Fish and Rabbits

I spent the day butchering rabbits. It's hard to explain how it feels. Its a solemn kind of day, there's no vulgar cheering or pride; straight faces, calm hands, a focused kind of demeanor mark our gratitude. I was thinking it feels like I spent the day clear-cutting a forest.  When we kill rabbits, we kill a whole litter. Today we did two litters. But people who clear cut a virgin forest and then replant it with hybridized saplings thinking that makes up for the entire community they just destroyed are doing something that is greedy and ungrateful, even cruel. What I did today was done in a different spirit.

A few days ago, I watched as a group of students and teachers harvested eggs from the female salmon they had caught in a catch pond as the chum were headed upstream to spawn in their freshwater home. The students picked up the surprisingly huge creatures, verified that they were female, laid the fish down as it was wacked over the head with an aluminum baseball bat, then tossed into a cart full of water. Other students then took the carcasses and sliced open their bellies, releasing the eggs into a bucket. This was all new to me, having spent most of my life in the midwest and being completely unaccustomed to seaside life. I was surprised by how gruesome it was. The routine nature of the killing, and the smirky joviality that the handler of the baseball bat had seemed cruel to me, as if he didn't even recognize that he was ending so many lives. And the reason for all this, for collecting eggs and spawning them in tubs inside of buildings, is because greed has become the norm. We fish more than we need, more than would naturally occur, so fisheries make sure fish are raised with higher survival rates than salmon that are born naturally in streams.

"No it wasn't simply the death of fish that bothered me. The thing I found offensive, the thing I hated about Mohican-mountain-makers, gill-netters, poachers, whale hunters, strip-miners, herbicide spewers, dam-erectors, nuclear-reactor-builders or anyone who lusted after flesh, meat, mineral, tree, pelt, and dollar--including, first and foremost, myself--was the smug ingratitude, the attitude that assumed the world and its creatures owed us everything we could catch, shoot, tear out, alter, plunder devour . . . and we owed the world nothing in return." (David James Duncan, The River Why, p. 134)