Life in the Kingdom | BEN HEWITT

was working a few days each week at a sporting goods store in Montpelier). I had them in a cage, which I situated in an alley behind the store. Every so often during the day, I’d emerge from the basement catacombs where I was fixing bicycles to scratch and sing to them. At the end of the day—as this dream went on—I headed home on my bike, and it wasn’t until late into the night that I “awoke” with a start to realize I’d left the pigs in town; in my dream fugue, I imagined them marauding through the streets of Vermont’s state capital. At this point, I awoke to the sudden, sweet relief that I’d merely been dreaming. But the relief was short-lived, for I knew what morning would bring.

Since then, we’ve raised dozens of pigs, and from them, along with other species we’ve kept for meat, I’ve learned the crucial distinction between love and love. I love all the animals we raise for slaughter, but I no longer love them, and when I sing to them, it is not a fullthroated serenade but merely a tune in passing. I still train our piglets to belly scratches, and often when I stop by the pigpen at chore time, I linger for a minute or two longer than strictly necessary, if for no other reason than it brings me pleasure to watch our animals. It is my belief that the moment one no longer derives pleasure from the animals under his or her care is the moment one should consider whether there might be better uses of one’s time and energy. Like so many aspects of working the land, the recompense must be counted in more than money, meat, or the materials one gleans, or it will always seem to fall achingly short.

More than once, I have been asked if it is hard for us to kill animals we’ve tended on a daily basis, animals whose quirks of personality and habit we’ve come to know nearly as intimately as our own. Yes, I answer. It is hard. But I believe that if it is our choice to eat meat (and for now, it is), it is also our responsibility to know the full truth of it. I realize that not everyone feels the same, and that is OK. I’ve learned that the world is big enough to accommodate a lot of different feelings.

Even as you read this, there are two pigs fattening on our land, perhaps three months shy of slaughter. Every morning, I fill a bucket with grain and milk and maybe a handful of questionable eggs from the tucked-away nests I occasionally find in the barn, the ones the chickens have been hiding from me for who knows how long. I carry the bucket down the driveway to the old abandoned pasture the pigs are generously helping to renovate, and I step over the two strands of electric fence keeping them contained. If I’m quiet, they won’t hear me until I’m nearly upon them, at which point they’ll rouse themselves from their nest of hay under the old truck cap that serves as their summer shelter (Melvin would approve, I think) and lumber over to their trough. I’ll scratch their backs as they eat, humming to myself and watching the sun rise in the eastern sky.