Last winter, I had the great good fortune to spend two weeks at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. It is a beautiful artists’ colony set in central Virginia, south of Charlottesville and north of Lynchburg. While I was there, I made many new friends— a composer, two novelists, a film-maker, a painter, several other poets, a cow. Yes, a cow. I called her Martha Jefferson. Our relationship began my second morning at VCCA. Because I need to create rituals to be productive, my habit became that I would eat breakfast early, make a thermos of coffee, then walk to the bottom of the long driveway and back before I settled into my studio for a day of work.
On that second day, as I walked up the driveway, a young cow was standing in the middle of the road, with several others nearby. “Hi, sweetie,” I greeted her. Then the cow walked up to me. I stopped, and she rubbed her head on my thighs and across my torso, she leaned into me. I talked to her and patted her, and she nuzzled me just like one of our dogs. Several times during my stay at VCCA, I had similar encounters with her. Some days I would see her across the field and shout out “hi, Martha.” She’d just look at me, and because I am a newby to cow fellowship, I am not sure whether it was with recognition or not. But, if she was near the road, she would almost always come up and lean into me and rub her head against my legs. When I finally pulled away to go up to my studio, she would stand in the road and watch me walk up the hill.
It was startling. I don’t really know any other cows, so maybe this is just typical cow behavior that I’ve never heard about. But I do know that I found myself hoping that she would be out there each morning. I grew to look forward to our inter-species communion, and I was disappointed if she was further out in the field. The morning I left, I said goodbye to all my human friends and then went out to find Martha. She was there. We visited for a few minutes, I rubbed her head, and I told her goodbye. I’ve thought about her many times since then. I miss her, and I hope she has found other VCCA fellows to scratch behind her ears.
I shouldn’t be surprised really. My relationship with our dogs, Maddie and Bailey, is real—tactile and loyal and familial. We are—in their minds and in mine—part of the same pack. I have had extraordinary experiences with other animals as well—an organ grinder’s monkey that broke away to run through a crowd and jump into my arms, deer coming so close I could touch them. I have caught birds in the house with my bare hands and come eye-to-eye with a raccoon out our bedroom window.
I am not a PETA member, and I have no desire to become a radical, but I am increasingly aware of our relationships with non-human animals. It seems to me that you can tell a lot about a person—and a culture—by how it thinks about and treats other sentient beings. When we discuss the options for gun control, we talk about hunting as a no-brainer. We never question but that we should protect and defend hunting. And maybe we should. I’m on no crusade to ban hunting, but let’s call it what it is: killing.
Just before the holidays, barely a week after the shootings in Newtown Connecticut, I attended a holiday party for Oregon Humanities. At that party, they showed a short film featuring a writer and butcher, Camas Davis. In that film, Davis said that “without the slaughter of animals, we would actually become less human” and that “we need killing in order to understand ourselves.” In some ways, I understand her point—she went on to argue that we are all mortal and fragile and make complex moral choices every day and that we need to look unflinchingly at those choices and their implications. But, I also thought: “I sure hope not.” Because if killing is what makes us human, then of course we kill other defenseless creatures, both human and non-human. If killing defines us, there is no hope to stop the violence and tragedy that we have spiraled into.
I wondered if we might need to rethink that acceptance—and very nearly glorification—of killing and ask ourselves a few more questions. And the answer to those questions may well end up in the killing of animals for food, but I sure hope that that act is not what makes us who we are as a species or as a society.
I haven’t eaten meat or poultry for thirty years, and for most of those years, I have not even really known why. But now, I find myself increasingly reluctant to eat even the small amount of fish I have consumed over the past few years. Believe me, I am singular in this reluctance in my household. Everybody else eats meat and poultry and fish. Bacon is a major food group. I don’t really have any desire to tell anyone else what to do or eat or think. But for me, I know this. I have a friend who is a cow, and for all I know, my next one might be a pig or duck or a salmon.