Let’s talk about hunting philosophy. Let’s use, as a jumping-off point, a piece on yesterday’s New York Times op-ed page by a man named Seamus McGraw. You can read it for yourself, but if you’re not inclined, I can pass along the important bits. The piece is a justification both of deer hunting, and of [...]
How to cook your Thanksgiving turkey: Step One
November 19, 2011 By 13 Comments
I was very small when my mother explained death to me. Everything alive eventually dies, she told me. Pets, plants, grandmothers. You and me. And it is death, she has always said, that makes life precious. But that’s not strictly true. It isn’t death that makes life precious. It’s knowledge of death. Something our six [...]
Goodbye, Cat
October 15, 2011 By 19 Comments
Today we put down our cat, Cat. She was seventeen, and her kidneys failed. For the last few days, she nested in a towel on a table on the porch, leaving it only to eat a few bites and pee on the floor. She didn’t appear to be acutely miserable, but she clearly wasn’t well. [...]
Death, again
July 14, 2011 By 12 Comments
It never bloody ends. Rocky, our smallest chick, so named because she was both a barred rock and an underdog, got picked off by a hawk. She had a beak problem, either a deformity or an injury, that apparently made it tough to eat, and her development lagged behind. Still, she was growing. She was [...]
Death, continued
July 6, 2011 By 12 Comments
One of our turkey poults died and, for the first time, I was upset by a livestock death. The poults were big enough that we put them in the all-purpose poultry pen, which had been vacated by the ducks a week earlier. We’d cleaned out the house and the sheltered area under it, but the [...]
Lessons of Duck Day
June 29, 2011 By 9 Comments
I know that death is a part of my life when going from killing sick chickens to killing healthy ducks feels like a step into the light. There’s a difference between killing a sick animal because you don’t want to it to suffer or contaminate the rest of your flock, and killing a healthy animal [...]
Death central
June 27, 2011 By 13 Comments
6/28 Update: Chicken Little was showing some of the same signs that Droopy had, and Kevin wanted to check if there was fluid in her lungs. He turned her upside down and, sure enough, a little fluid dripped out her beak. And then she just died. Because there was fluid in her lungs, we probably [...]
Mark Zuckerberg and me
May 29, 2011 By 5 Comments
Seems I have a lot in common with the founder of Facebook. He’s young, famous, and unfathomably rich. I’m … well … Okay, maybe “a lot” overstates it. But when the one thing you have in common is that you’re slitting the throats of animals, it seems like more than if, say, you’re both Libras. [...]
Get well soon
April 29, 2011 By 11 Comments
4/30 Update: Despite several warm baths and one attempt, by me, to make tactile sense of what’s on the nether side of a chicken’s vent, our chicken remains the same. If there’s no change tomorrow, we may have to take that most drastic of measures. Thank you for all your good wishes, and for the [...]
Deer, 4: Kevin and Tamar, 0
December 6, 2010 By 22 Comments
I ask forbearance from those of you who are tired of, put off by, or simply uninterested in deer hunting. The season ends this coming Saturday, and then I promise I’ll be back to chickens, shellfish, vegetables, and variety. In the meantime, though, it’s all deer all the time. When I signed up for my [...]
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