I do believe there is a good way to keep animals enclosed in fences, happy and loved, if hardly free. Like a dog can be tummy-up sun-soaking pleased, tethered to the hemlock on the east edge of the scruffy yard, a goat or duck can be living their best life under the care of a human who will eventually end their lives with a swift slice and be nourished by tender flesh and succulent bones.
I wish sometime to live in a place where the animals I take in have so much room, that the fences will feel more like subtle one-way streets than muddy urban backyards. Soul-stretched limbs wake to sunlight on food, their lives can go around with the wind, and mine can be molded around their milking cycles, their needs for new pasture, their understanding of weather approaching.
Keeping animals thus far has been like a gritty salad, unwashed and earthy but with bursts of flavor, and with strides in learning and understanding. I have salted stubborn mats of manured hay with harsh, irritated tears, and gasped as a machete took feathered lives on the wooden block behind the goat house. And when we pushed the two girls up the ramp to the slaughterhouse, where gruff and gentle hands tugged them from us and to wherever they were going next, I wished there had been less fence, and more freedom. More scratching behind the ear, more seeing each other's inner selves through the shiny layers of eyeball cells.
This year, the pallets lay in jagged angles, where the lives of girthy oaks and beeches slammed to the ground by the whirr of the chainsaw in preparation for building. Now the contents of the freezer slowly drain into my bones, and my cells awaken from years of vegetarianism: Their flesh feels right in my body.
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