The day I could have become a vegetarian
By: Ciizar - The Upcoming Life
Tags: Vegan, Meat, Hunting, Vegetarian, Consciousness

And how it changed me nevertheless!

It was three or four years ago when I had a sudden realization: there’s a disconnect between our perception of the meat you get at the grocery and the animal/-s it actually comes from as a living being. We are so detached from the physical reality of what happens that we basically set aside the aspect of a living being when we are looking at the steak on our plate — meat is merely an object like a noodles or a piece of chocolate.

Ironically I had that insight whilst being at the supermarket buying meat and it made me come up with something. I felt the need to rethink my consume of meat, to find out if I would be able to provide it for myself on my own if I needed to. And by that I mean the whole process. The wait, the kill, the gutting… everything from the living, breathing animal down to the meat on my plate. Could I stand by whilst someone is doing that or even doing the “dirty work” on my own?

What complicates the matter even more is that I’m a sworn pacifist. I refuse violence. I haven’t had an active fight with someone since I was 13 years old. I never fought back when I got hit in my late teens and it resulted in me seemingly leaving behind me the skin of experiencing violence like a snake would leave its skin. I always joke that I’m surrounded by a bubble of peace which violence can’t penetrate, because literally as long as I’m anywhere nothing spectacular will happen. But dare me to leave and I come back to stories how I just missed a fight. I’m the Blitz of physical violence so to speak.

And it goes on. I don’t kill anything usually, either. No Fly, no Wasp, no nothing. I don’t drive over frogs, I don’t step on ants or whatever insect is just crawling around on the floor. I try to catch flies by hand and throw them out the door in the summer in order to avoid killing them. I have made exceptions every once in a while, but never without feeling guilty. But still, in regards to eating meat I never lost a second thought about it (because there is no connection anymore to the piece of meat in the fridge and the animal it comes from).

I’m kinda lucky, because my best friends uncle is a hunter. So my inquiry was actually in the realms of possibilities, which isn’t that easy living in Germany. I would ask him if I could join him for a hunt one day and he agreed.

The years went by, I would continue to buy my meat from the supermarkets but never would I forget my moral struggle with it. Also, the more I got interested in fitness the more I wondered how food would affect my body as well as if there’s any difference in meat from the supermarket out of cruel sources of something grass-fed or growing up in the wild. I also would ponder about the consequences if I couldn’t go through with it. I mean I love meat, seriously. I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t eat meat. And the more sports I made the more meat and animal products became focus of my diet. At the same time this nagging question of morality grew as well and I was sure, that if I can’t handle “the process” then I shouldn’t eat meat. It really was as simple as that but also kind of disheartening as well. I really had a lot to loose.

Then this year the cousin of my roommate became a hunter as well. Whilst his father seemed to have forgotten about it or I wasn’t inquisitive enough with my request his son remembered and he invited me to join him on a hunt. But we weren’t just in the woods to shoot something. Their job is far more than that. They place feeding-grounds for the wildlife in the winter as to support them in finding food and much more too help the ecological environment in which they are active. And so we had to drive through the territory. It was quite adventurous, because it just had snowed and we drove with a truck through the wonderful white wilderness.

On one of those spots we set up our “camp”. He would go on the highchair, whilst I was sitting down at the camping chair. Both of us packed in warm clothes because it was -3°C (26F) and it grew colder during the two hours until sundown. We didn’t speak. I did look through the binoculars he gave me, observing the area. Sometimes I saw him picking up the riffle, looking through the visor, also checking the area.

We just sat there. My mind started wandering off to places. My mind does that and there literally was nothing to take my mind off with. We just sat there in nature, in silence and I didn’t want to spoil this experience with wasting it away on my mobile phone. So I began to somehow meditate. I focused on my surroundings, watching the woods from a distance, calming my mind, breathing consciously.

I was in a deep state, not sure how much time passed by, when I heard footsteps in the snow in front of us. It was almost dark. I looked through the binoculars and there I could see it: deer did arrive. I was sitting so low, that I only could see them, when they lifted their heads, but I could see them.

BANG!!!

It happened so quickly and it was already over before it began. We rushed towards the hunting grounds, where we have seen the deer and had to look for the one my friend just shot. Or hoped he shot, because we couldn’t find it and whilst looking for it it went totally dark.

During our search we suddenly heard a barking in the distance (because deer bark as I found out). And there it hit me quite hard. That deer we heard barking was one of those standing here at the same place we were just now. That deer was calling, searching for it’s friend or relative. And there was pain in that call. That pain is actually what made me realize this.

I couldn’t help it, but in that moment I realized, that this wasn’t so far from a human reaction away as one might wish, that this was far more conscious and socially advanced than even I would have expected, and I’m someone who tends to see us humans as animals as well, instead of something up the hierarchical, conscious letter. If that would have been a human being hunted down by some far more advanced being then itself, we would behave the same: we would run away and afterwards cry out in pain and search for the person we’ve lost on the way… That might just be the moment which is the most haunting and left the biggest impression in a day filled with life-altering impressions.

That happened as we waited for another hunter with a dog. After they found the deer we had visible confirmation of what the deer in the distance gave us confirmation of already. He landed the shot, the deer ran another 50 meters, until it collapsed between some bushes. By now an hour and some had passed until the shot (later I would find out we even sat there for 2 hours waiting until the shot, those flew by even quicker).

So, I had that “accomplished”. The witnessing of the killing wasn’t as hard as I imagined it. Also packing up and interacting with the dead deer didn’t strike me as gross or anything. I didn’t hesitate to touch it. But I had a hard time believing it to be dead in the beginning, because it still looked so… in lack of a better word I have to say alive. It looked still alive. It wasn’t moving, it’s pupils turned grey, and still I was expecting it to jump up and run away any second. I somehow expected it to be not as vibrant with color as I saw it before me, somehow I assumed that some of it’s color would just fade away the moment it stops to breathe, that it would look observably different the moment it’s dead. It’s really hard to explain, but I hope I bring the point across.

Afterwards we drove with our “prey” to a place where we would be able to take the deer apart. That was where I assumed the really hard part would be — the gutting.

Two years ago I took apart a whole, already gutted and skinned rabbit. I didn’t get nauseated, but I felt it in my stomach. Severing the limps and the head (the skinned head) left me feeling a little weak in my stomach. According to this experience I thought this would be the part where I run into serious problems and I was almost as sure about this as the earth is round.

But also that didn’t happen. I won’t go into more details here. Just that it was really messy because the shot did some more damage internally than one would wish for (even though it was almost a perfect shot). And I could interact with that part of the experience just as well as I did with the previous. Where I assumed to be disgust or hesitation I helped as much as I could. I was a little more cautious, because I didn’t know where to grab what exactly and how strong I have to grab it, but nevertheless I participated without any struggle or any nausea.