So I saw some chickens get butchered the other day. First time, for both of us.

I never thought the ’slaughter’ part of farming would bug me much. But it did. Not so much the chicken going head first into a cone and getting its throat slit, nor the blood, nor it thrashing for awhile after it was “dead”, nor the nifty wheel that flicked the feathers off and made the awkward corpse dance, nor the high-school biology fest at dissection time, nor even the large bucket of feet, lungs, and other undesirable features of the late poultry. No, all these details, though fresh and arresting, were quickly put in the Normal For Farming File, somewhere between manure and backache. What bothered me was the idea.

You take a bird that can’t fly and can barely peck, and you decide its life is over. That’s it. You are master of life and death. Sounds straightforward to many of us, but in real life you catch the animal and stick a knife in its throat.

It wasn’t the killing I minded, but the helplessness of the victim. I think it’d have been different if I was shooting a grown bear or even a pig. Granted, the animal hasn’t much chance against a gun, but it’s bigger than I am and could do me some serious damage if it got the chance. Whereas unless the chicken gets a shot at my eyes, it’s putty in my hands. (Not that I did it myself yet. So far I’ve just watched.) For the first time in my life, I think, killing animals for food seemed cruel. Yikes. The instant vegetarian.

And yet what was the alternative? Plants? More than once I had looked down a row of salad mix and gotten the creeps. Salad mix is about as defenseless as life forms get, with the possible exception of computer programmers. Who knows what they (salad mix) feel when the knife slides through?

Actually, that’s a bad example because salad mix plants grow back, but it’s not like we give them a lethal injection before we plow them under. Why should plants get less compassion simply because they remind us less of ourselves? Someday, I thought, a vegetarian would have to explain that to me. My vegetarian period abruptly ended.

Meanwhile, I realized, unless I was prepared to subsist on windfallen fruit, my life was going to continue only by other’s deaths. I’d already “known” this, but once in awhile, like when you first see a chicken get it, that’s hard to deal with.

But if I managed to avoid killing my food, I would be the exception. All other animals and plants prey on each other, generally on those weaker than themselves. If butchering is cruel, the whole world is cruel.

So as I watched the next chicken go and heard the final squawk, I consoled myself with the thought that this was probably quicker than getting shredded by a hawk. Or eaten by its penmates.

The “Circle of Life” — a rather tame metaphor for unceasing bloodshed. But then, it’s unceasing birth, too. And if all the other creatures don’t mind hacking into each other to keep themselves going, there can’t be much wrong with our getting into the act. Back to Nature and all that.