People often visit and after seeing how sweet the animals are and how much I love them, wonder how we can possibly eat them. Especially my vegetarian and vegan friends, who are numerous since I grew up vegan as well. The answer is that after many years of very limited animal products, my health started to seriously decline. No amount of beans and broccoli could help me. I was desperate and tried everything I could think of. I eventually found the Weston A. Price Foundation and experimented with adding more animal products to my diet. It helped!

Learning to eat meat after a whole lifetime of abhorring it was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and I actually still don't eat much meat. I mostly nourish myself with bone broth, eggs, and dairy, in terms of animal foods. But all those health problems are history! From the very beginning of adding in the animal products, I knew I would never want factory farmed meat so I sought out local, grass-based farms. Pretty quickly it became clear we wanted to raise our family in the country and I'd always intended to be a farmer (not of food animals, originally). That was pretty much that.

This is a big question, and one that people of integrity come to different answers on, in my opinion. On the one hand cattle and sheep and hogs aren't really different from the dogs and horses many of us love and would never eat. On the other hand, carnivores are a natural part of our world's ecosystem and our physiology and history make it clear that our ancestors ate at least some, and sometimes mostly, animal products. 

Then there is the question of whether it is spiritually right. Maybe this answer is different for different people. For me, I have pondered this a lot in prayer / meditation and I recently received a message that these animals we eat signed up for a trade. We (the farmers) would protect them from predation, hunger, and suffering so that they can focus on their spiritual work and in exchange they feed us. I was told that holding up my end of this bargain means I need to change a few things. The first is that I need to be actively sending them love when I am caring for them and other times: just raining love down on the land I steward and all the occupants, for as much time every day as possible. I've been working on this. The second is that I need to do a ritual when I am going to harvest them, and that it can be a bit in advance of the actual event, which makes it much more logistically feasible. I'm still working on the details of this, but going forward this will be a regular part of raising these beautiful beings.

In Summary,

I struggle regularly with the reality of eating animals. Living an agrarian life, however, I am always witnessing the predators around me: hawks, owls, foxes, snakes and more, living on the bodies of others without regret or guilt (as far as I can tell). In fact, the ecology of our world relies on this cycle called the food web. Without predators, prey species would overpopulate the world, eat all their food supplies and starve en masse. We all feed other species in the end, whether it is worms and fungi in the soil directly, or by cycling through a fox or a person before rejoining the soil.

In addition, many small animals are killed in the process of growing grains and vegetables. Only people unaware of the realities of agriculture, or growing all their own food at home could believe that nobody is killed in the production of salads and pasta.

It is my belief that the real choice isn't between omnivorism and veganism but between supporting the industrial food conglomerates with their polluting factory farms and factories or the local, small-scale food network comprised of good people caring for the land. When it comes to animal foods, supporting the right farmers can mean building a healthier body, a healthier economy, and a healthier ecology - because animals can be and want to be happy agents of healing land and sequestering carbon if they are given the chance.

The second photo was taken by a fabulous professional photographer whose website is: olivinefox.com