Lessons in Animal Death

The following story was runner-up in the Open Season Awards of the Malahat Review, a literary journal published four times a year by the University of Victoria, BC. The category was Creative Non-Fiction: the story draws from my past, but a few details have been altered - that's the "creative" in the category. A warning for delicate stomachs, some of the content is graphic.

Lessons in Animal Death

My father was an apprentice butcher before he married into a pastoral Roman Catholic family (I was the germ that prompted action) and became a farmer. In one of my earliest memories I’m standing on the slats of the woolshed pen before a sheep carcass hanging by its fetlocks from a twinned hook, watching my father at work. The whick-whick, whick-whick as he sharpened his knife, the blade flickering from one edge to the other. The peeling of the pelt, exposing flesh and fat, a mottled map of bluish veins that only moments earlier had pulsed with life. The neat incision as he made a vertical cut down the middle of the animal. The iron-rich taint in the air. My fascination with the innards, the coil of intestines, the pink flaps of lung, the dark shapes of kidneys and liver, the blood oozing from the ventricles of the heart. My father equating these organs with the hidden contents of my own belly. I watched as my father pulled the guts from the sheep, the intestines tumbling over themselves into a bucket. He separated the organs we ate, liver and kidneys for us, heart for the cat, placing them in a stainless steel bowl. I touched the intestines, marvelling at their heat, the residue of life.
     I don’t recall actually witnessing the animal’s death. I was likely too young to witness its final moments, but I’ve seen the slaughter enough times since to know what’s involved: knife blade slicing into the throat, the audible separation of windpipe, carotid artery, jugular vein, blood hissing free, and the final, irrecoverable snap as the neck is broken. How disassociated are the shoppers who pick up the neat plastic pack of beef steaks or lamb chops in the grocery store from the moment of death that brought them their meat?
     The farm house was a kilometre from the bus stop, a little shed with a bench seat, its back to the prevailing winds off the Pacific, by the highway. I cycled the narrow sealed road that ran alongside our farm’s boundary, past the tadpole pond and our neighbour's place with the dizzying rope swing. On the other side of the road were a scattering of small houses, mostly holiday homes - cribs, we called them - and the cliffs that fell to the rocky shore below. Beyond was the broad surface of the ocean. I cycled to a widow’s cottage near the bus-stop each school day, left my bike in her woodshed, and walked the last stretch to wait for the big red school bus. I was young, only six years old, making that journey alone. A less anxious age, perhaps, New Zealand in the eighties, but my father worried nevertheless.
     I don’t remember when he taught me about strangers and cars, but it was probably that year, when I waited for the school bus alone beside the highway. His words have stayed with me all the years since, cruel words, containing nightmarish images. I was told never to enter a stranger’s vehicle, that strangers would take me in their vehicles to their homes. There they would hang me up from a butcher’s hook, do to me what my father did to a slaughtered sheep. When I think of his words now, I see my wrists pierced by hooks, my skinned body, intestines cascading from my belly. Then, my mind was elastic, a child’s mind, on to the next curiosity. As a farmer’s son I understood in some inchoate form death’s immediacy. A stillborn lamb discovered on a hillside or a lamb struck down by a freezing cold front. The corpse of a ewe found, rotting flesh, exposed bone, wads of durable wool scattered about, dead from disease or ailment unknown. There was a lesson in my father’s words - stranger’s car, don’t - I absorbed. The images were vivid, but they shock the mature me, not my six-year-old self.

I remember the day the dog died. It was during the summer holidays, after my first or second year of high school. Different farm, different father, the next decade. I was a passenger in the farm truck; my step-dad’s dad was driving. We had a couple of dogs on the back of the truck, heading out to muster a thousand-acre block. My mother was ahead of us, riding a motorcycle, avoiding the dust thrown up by the truck’s passage along the dry gravel road. My step-dad was following on his motorcycle. We hadn’t reached the creek bridge, barely a kilometre from the homestead, before there was a yelp and a thump. One of the dogs had slipped off the side of the truck. The chain tethering its collar to the back of the truck’s cab prevented the dog from leaping clear of the vehicle. Instead, the animal was dragged under the rear tire of the truck. The truck stopped and we got out. The dog lay on its side in the dust. My step-dad pulled up on his motorcycle. The two men stood over the dog. The sun beat down, before noon but already relentless. Their conversation was resigned, mundane even. The dog sucked in short, shallow breaths. A skim of red lined the dog’s mouth and its eyes were fixed, docile, surrendering already to its fate. I imagined its injuries, crushed organs, shattered ribs, snapped spine.
     The two farmers, one nearing retirement, the other on the verge of assuming his father’s role, had seen or caused the death of animals many times before. The death of a dog was different. Sheep, cows, pigs, ducks - these were all protein with varying flavours. Bovine clumsiness and the mobbing mindlessness of sheep inspired little respect. They were, in the final analysis, products of their business. These farmers respected a dog’s obedience, its intelligence and loyalty. Here the dog wasn’t “man’s best friend,” it wasn’t a pet. The dog was an employee, sheltered, fed and in return worked hard, but worked hard in a pursuit it relished, the herding and driving of animals. There was companionship, but this dog, dying on the road, had never been invited into its master’s home. It was a work dog and had its place. Its death was regretful, like any avoidable cost to a business. These men were not sentimental about such matters - the nature of their occupation didn’t allow for soft-hearted emotion. If the dog had served many years there may have been more feeling in their voices, but the dog had barely shed its puppy shape, the too-big paws and oversized ears, and its youthful excitability, its inexperience, had contributed to its fall.
     My mother arrived; after noticing the truck was no longer following her, she had turned back. The scene she saw was this: two men and a lad, standing under the baking sun around a dog lying in dust, hoarsely breathing its last. My mother was livid. She yelled at the men for standing there and doing nothing. She asked where the rifle was (in the truck), whether there was ammunition (yes). Her response was to end the dog’s suffering - “putting the animal out of its misery,” they called it - but despite her words she stood there with the men, berating her husband as the dog died. There was no sudden convulsion or frothy gush of blood from the mouth. The dog exhaled one moment and didn’t inhale in the next. We stood as life fled its eyes. Some years later, reading Hemingway, the imagery of the corrida recalled this memory, stamped indelibly on my mind. I felt the potency of this small moment in time, the death of the dog, the vehemence of my mother, the resignation of the two men, the heat and the dust. The dog was dragged to the side of the road, to be picked up later and disposed of, and we continued with our work.

When I was seventeen one of my subjects that academic year was agriculture. During the year we attended a seminar produced by the Accident Compensation Corporation, a government entity, on farm safety awareness. Farmers were renown for ignoring occupational health and safety guidelines in their workplace; one of the ACC’s responses was to educate their children. The seminar included common causes of death or injury in a variety of agricultural fields, with a focus on all-terrain vehicles, the “single most common cause of work-related fatalities,” often involving children, as well as the unsafe practices surrounding heavy machinery use. Case-studies were presented. We saw photographs of destroyed bulldozers and turned-over tractors, chain-saw wounds and the injuries sustained in ATV accidents.
     Some of the images were graphic. The most shocking was of an unguarded drive-shaft attached to a tractor’s power take-off. I don’t remember the implement attached to the tractor, perhaps a baler of some kind, because the eye was drawn to the drive-shaft. Wrapped around the shaft was the body of a man. We learned that the man’s sweater had caught on the operating shaft - because there was no guard - pulling him into the rapid, inexorable rotation of the shaft. His body was twisted, broken, reduced to a spiral of inanimate flesh wrapped around a heart of mechanical metal. The photograph printed itself on my mind, not because it was a dead body, but because the dead body was barely human-like. The limbs, the torso and head, had been spun into a solid mass, a coil of killed animal.
     I was at university when a farmer from my home district died in a similar fashion. Unguarded drive-shaft, loose clothing, dead farmer. I didn’t know him but my mother and step-dad did. They were surprised at the manner of his death, but talked more about the family he left behind, a wife and two young children, what their options for the future were. The memory of the image from the seminar was forefront in my mind. What, if anything, were his last thoughts? What was the length of time between his sleeve getting caught and his brain being corkscrewed? A second? Time for surprise, regret? Did his mind slow in the instant of his capture, like the compression of dream narratives, allowing the entirety of his life to flash before his eyes? And what was the lesson I took from his death? That death can strike at any time/ergo carpe diem/live each moment to its potential?
     No. The lesson was: don’t operate an unguarded drive-shaft. And: we are all animals. Despite our attempt to separate humankind from other animal species, through language, the trappings of culture and technology, Italian suits and literature and fine red wines and beach resorts and cellular phones, despite our propensity for violence, for causing the death of other animals, we bleed the same as sheep, we breathe our last like that dusted dog.