Shannon Hayes

My teenage years presented very few viable options for satisfactory adolescent rebellion. Children of children of the sixties often find themselves in this conundrum. Alcohol wasn’t taboo. Drugs and cigarettes were dismissed as over-rated; protest was actually encouraged; and while recreational necking posed some thrill, the reduced gene pool of a rural school automatically rendered teenage sex an unattractive option. How does a third generation farm girl satisfactorily piss off her parents?

I became a vegetarian. Sort of. Long aware of the butchering process, I knew the pungency of sheep viscera, the facts about chopping off chicken heads, the importance of using stun guns prior to slaughtering a steer. But at 14, the taking of another creature’s life for food became cause for alarm.

Dad was chair of the animal science department at SUNY Cobleskill. He was also in charge of the school’s slaughterhouse. Vegetarianism was just the ticket for inspiring genuine parental fury.

Dinner on the night I announced my decision was a dangerous scene. Mom’s meatloaf was heaved across the table as I endured Dad’s irate lectures about the human digestive tract, our nutritional need for animal fats and proteins, about the function of my canine teeth. My concerns about animal cruelty were met by frenzied rants. The veins in Dad’s neck throbbed as he pronounced that the animals don’t truly suffer; that they don’t have the same hang ups about life and death that plague humans, that killing is part of our survival.

Only years later do I understand the emotions behind his anger. No farmer raises livestock because he takes joy in their death. Farmers choose their vocations because they enjoy life, because they like animals. Death, whether by slaughter or by accident, takes an emotional toll on any farmer, no matter how stoic they may seem. Dad had all the same questions I did, but he’d never had to answer them for a recalcitrant teenager, and he never imagined defending his livelihood to his daughter. Nevertheless, a high schooler is no match for a pissed off Ph.D., especially when he happens to be her father. Combat weary, I offered a compromise and became a meat-eating vegetarian.

I quietly accepted meat at home for the sake of keeping the peace at dinner, but refused it everywhere else. Meals out I ate pasta or pizza. I eschewed McDonald’s, steered clear of the high school cafeteria line, and ate peanut butter by the bucketful. Dad was aware of this, and attempted to honor the peace treaty I offered. Still, from time to time, he’d confront me on my decision, and grow exasperated with my insolence. This adolescent rebellion was profoundly effective. I wasn’t just rejecting meat. I was rejecting my father’s life.

My boycott didn’t last a year. Ruth, our elderly neighbor who farmed up the road, inadvertently terminated it. A surrogate grandmother to me, her farmhouse was my second home during the summers as I mowed her lawns, mended the fence for her grazing cattle, helped to clear the water lines, cut thistles, put up hay, and took her to do her grocery shopping and visit her neighbors. I was highly averse to conventional teenage employment, and seeing where I chose to spend my days, my parents didn’t question the aversion. I reveled in the fields that surrounded Ruth’s mountain farmhouse. One evening, before I walked home, we sat out on lawn chairs and listened to the quiet chomping as the cows stepped forward from their shady retreats for an evening graze. I looked out across her land as a mist drifted in from the surrounding hills, my own family’s farm, and felt myself lulled into deep thought by the tempo of the crickets.

My rejection of meat was ostensibly on the grounds of animal cruelty. But sitting in the safety of my neighbor’s meadow, I understood I was turning my back on more than that. The hills surrounding Ruth’s farm could never grow corn or cabbage. Nor could the hills surrounding my own family’s land, nor those surrounding those farms who neighbored us to the south – the Nevins, the Spangenburgs, the Clappers. I wasn’t just rejecting my parent’s livelihood. I was turning my back on my community’s way of life.

In an era that worshipped industrial farming and row crops, the farms of West Fulton were deemed by our county government at that time as marginal. Our steep hillsides are dangerous for cultivation, and the frequent frosts promise little in exchange for the effort and peril. The farms of West Fulton could grow livestock, and no modern technology could improve the way we did it, or offer any other opportunity for living off the land. If my life would be in these hills, my life would be about meat. I could pursue dairy, but bulls don’t give milk. I could raise chickens, but roosters don’t lay eggs.
“Ruth?” I broke the silence between my neighbor and me.
“Hmm?”
“How do you fix meatloaf?”

To this day, I am not able to take a knife to an animal’s throat. Nor do I have the emotional fortitude to swat a fly, step on a caterpillar, or put a worm on a fish hook. Dad does. He can also shoot a suffering sheep, swiftly ring the neck on a dying chicken, trap an owl that preys on our turkeys, and put a bullet in the head of a rabid raccoon. Despite my inability to do any of these things, he welcomes me on the land. He makes it clear that I do not have to kill to be part of the family business. There is more to farming than slaughter. There’s bookkeeping, marketing, canning, meat cutting. And most importantly, at noontime, there’s often good meatloaf.