Butch

by Bruce Schimmel

I’m going to buy me a steer. Not a whole one, just half an animal, but that’s still a pretty big piece of meat. And meat he shall be, because I intend to cook and consume him over a period of several months.

I shall call him Butch, because I want it clear from the outset -- to me, not Butch -- that he is livestock born to be butchered and not a pet to be loved. I know that by giving him a name I will be breaking one of the cardinal rules of raising animals for slaughter.

But Butch he shall be, because I intend to look both him and myself in the eye and take moral responsibility for being an avid carnivore. I shall try not to hide from either his gaze or my own.

I got the idea for Butch from Michael Pollan, who wrote an article called "Power Steer" in a recent New York Times Magazine. Pollan also bought a steer, and in the article he traces his journey from birth to gamboling in the grass to the feedlot awaiting slaughter. (For some reason, the story cuts off before Michael's steer becomes meat.)

Along the way, we learn how most of the supermarket beef we eat is adulterated by steroids of dubious safety, antibiotics that breed superbugs, and by feedlots thick with manure and leeching disease.

Supermarket beef is meat made in a factory system that is every bit as dangerous and polluting as any heavy industry spewing toxins. My steer's life will be different from Pollan's. Butch will also begin life gamboling and grazing in the grass, but that's where he will stay until his demise, which will be swift. My steer will not be pumped up, disinfected, fattened to grotesque size and mired in his own manure. As a steer's life goes, Butch's should be relatively healthy, both for him and for us.

In fact, if you analyze the environmental impact of a steer that grazes on grasses (as Pollan's did in his article), Butch's life should be benign.

So having taken ecological issues out of the equation, my steer's life and demise will be more of a moral journey. Not for him, but for me. A moral journal that some might view as dangerous, if you subscribe to the notion that human beings, left unchecked, will decline into sadism and bloodlust. Such would be the view that some hold of those who hunt, or even fish. But it is not my view, at least for the moment.

We shall see. To be frank, I have yet to meet my steer. But I have found a butcher in rural Delaware who raises such animals for slaughter, and I expect to encounter Butch, and start my -- and his -- journey soon.

I hope you'll come along.

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October 7, 2004
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