Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

Every now and then a thought or situation will arise that reminds me that farming, livestock farming, has changed me in an important and fundamental way. In my broader life, I am trying to be less black and white, less critical of myself, less dichotomous, so I don’t want to pass judgment on this change, just note it, acknowledge it, bring it to light and let it be there.

When I started farming, I had never killed anything of substance, not really, only insects. I wasn’t one of those kids that ran around with a bb gun shooting birds and other little critters just for fun. In fact, when I was with any of my friends that were doing that, I always looked at the death of the animal as a sort of mini tragedy, a transgression of the sanctity of life. And, even though I did it all of the time, of course, I actually felt bad when I did kill insects.

Then I became a meat animal livestock farmer, who is, of course, a person who raises animals — most often sentient, expressive mammals — for the sole purpose of killing them so that we can eat their flesh. Initially, and still today, this was something of a challenge for me. My feelings about life were and are in direct contradiction to my actions in regards to the lives of those animals, or, more specifically, to their deaths. I am never more than a thought or two away from remembering that I kill for a living.

Over the years, therefore, I have been able to hold onto my discomfort, my uncertainty, my anxiety about raising animals to be killed. I have maintained, to some degree, that little boy’s visceral sadness in the face of death, at the sight, for example of a little robin gasping its last breaths as blood pulsed out of the bb gun hole in its throat, while my friend watched and spoke as the small bird died with an exaggerated sense of bravura.

Nevertheless, something fundamental has changed. When Izzy the Goat died, more or less in my arms, I bawled hysterically. I felt her death in the deepest parts of me. But, then, as the number of animals increased on the farm, first one and then another would occasionally die — of old age, of disease, of troubled birth. I have dragged the bodies of full grown ewes and 200 lb. pigs into the tractor bucket loader and buried them in the compost. I have picked up limp, still slimy and warm, dead lambs, wrapped them in some hay, and dropped them in the wheel barrow to also be buried in the compost.

More than that, I have strangled a pig that was in a coma to kill it, and, recently, I used a gun, a real gun, not a bb gun, to put down two lambs that were in the violent throes of what I was convinced was tetanus, which would have slowly, painfully, and viciously killed them over the course of a few days. The bright red blood oozing out of the holes in their heads onto the dark brown ground is emblazoned on my mind and the thunder of the shots still rings in my ears. That vision is a sort of engraving I carry around with me, a totem, a testimony about my farming life.

All of this death and dying still confronts me as a challenge. But, and this is an important but, my relationship to it has changed. I still care, but I don’t Care. I feel as if my connection to an Ethic of Care has been severed by the degree to which I need to divorce myself from myself in order to live through these bloody, permanent, can-never-go-back moments. I have, as much as I hoped it would never come to pass, become inured, even if only slightly, to death and dying.

In spite of my opening words about judgment, I will say only that the day I loaded those first two pigs on the trailer five years ago, on a very cold February morning with my friend Zach helping me out, I noted the sadness, I noted the apprehension, I noted my sense of loss and longing, and declared that no matter what happened in my farming life, no matter how long I worked at it, no matter how many animals I had killed, killed myself, watched die, and found dead, I would never ever lose my sense of the transgression of the sanctity of life inherent in my actions.

I am writing today to say that in spite of the strength of this desire, the day to day reality of livestock farming has changed me. Death is merely a shadow of what it once was to me. I meet it now with a sort of indifference, and even on occasion disdain. I have become, to put it very bluntly, a killer, something I hoped to never be regardless of the fact that I kill for a living.