Kasey Peters

Captive Bolt Stunner

Kasey Peters

We have done an old sheep today, and so I find myself at the helm of a wheelbarrow of eviscera and skin and hooves and spine that must outweigh me by twenty-odd pounds, stumble-jogging down the terraced slopes of a winter soybean field by the lightlessness of a nearly new moon. I am supposed to be writing, but it is butcher season. It is early November, with light frosts overnight, and days sunny and warm enough to butcher bare-handed in the shed without a propane heater, without going numb.

I am making my precarious way to the ravine in the middle of the section—a square mile of field— where I will wrestle the wheelbarrow to the furrowed edge without letting it go over—or, at the very least, without letting it take me down, too—and therein strew the contents for the coyotes, who will make quick work of my mess, and hopefully less work of our chickens. It is not really a ravine, or, it is not supposed to be, but the farmer whose land this is has never been a great manager, he is not very bright, we say about him, and he has been informed by two decades of maximally extractive university research funded by the major ag corporations, and he is expecting any minute to sell this section for development. He will make a killing. So he has over the past few years removed his erosion buffers, ripped out great swaths of brome grass and flowering herbaceous plants in the drainage-ways of the land, and installed, instead, culverts and bare land bridges, so that he can plant right up to the edge of his narrow waterway and drive his machinery across it. The land bridges and culverts each year are washed out, as tons and tons of silty topsoil flow fast down the fields and into the drainage, widening it, clawing down the banks and cutting deeper and deeper into the ground, some ten feet down and fifteen feet across. And each late spring or early summer the farmer drives into his field a front-end-loader with a grapple on the bucket, often smushing out his just sprouted beans or corn, because he must rebuild his road across his ravine or he won’t be able to get his harvest equipment to the two-thirds of his crop on the other side, and he collects the culverts and re-sets them and dozes great heaps of ravine-river-delta back up the slopes of his land to re-pack his road. If he is lucky, it does not wash out again before harvest. What this management style means for me and my wheelbarrow and our absolutely blackout pilgrimage to the middle of the section is that this year’s late, heavy rains have carved treacherous shadows into the ground where I least suspect them. When the wheel drops into a cut in the land, it halts and tips upward, threatening to heave itself sideways. I do not halt until I collide with the wheelbarrow and cut my shin through my jeans, and it takes the whole weight of me to keep the thing from emptying out. Breathing hard, I am not yet halfway there. I rock and pull and push, attempting to surmount the incline on the other side, but am unable. I can only dislodge the wheel from the furrow by backing up. I turn the wheelbarrow ninety degrees. I use my phone flashlight for a furtive moment to get a look at how far up the slope this washout goes, to see where I will be able to get across before I can come back down and continue. I do this at night without a light because I am not supposed to do it. It’s not our field, after all. This did not used to be much of a problem, because my in-laws’ house used to be one of a half-dozen

residential lots along the edge of this section, which the current farmer’s parents sold off in the 60’s, and on all sides were fields, and there was a general agreement that as long as the residents did not disturb the crop, the residents might play paintball in the long, wide stretches of brome and mulberry with their kids, or sled down the backside of the dam at the far side of the section. Now, the sections on two sides of this one, and just across the road from my in-laws’ house, are almost entirely developed into massive estates with rolling green lawns and lawn sprinklers and those ambient golden property lights mounted on their eves and security cameras and golf carts—people out here have adopted golf carts to navigate their sense of country living, an unironic country-clubbing of rural ideation that I couldn’t have made up—and in-ground pools and brand new maximum-tow-load trucks parked in their detached three-tofive car garages. One house has its pool inside, like a celebrity home, a detail I might not have employed, if this were a short story, for its being too absurd. And these people, or some people, lately, have been calling the cops on people in fields. It’s happened twice. The sense of private property is crystallizing, sharpening around us.

So nobody can see me, is the idea. There are now a few houses on other edges of the section, people we don’t know. We still feel pretty confident that the farmer would not care that we are dumping guts into the field; he gave us paintball permission, and gives other people hunting permission, and I have on the occasional winter walk encountered the site of a deer-cleaning. This is not so different, and I am taking my haul as directly as I can to the coyotes.

This afternoon, the kill did not go well. At the time of it not going well, the thoughts that I permitted myself to entertain were what the fuck, and, I’m sorry, and, think about this later, not now, later. As my feet find their way in the dark over shattering stubble and crop residue clods, I permit myself to think about it. I apologize again to the sheep. It is the first sheep I’ve ever slaughtered. A male sheep is a ram; our guy’s name was Rambo.

When we first purchased the captive bolt stunner, we tested it on an old railroad tie. The tool uses a cartridge, just like a gun, but instead of firing a bullet, it fires a bolt, which near-instantly retracts. I say tool, instead of weapon, though it also goes by ‘cattle gun’ and ‘captive bolt pistol.’ When we tested it, the bolt punched a perfectly smooth, smoking cylinder into the solid wood. I was nervous. I did it multiple times, inspecting after each percussion the depth and angle of my work, to make sure I could perform it correctly. When I prepared to apply it to the back of a goat’s head, I found myself visualizing where on my own skull I would execute the stun.

When we are going to process an animal, we lead the animal into the yard with a little grain, or we close the animal into a stall in the barn where it’s already at rest. The idea is that the animal is not afraid. The animal lowers its head for a pleasant treat, a scratch. We handle them regularly; I think we annoy them, but mostly we do not frighten them. The idea is that this animal never has to get loaded into a trailer, driven to a slaughterhouse, handled roughly in its terror, stand overnight in a chute saturated with the shit and blood of impending death. The idea is that we do the handling ourselves, with compassion— that this is a kind of care.

The stunner is an immediate emptiness. No anticipation, no fear. After the animal drops, I take a very sharp knife and cut below the jaw, opening up the artery. It’s best to pump one of their front legs, to

hurry the blood out.

Once the animal is bled and definitively dead, my husband and I slit the skin around the back ankles, peel it down, and let the knife ease itself between the tendons. We open up these holes so that we can weave the hoist rod through, and then we pulley the animal to hanging. We hang our animals on my inlaws’ swingset. We skin and eviscerate. I’m good at it, have been doing it a long time. The animal hangs in the shed, cooling, until the following morning, when we butcher.

With Rambo, I tried to use the captive bolt stunner per its recommendations. That is to say, from the front of the head. I had never killed a sheep before. Goats, yes; chickens and rabbits plenty. But I haven’t killed too many ruminants, because we only recently started processing for ourselves.

Back in Missouri, where my spouse and I raised these goats for sale to restaurants and families, we took our animals to be processed a few towns over. Asmir was Bosnian (he still is, obviously; the business is still there and he’s still running it, but I’ll write about him in the tense of my experience) and he worked the chute, the kill-floor, the packaging, and deliveries himself. His dad worked the kill-floor, too, barehanded with an inch of ash dangling from the cigarette papered between his dry lips. Asmir’s dad spoke little English. He helped me unload animals: we communicated mostly with pointing, thumbs up or down, and shouts. Raw flesh grit caked his tobacco stained nailbeds. He ate jerky out of his pocket while he worked. I couldn’t imagine an existence so steeped in meat. I couldn’t imagine where he’d been, either.

The St. Louis area had been the site of an extensive relocation of Bosnian refugees in the 90s. They were refugees from the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian war. At its peak, the Bosnian population in the St. Louis area was about 70,000 people. I don’t know anything about Asmir’s family’s experience; I never asked. I couldn’t tell how old Asmir was. If Asmir was not born here, he had come over young enough to get pretty good English, drive box trucks through St. Louis traffic, and figure out how to do taxes for a business. The last one was more than I could do. Most abattoirs charged a flat per-head kill-fee for every animal, regardless of size. A seventy dollar kill fee spread out over hundreds of pounds of beef wasn’t bad; on a sixty pound goat—goat already being on the high end of what people were willing to pay for meat—it really added up. Asmir charged a lower fee per head for small animals, even goats, despite the fact that killing a goat is different than killing other animals. Most abattoirs use stunners, which go through the front of the skull into the brain. The animal is rendered unconscious; the worker cuts the animal unconscious. The horn plate on a goat or a horned sheep, which exists to withstand tremendous force, makes this impossible. The stunner bolt won’t reliably penetrate. So goats and horned sheep are cut while conscious. This is also true for all kosher facilities. The animals are simply bled, fully conscious.

I’d only participated in this one time in Missouri, at the farm I managed. We sold live goats to a few Kenyan and Indian families. It is legal for somebody to purchase a live animal from you and slaughter it on your property; as long as you don’t assist them in any way, you are not liable for whatever food safety transgressions or injuries they might sustain. On one occasion, a father came out to the farm with his kids, four of them, and the oldest was eleven. Kenyatti wanted an intact buck. Big horns, rutting, the buck was hard to hold down for the cut. Kenyatti’s eleven-year-old, tears in his eyes and rooted to the hill a few feet away, couldn’t help, and therefore, we couldn’t not. Kenyatti’s knives were not sharp enough.

The animal wailed. Goat cries, as you may know from the internet, sound not unlike desperate children.

One morning in the winter, I pulled up to Asmir’s building with four animals in our little pickup. I’d had to beg for the slot in his schedule: it was deer season. Asmir took our animals on the condition that we would run our own delivery even though we didn’t have a reefer truck, which was pseudo-legal, by which I mean that it was not legal, but that it was Missouri, where regulations on rural people are lax even on paper, and enforcement is practically treasonous. After Asmir’s dad helped me unload the goats into the chute, bloody aproned in his gut-splattered boots, he lit another cigarette and drank from a coffee thermos greasy with his handprints. He gestured to the semi-trailer taking up most of the yard, and then to his own arms, which he sagged demonstratively, to show his exhaustion. Inside the open trailer were hundreds of semi-frozen deer corpses, and I do mean hundreds, thrown in on top of one another at all angles, splayed and tangled legs, milk-eyes and purple tongues lolling. Though it sent a wave of nausea through me, I couldn’t imagine that this image represented more than a lot of long days for Asmir’s family. A volume of bodies was not a shock to them.

The red one was your little buddy, Asmir said to me, when I came to pick up animals.

I caught my breath. That goat had been so friendly. Not even a bottle baby, and yet strangely trusting. I named him Melvin. But I had talked myself out of keeping pets. This was a livestock operation, not a hobby farm. We couldn’t afford pets.

I pet him, Asmir said, his eyes breaking momentarily for the first and only time I witnessed, and it still wrecks me. Both that I took Melvin in for slaughter, unloaded him into the blood-and-guts reeking chute to stand in the cold overnight and shit himself with fear, and that Asmir had to kill him, cut his trusting throat alive and screaming, and move onto the next one, and the next one after that.

What do we ask of people, when we ask them to slaughter anonymous animals for a living? Beyond their bodies, we ask of them a profound desensitization, an internal hardness, a life whose daily fabric— whose nailbed crust, whose hot shower aroma, whose half-sleep visual rumination—is the repetition ad nauseum of the concentrated death required by an industrialized meat system. We ask them to bear a reality that we can’t.

But you know this. You know it when you think about it. And then you drive home, wait for Asmir to call you and tell you when your next batch of animals will be ready for pick-up, so you can coordinate deliveries with your chefs, and give them produce availability lists; and you pull row covers in the high tunnels, and collect eggs, and review the seeding schedule for the following week, and you make dinner and eat it and wash the dishes and close the chicken coops and check your emails and place a few seed orders and walk out into the pasture in the middle of the night in rainboots and your underwear, shivering, to see if you closed the chicken coop, and you did.

Some five years later, I’ve attempted to kill a sheep, and it hasn’t gone well. The captive bolt stunner punched the same perfectly cylindrical, perfectly smoking hole into the sheep’s head, and the sheep did not drop. The sheep with the hole in his head blinked at me. His gentle eye stayed perfectly conscious. I let go of his head, and he turned it, to look me in the face.

What the fuck, I said, almost a whisper. With my legs, I pressed the sheep’s body against the halfwall. He seemed slightly unstable, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to relieve any of my pressure against

him. He outweighed me, and was significantly stronger than I was. If he felt like kicking or dragging his way out of that stall, he could have.

What do I do? I said. My husband grabbed the captive bolt stunner and ran to the shed to reload. My father-in-law and I stood in silence in the stall, both of us with our hands on the animal, me pinning him firmly to the wall, my father-in-law holding the sheep’s face in his downturned hands. I felt the sheep’s chest. I felt for his heart.

His heart is not going crazy, I said, as if that meant something. I wasn’t sure what it meant. The sheep wheezed, then, and blood dripped from his lips.

It did something, my father-in-law said, He’s got blood running.

I’m sorry, I whispered to the sheep.

My husband returned with the reloaded captive bolt stunner, reached over the half-wall, and positioned it firmly at the back of the animal’s skull.

Be careful, my father-in-law said, With your hands. I had taken the sheep’s jaw. The bolt would only eject two inches, but these are exactly the situations, nerves jumpy, trying to re-right the ship of time that has capsized us in uncertain limbo, in which people stupidly get hurt. We waited for agonizingly long seconds, making sure all our hands were positioned securely, holding the sheep’s head so that the force wouldn’t just kick it away, the stunner flush and aimed right. We said, Ready, Ready, Ready, Ready. And finally it went.

Rambo dropped, legs jelly, and reflex-kicked a few times as my husband jumped the wall and pressed himself down on top of the animal, holding him still, while I took the knife and made the cut. Our knives are so sharp you can shave translucent curls from your fingernails. The cut is always easy to make. It happens almost without me.

I’m sorry, Rambo, I said to him again, as my husband pumped his front leg to hurry the blood out. That’s not how I wanted this to go.

Out in the field, post skinning and eviscerating and hosing down, post sectioning and tracing along joints and grinding, in the deep dark, I breathe hard and wonder at some prayer I ought to say to the wheelbarrow full of all that which we will not use. I’m never sure how much is too much.

I try to take a moment before I kill an animal to hold gratitude for its life, but the moment cannot go on too long or I will fall forward into a limitless vacuum of paralysis. I will not be able to hold the contradictory things in my head. It must be turned off. So the amount that is less than too much, in that moment, is just exactly the amount of gratitude I can withstand, and still kill the animal.

Afterward, now, the right amount is just exactly the amount I can hold in my body leaning into the simple tool of itself. Wheelbarrow up, the whole machine of my legs lifting against this broken-down body’s unsteady weight, holding on and letting go. Once the balloon of stomach lurches out, the whole lot slides over, all connected. I lift the head out with my hands, place it gently. This is a small offering to coyotes, and to the sheep who should have gone instantly dark but did not, and to the swale-turned-ravine whose life has been torn out, and to slaughterhouse workers who kill for our living.

In dreams of execution I go willingly. I tell the others, It will be over soon. I exhale my fear and I lend my skull to the hostage-taker’s barrel, calmly. This is the worst part, and so if it is not so bad, then death is not so bad. It is a relief. I wake in a state of profound bodily serenity, the kind I imagine people

experience in sensory deprivation tanks. I hope to go trusting into careful hands, domesticated thing that I am, in the surround of the ever-encroaching violence of rural suburbia. This care is the small world I am making. I hope that I am trying to do the right thing, even in my failures. It will be over sooner than I think, and now is now, so I vow to try again today, to be kind and to pay attention.