Killing Chickens

One comes to have a very different outlook on life when one lives on a farm. Of course, that statement in itself belies my bias - the "standard" perspective is not living on a farm. Well, here's what I find - at slaughter time, the animals are just sort of random - you capture whatever 10 chickens you can, and you put them in a cage. The next day, you pull them out in whatever order they happen to come out, and you slaughter them. In one sense, each of those animals is an individual. But in another sense, they are all just chickens. We haven't slaughtered any larger animals yet, and I'm kind of curious to see what that will be like. With a pig or a goat or whatever, if you have only a few, you can't help but know them as individuals. How do you get past the individualism of the animal then?

So as I start to acclimate myself to this life, I wonder how very different are the perspectives of those who grow up this way - the meaning of life and death, the meaning of our existance, all that stuff must come out very differently. As I said to Patti a couple months back, I think that this is much closer to the way God wants man to live. One can't even understand the bible without having an intimate understanding of herding animals, and slaughtering, und so weiter.