Animal Husbandry: The evolutionary reason why it's so hard

A few years back, a government agency promoting the American agrarian ideal shipped baby chickens and piglets to Koyukon Indian villagers- people who have been hunters, trappers, and fishers all their lives. Some folks took to the notion, built pens, raised healthy pigs and successful flocks, and eventually found eggs under their hens. That's when things started going awry. After watching the chickens grow, many couldn't bring themselves to eat the eggs, and it was even worse to think of dining on the birds or pigs. "People felt like they'd be eating their own children," a Koyukon woman told me. "A lot of them said, from now on they would only eat wild game they got by hunting. It felt a lot better that way.

That's from the excellent Heart and Blood by Richard K. Nelson. I actually recommend this book more to former vegans than I do The Vegetarian Myth, because it's an incredibly well written eco-humanistic journey through our place in nature. I've been meaning to give it one big post, but it's hard to do because it's such an amazing book...so I guess I'll keep doing posts about it until I keep thinking about it. 

Having experience with farming, I can say that there are animal husbandry methods that make me uncomfortable. People make much ago about foie gras, but they would find other more common methods just as distasteful if they were exposed to them. But they aren't. People live in a fantasy land where Bessie the cow gets retired to Green Acres when her milk production goes down and chickens die a painless death for McNuggets.

Knowing what I know about human evolution, my uncomfortableness with animal husbandry makes sense. Paleolithic humans may have kept animals, but only as allies like dogs, not as future food. With the domestication of animals comes the issue of killing something you raised yourself, that often bears some resemblance physically or behavioral to your pets and children.

I've had this problem in particular with goats. Domestic goats, unlike sheep or chickens, often crave human contact and react towards humans in a way similar to dogs. I think most of my readers would have a hard time slaughtering a domestic goat, even if they have pretensions against sentimentality. I've known goat dairy farmers to cry when sending away the male kids who have been born so they can be raised for meat. Although this disconnect and unhappiness among farmers has certainly gotten worse since the USDA mandated all slaughter for sale for non-poultry animals be done in a USDA inspected slaughterhouse that is usually unpleasant and far away from the farm.

I think it's partially a recognition of this inappropriate relationship that humans now have with animals that more and more people are interested in hunting from former vegans to Betty Fussell, an 82-year old NYC food writer who I met at a hunting workshop.