Correspondence
Stephen Jenkinson has reached an epic level of rationalization and superficiality with his response to the letters criticizing his views on killing animals for food [Correspondence, November 2015]. Eating animals is detrimental to our health and harmful to the environment, despite Jenkinson’s protest to the contrary. He even suggests that killing plants is on the same level as killing animals. But there is no equivalent to the obvious grief of animals who’ve lost their young or their mates, and their terror as they hear the sounds of death in the slaughterhouses.
Bob Gotch
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California
Stephen Jenkinson’s claim that death “doesn’t burden your life. It animates your life” is in tune with the conventional wisdom that we should accept death. But people vary. As an atheist who loves life and is convinced there is no afterlife, I dread my own end and intend to postpone it by all available technology if I become terminally ill. Don’t push me to bow out naturally!
Felicia Nimue Ackerman
Providence, Rhode Island
I have always felt we don’t give dying the respect it deserves, but Stephen Jenkinson helped me realize the immensity of the problem [“As We Lay Dying,” interview by Erik Hoffner, August 2015]. I am a hospice volunteer and see people — both patients and families — who should know it is the end yet refuse to believe this is so. I respect Jenkinson’s work and the wisdom he shares with the world.
Lynn Mack
Clarksville, Georgia
Stephen Jenkinson brings a depth of understanding by confronting the mind-numbing consumerism that deadens our nation’s spirit. I had a chance to hear him speak in Chicago and felt the calm and strengthening one feels when truth is explored, revealed, and given up as a gift for any to take as their own. He has a mind that is in constant conversation with his heart and soul: a learner and a doer.
Nancy Nitto Onderdonk
Chicago, Illinois
When Stephen Jenkinson describes his spiritual practice as farming animals, he says that feeding them well is a “subtle exchange” for slaughtering them. But we don’t need to eat animal flesh or the products of their bodies to be healthy. Breeding and murdering sentient beings that don’t want to die, and stealing their babies and their milk, is a chilling “spiritual practice” indeed.
Joanne Ehret
Belchertown, Massachusetts
Stephen Jenkinson responds:
It is in keeping with these times — and the death phobia so persistent in them — that the discussion of death on the farm draws more ire than anything else. Would that people be as roused by the mayhem that gathers at human dying.
The reality of small-scale mixed farming is that the life of animals is mandatory for the plant, soil, and human health upon which they rely. Animals mitigate the need for chemical fertilizers and the like. The apartheid of sentiment that criticizes the purposeful killing of animals on the farm and condemns those who attend to it typically extends no similar critique of the equally mandatory killing of plants. Life does not sustain life, friends. That is death’s job. Farmers who domesticate animals agree to take upon themselves the spirit burden of replacing the natural predators which attend all animals’ lives, and which enforce animal health through the culling of the weak and the sick and the numerous. When honor and devotion are present, as they must be, farmers visit death upon those animals in a way that is no more or less arbitrary than the way it would have happened in the wild. The abattoir is a rupture of this covenant.
The spiritual practice of farming, and of eating food produced by the labors of those who farm, brings all of us into a burdened kinship that hoists us upon the red hook or the green hook of being alive.
Stephen Jenkinson says he tries to offer his farm animals “close to a fair deal” for what he asks of them, including “that they more or less submit to the knife or the bullet when the time comes.” But it’s a stretch to think of an animal looking at its executioner as “submitting.” What else is the poor critter to do?
There’s a simple way to avoid making such a deal: don’t kill animals. Eating meat is only part of what Jenkinson identifies as our debt as fortunate members of a consumerist society, but to me the debt feels lighter if meat consumption is minimized.
Coyd Walker
Scottsbluff, Nebraska
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