I believe every person reading this is complicit in the killing and suffering of animals. I do not care to be one of them any more than is necessary, and am getting rid of my lead bullets in favor of copper or a safer  substance for euthanizing the animals on the farm. Here’s why and how i came to the decision:

The animal world, like the media and political world, lives and feeds off of electronically-transmitted hysterias, most of which turn out to be exaggerated, misapplied, or simply false. Very few dogs are stolen from their owners in America, very few children are kidnapped by strangers, very few dogs die of heat stroke in cars, and very few, if any, refugees are terrorists.

And very few animals are known to suffer from eating shot chicken thrown over a fence into the woods.

That most people don’t know or believe these things testifies to the power of hysterias to guide our ideas and emotions.

Hysterias abound, all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials, they are a part of us, and anyone with a Facebook account can make a  busy life out of transmitting them. If I listened to one tenth of the warnings I get every day about my dogs, I would move them into a concrete bunker and feed them oatmeal and raw animal meat.

I know I am defensive and wary. If they were all true, my dogs and I would be dead many times over.

It is not good to be defensive and wary, to think in America one has to pick and choose about which hysteria to pay attention to on any given day It is not a simple process. For me, dignity and real thought is personal, private and solitary, I don’t get it online, I am allergic to drama and hysteria. I am a freak in our world.

So let’s talk about the death of a chicken.

___

I’ve lived on farms for more than a decade now and one of my sacred responsibilities is to help my animals to end their suffering and leave the world with dignity and comfort. To that end, I have taken responsibility for killing them myself, rather than pay someone else to do it. I believe I owe them that, it is not a distant experience.

I want to see their eyes and blood so it is always real to me.

I take it seriously, feel it deeply,  and over time,it has become almost ritualized for me.

Maria and I do it together, she usually gathers the animal, if it is small, we place it in a safe place, by which I mean the bullets – lead bullets in a .22 cal rifle – can pass through the animal and into padding, such as old and no longer viable hay bales, and  to eliminate the danger of ricochet.

I also do it to make the body ready to be returned to nature with few things inside of it, specifically for the coyotes and foxes that live on the edge of the farm. They have been eating our dead animals for years.

For me a rifle has proven to be the fastest way to kill an animal who is suffering.

I’ve shot sick lambs, ewes, chickens,  and roosters. I always thank them for their time with us and Maria takes it upon herself to carry the bodies out into the woods and return them to the earth. She says her own goodbyes. She is never present during the killing, I am never present out in the woods.

We both believe our way of killing sick animals is the best way for us. We do not ever tell other people how to do it.

I see every day the awful consequences of our human way of dealing with death.

People suffer greatly for many years because our system will not permit them to let go, we soak the last dollar out of them for as long as we can. I am grateful to be able to spare my animals from this fate and also to give something back to nature.

Although I share the process of saying goodbye to one of our animals, I consider it intensely private and personal and spiritual. I am never prepared when a thousand or so people are waiting in line to tell me I did it wrong, or that i should do it the way they do it. I never think this is healthy or useful.

—-

Every time I have killed an animal it has been controversial, whether I do it or a vet does it or a farmer/friend does it. There is always something wrong, say people on the Internet. Guns are too violent, the .22 is too small, the animals should be buried with tombstones, I should have spent more money, they should have been given more time to live, or given medicines and procedures I never heard of,  cannot afford and do not believe in.  

I share my life openly so even this personal and emotional and private ritual draws instant and continuous observations, comments, criticisms and information online. Many people simply commiserate, many people presume to tell me how to kill my animals. People tell me I am asking for it by  being open, obviously this is so.

Yesterday I posted a story about the shooting the Gray Hen, and by now, I just wait for the struggle to start. I can deal with the spiritual stuff later.

This time the issue – the lead poisoning by bullets of the animals here – was fairly new for me regarding farm animals.We just don’t think that way in the country.

A number of my blog readers asked if I was familiar with the dangers of lead poisoning to wildlife and other animals, some suggested I was arrogant for not taking this into account when I shoot animals on the farm. And that I should make sure my bullets had no lead in them.

The conversation was mostly intelligent and civil. There was, as always,  the whiff of self-righteousness and superiority when you think you are good, and everyone else is evil.

—

I confess to being defensive about killing animals, the numbers of all-knowing people with access to free digital messaging grows each day, and instead of saying goodbye to the Gray Hen peacefully, I was, of course, defending my method of euthanasia before the body was cold.

I don’t think defensiveness is a rational or admirable trait, I’m not proud of itl. I don’t want to follow the new and vile American model of rigidity and ideological extremism. I don’t wish to emulate our President or most members of Congress, Democrat or Republican, left or right, or the mobs on Facebook and Twitter.

I wish to listen, grow, learn and change, if possible. This should be a conversation, not a fight. Was I helping?

I am weary of people online rushing to share warnings and alarms about animals, from taking rides with them in the summer to going to vets to eating commercial dog food to the other innumerable dangers they face.

I am aware there are many things that threaten and  kill animals in our world – cars, trucks, climate change, hunters, trappers and poachers, idiots from New Jersey with machine guns, development, crop spraying, the loss of habitats, flooding of environments, use of  gasoline and petrochemicals, human greed,  chemicals in food, giant corporate factor farms, animal rights fanatics. Death from eating shot chickens has never been one of them.

How many of the people reading this have structured their lives, shopping, and personal habits to make sure they are not harming a single animal? Beware of hypocrisy before you lecture anybody else, hypocrisy is the worst kind of evil, and the lowest form of life.

I believe we are all complicit in harming animals, anyone who uses plastic, who cuts the grass on their lawn, who flies a plane, or uses electricity from a solar fan, who drives on a road, who fails to oppose another condo or mall expansion, who claim snakes and turtles are emotional support animals, who turns on an Iphone, who drinks bottled water, who denies climate change or global warming, who thinks pulling a light carriage is cruel to a big horse, or who believes that ponies who give rides to children in farmer’s markets are being tortured.

For many animal lovers, paranoia and alarm are the currency of their relationship with animals. They warn of the dangers of collars, crates, wooden barns, dog food, feed, beets, carrots, milk,  leashes and rawhide. Some people live to warn other people of the dangers to their animals, they want to be the first.

There is no one reading this who has not participated in or enabled the slaughter, dislocation or extinction of animals. I have no right to judge anyone else, and I don’t, I do not tell other people what to do.

—

Last night, I spent several hours checking in with vets I have known and interviewed, read the studies of wildlife experts online and other kinds of animal poisons. I called on a state animal agent who came to our farm after a bear was hit by  a truck.

Here’s what I found.

The issue of lead bullet or other minerals and chemicals harming animals is real.

The Humane Society says an estimated 20 million animals die each year from lead poisoning in one form or another, bullets and through other means. The Humane Society, I learned from the New York Carriage Horse controversy, lies constantly to raise money, and is now little more than a mindless tool, a propaganda adjunct of PETA, much more skilled at taking in money than helping animals.

Vets tell me that lead bullet poisoning in dogs and cats is rare and declining due to federal regulations about lead passed in 1978. I could not find a single vet in my area who had  treated a dog or cat or wildlife animal for lead bullet poisoning. They all did say it occurred  more frequently in other parts of the country, and was increasingly a probably for birds.  (Lead doesn’t just come from bullets, it is in the walls of many private homes, especially in poor neighborhoods.)

It simply is not clear how many animals in rural areas like mine die from eating animals shot by hunters or others. The concern is widespread and growing, the data is sparse.

In the 15 years I have lived here I have never heard of a single instance of an animal dying from eating lead bullets or fragments, and I know a lot of vets and wildlife rangers and agents. It may be that we are simply oblivious up here, but I don’t think so. We know a lot of coyotes too, they are quite hardy and active.

The people most alarmed about lead bullets seem to come, oddly, from urban and populated areas, I have never  heard a farmer or anyone else I know  mention it. And contrary to popular belief, farmers and hunters are animal lovers.

From my reading, it seems clear that the greatest danger from lead fragments in the wild is to birds, much as plastic is killing fish in the oceans. It seems to be pet owners and wildlife biologists and pet owners have taken up the issue most intensely in recent years.

So I was surprised by yesterdays’ animal death controversy.

This fits with my experience, people who own pets and people who own animals have radically different view of animal welfare and care.They do not understand one another thanks to the Internet, which promotes tribes, not communications.

For all that, it is clear that lead bullets and their fragments can and are harmful to animals who eat the carcasses of animals who have been shot with them.

It is also seems to me that there is no reason to risk the life of single animal – birds or other creatures. We are killing enough of them in ways we don’t wish to talk about or face up most of the time. To live in a world that really protects and saves animals, we would have to give up cherished comforts like unlimited driving, unlimited electricity and Internet usage, air travel, giant luxury Cruise Boats, and air conditioning and electric heat.

Much easier to focus on than lead bullets in a chicken and hot cars in sunny weather.

But let’s be  honest.

There is no reason for me to use lead bullets to euthanize my animals, that seems callous and reckless to me. I did consider these messages and think many were valid and written in good faith.

I will dispose of my lead bullets and get one of the the many other kinds that do not threaten animals in this way and are just as efficient. It is the least I can do.

I find it deeply arrogant and offensive for strangers I don’t know to presume to tell me what to do and what practices to adopt. That doesn’t mean they are always wrong, or that I should forego the art of listening. I can’t hope or work for a more compassionate or polarized country if I can’t learn to listen and change myself.

When I can no longer change, it will mark a kind of death for me.

So the great conversation about how we live with animals continues. I shoot sick animals because I have gotten efficient and accurate with my rifle. I shoot animals though parts of their bodies that usually enable the bullet to pass through. I shoot animals to end their suffering.

I believe this is fastest and most humane way to kill suffering sheep and chickens. I call the vets for the donkeys and dogs, I don’t trust myself to kill them instantly with a small-caliber rifle.

If we are ever to live well together, it is imperative that we learn to talk and listen to one another. We live by example, it is not what we say, but what we do. It can’t happen by magic. If I can’t learn to do it, why would anyone else?

I will never accept the right of others to enter my life uninvited and tell me what to think, write or do. I will fight to think for myself. But shutting my ears and eyes to the outside world of people who care about things just as much as I do, is not listening, it is just another way of staying blind and ignorant.

So the Gray Hen gives a final egg and a final gift. Good girl.