Part of what comprises the culture of smaller organic farms is the humane treatment of animals - relatively speaking. The animals are given room to move about, given good food to eat, and then slaughtered as quickly and painlessly as possible.
In this case, the target cow was allowed to graze about with its herd, so that there would be relatively no fear at the fateful moment. The cow was shot right between the eyes with a 22 rifle, with the 22 bullet tumbling within the skull, dropping the cow immediately. The other cows were startled by the loud pop, and promptly left the pen when they could, but they then resumed grazing without any clear indication of group trauma, which satisfied those observing. The major arteries in the neck of the felled cow were then slit and the cow was drained there in the pen. The body was taken out into the field, where it was quickly dismantled and loaded into a refrigerated trailer.
This method is preferred to rounding up the desired animals and then shipping them to a local slaughter house, which can be traumatic for those put into transit, and for the group of animals that is separated.
This was a careful and deliberate process, similar in form to an industrial slaughter, but then far removed from industrial aims, and consequently, far removed from industrial results.
In industry, the perfected kill process is bent towards efficiency and the management of large volume: the constant repetition of industrial slaughter turns the workers into machinery themselves, imperfect machinery that grows equally indifferent to animal suffering, and which makes careless mistakes such as carving up the animals needlessly or accidentally boiling them alive among other things. These places become veritable torture chambers, and the corrupting effects of those
places circulate back into society as the workers re-enter it.
There is no real way to determine the nature of suffering of the cow that is shot in the brain and instantly killed among its herd. One cannot get shot in the head and experience what the cow experiences. All that is possible is that any extraneous causes of suffering are eliminated, both in the target cow and that cow's herd, as far as one can perceive those causes and empathize with them. When one is satisfied with the conditions of the slaughter, in accordance with one's own faculties of perception, sensibilities, and world view, then such a cultural practice will continue in its present form.
However, after one's connection to a food source like animal meat is broken, after one is removed from the cultural practices of slaughter, and one only encounters it as a disembodied commodity in the supermarket, then it can be quite a shock to come back into contact with that process.
Upon coming into contact with such a process, an abstraction still occurs: the body of the cow is dismantled and it becomes meat, no longer in the category of a living and breathing thing, a strange thing to witness. But indeed this perception is part of the wound. Through this abstraction, one traces the meat commodity back to the unity: the living cow, its community, its environment, and one feels the pain of that loss; the pain signal finally returns from the wound, that original separation in which the commodity is removed from its birthplace. To heal is to witness this entire chain.
But there is also a gratefulness. One's destruction feeds the maintenance of another's creation. It is this mixture of joy and sorrow that make up a reality which has not been bisected by the operations of capital, and ultimately empire.
