My family loves to tell a story about me as a girl growing up on a small farm in northern Minnesota. It is told, I think largely to connect, through an unspoken code, to people who grew up eating the animals they raised and to shock those who have not. It is also no doubt told to poke fun at me, the little girl who played with goats but got above her raising by getting a Ph.D. It is also likely to remind me where I came from so I don't forget. Fortunately, they tell it often enough so that there is no danger of that.
The story goes like this: one Sunday in the fall of the year, after butchering season, my mother placed a roast on the table. She wasn't the best at cooking the goats who had spent their entire lives running around our farm and it usually turned out a bit dusty and required the application of a lot of gravy. She'd been raised on a farm like her mother before her and her mother and grandmother and great grandmother in unbroken lines to the land in Denmark, Norway and Germany. The meat required gravy, not just because my mother learned to roast meat by cooking beef and pork, which has a very different fat content from goat; It was also hard to cook well because it was tough from a life lived in pursuit of me.
This particular year had netted us nine kids from our four does in an unprecedented year of triplets. Born in the frigid darkness of March in Minnesota my mother helped deliver them into clean and dry bedding, dried them with towels, guided the shaky babies to the udder and sat back with a lump in her throat at the miracle of life. Daisy, our oldest and wisest doe, a Nubian with a riot of black, brown and white spots gave birth to three boys that year, who I named Buttons, Beans and Bow.
As a kid on a farm, I had jobs. So, through the spring, I bottlefed them from a five-gallon bucket equipped with nipples. They came running when they saw me coming. They drained it in seconds, down on their knees, tails furiously flying. The does produced hundreds of pounds of milk that year: enough for us, the young goats, the neighbors and to make a little cheese. On this diet of fat, sugar and protein they quickly grew into fifty-pound monsters. By mid-summer, I set the bucket down and ran. When we weaned them off milk and started feeding them alfalfa pellets, they chased me anyway, jumping on my back, bouncing off with glee and mobbing me on the ground when I fell.
Nine of them.
For reference: a full-grown Nubian boat weighs more than a hundred pounds, can jump on top of a car (eat the top off of it too, by the way) and standing on their back feet, can reach over ten feet tall.
So, it was to my family's deep and enduring amusement that when I poured gravy over the roast on my plate, I queried, without a trace of remorse, "Was this Buttons, Beans or Bow?"
It is possible to truly love one's animals, to give them a truly good life and to also eat them.
In fact, it's the only way we should.