julia garrido
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
At Maine Coast Semester at Chewonki, we worked on a functioning farm. I spent countless hours mucking the horse barn like a madman, rinsing poop off of centuries-old wood panels, sprained my back helping my cabinmate carry a 50-pound sack of turkey feed down to their pen, and at one point got manure sprayed in my right eye. I can still hear the turkeys’ demonic cries as I brought them their precious bucket of water, simulating a rainfall they would never feel.
I felt a comfort existing in this manufactured ecosystem, making friends with the prey as their primary predator, perpetuating the cycle of life and death manually. Impermanence constantly surrounded my relationships– there was no time to kick and scream over your favorite ewe inevitably going to slaughter. It was necessary for the rest of the farm to continue, for the ewe’s children to live on. Farm life, much like real life, is difficult– and the circle of life I was so immersed in was as brutal as it was beautiful.
There came a time in the late fall when our hens stopped laying. Our head farmer Jeremy came to the decision– like any good livestock manager– that we would carry out a chicken slaughter. I signed up for the slaughter on a whim. I remember the feeling of disgust I had with myself at my curiosity in the death of these hapless beings, and the moral strife I had in finally exposing myself to intentional death; death for a purpose, a profit.
It occurred to me while I prodded at my barbecue chicken thigh, though, that killing the laying hens was no different from eating a store-bought chicken (but for the separation of a few steps). As much as I hated to admit it, I ate chicken, probably hundreds throughout my life. If I was too upset with what I saw, what moral implications did it have? Was it fair for me to continue my consumption if I was unwilling to face the reality of a chicken slaughter?
This is what I set out to find out.
The following Tuesday, I watched with reluctance and then gross fascination, as Farmer Jeremy took some of my close clucking friends, stuck their heads over a Home Depot bucket, cut their jugular, and held them down as the last remaining energy thrashed out of their tiny bodies. It was difficult to watch, and more difficult to hold their warm, dead bodies to a butcher’s table. And yet, I felt at peace. Because of the chicken slaughter, the turkeys were able to move into a larger grazing field. The mangled barn cat had dinner for the next six months, pucks of pale white muscle frozen into ice cube molds. The sun rose the next morning like it always did.
Going into this next chapter of my life, full of novelty and new possibilities, I’ll have many opportunities to push myself out of my comfort zone and into new experiences. Sometimes this may change my ways of thinking; other times it may reaffirm what I’ve always believed. What matters is that I remain cognizant of and open to the realities of the complex, ever-changing world around me.
To this day, I continue to eat chicken.