit of production, particularly in the kind of assembly-line organization they use.

And that's just it. There should be higher meaning. Destruction is just as sacred and meaningful as creation. Both sides of the equation are revered by the pagan path that I follow, and I think rightly so. I feel that violence is generally bad. But killing doesn't always have to be about violence. Is killing still violence when you're Dr. Kevorkian? Or if you're slaughtering an animal in a humane way for your own consumption?

I admit, I have to wonder if I'll have the guts to kill a chicken I've raised from the shell or from a fuzzy little peeper and serve it up as dinner. But if the day comes and I can't bring myself to do it, I think it'd only be fair to go vegetarian.

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