Brandon Sheard - Farmstead Meatsmith on befriending Animals You’re Gonna Kill and Eat

Brandon, the Farmstead Meat Smith. That's what I know you as.

Yes.

So tell me, we're here to— we're here today to serve this audience, give them some good value here. What do you see your— how do you see yourself? How do you best serve others? Who— in a broad audience sort of way, your public perspective.

Well, our habit, this thing that we find ourselves doing for the past 10 years as Farmstead Meatsmith, is, uh, giving people the confidence to just go ahead and raise their own animals, okay, and harvest them for themselves. So if I had to look back and say what have we been doing, that seems to be the thing. That seems to be the calling that happened to us, literally because people were calling us on the phone. That's how I know it was my calling. Yeah, they were calling us.

Dad joke. Dad joke.

It's true.

Right off the bat.

It's true. You know, I need you to come harvest my lamb, my goat, my pig.

So when you meet people, well, there's that. You've had this met this need. But when you meet people, they then say, hey, you've, you've enabled me, you've made me feel like I can do this.

Yeah. Oh yes, a lot. And it's, it's not because we're necessarily so great, it's because the waters are so muddied if— and we're so estranged from the basic simple processes that turn animals into food that, uh, it looks like a very complex such as the nature of our times. And we have not received the traditions of our fathers and how to do that. And so the lack is huge.

Yeah.

And so anyone who's just like, I think I know how to do it, you know, it's like you'll get seized upon and, you know, you can share that knowledge.

Did your dad pass it on to you?

No.

So there was a lacking there too.

Yeah, not, yeah, definitely not anything agrarian. You know, except for, uh, you know, he always had a nostalgia because he actually grew up on a small holding in California. Yeah, you know, 6 acres with the, you know, sheep and cows throughout the years. His father, he just told me this recently, which kind of blows my mind a little bit. He told me that my grandfather used to slaughter sheep. Their own sheep.

Wow.

And he told me this like 2 years ago. I've been doing this for 10 years. I don't know if I said that at the beginning, but like, earnestly, I've been doing it for about 10 to 12 years. And a year and a half ago, he brought me a bone saw that my grandfather used.

What?

To harvest his own sheep in California. And it's still got fat on it. It's my grandfather's saw.

What are you gonna do with that saw?

I'm gonna put it in a place of honor in my new, in my shop.

Yeah.

As I build it.

Yeah.

Yeah. So there is a history there, but it didn't get passed on to me except for this.

It's in your blood.

Maybe.

Why did you want to do it in the first place?

It was really responding to the need and it was purely out of the desire to feed my family well. Well, when I found that the only way I could do this was to do it myself, and that when I do it myself, it tastes amazing, like out of this world amazing. Yeah. None of us are used to, even if you're buying really nice food, like it's way beyond that. And it is your medicine.

Yeah.

It's your long-term medicine for your family.

When you say we're doing, it, this. Are you talking about the harvesting process? Are you talking about the growing of it, the process, too, or all the above?

Both. Yeah, those have always been intertwined for me because the most decisive elements in any recipe that determines whether or not it's delicious or not and whether or not it's nutritious are the harvest and the husbandry, the way the animal was raised the way it was killed.

Okay.

If those are right, if those are just, then everything else is effortlessly delicious after that.

Yeah. So you said that people are looking for— or they are— you help inspire them and make them feel enabled. Well, was there a time— I sense that maybe that there had to be— there was a time that you were disabled? And not knowing how to do this. Yeah, it didn't get passed down from your grandfather to your father to you. Yeah. So how did you pick up the— so you knew you had to do this for your family to have the best quality meat possible.

Yeah.

How did you learn how to do it?

So I worked on a farm.

Okay.

A small farm. And it's not like I was trained. I have not been trained in butchery ever, not a single day. I thought that would kind of be nice. It'd be fun. I like going to school and being trained, but I was not. And so it was on the job, learning on the job because we had to. I worked for a small farm, uh, on Vashon Island for a good friend. Uh, he's in Oregon now. And, uh, I worked there for exactly 2 years and it was just the kind of small business environment that was— had a perfect, uh, harmony of chaos and order, like a lot of small businesses like my own. And that chaos is kind of the precondition for, uh, achieving some great things. It always kind of keeps you on the, uh— I don't know, you're on the borders of exploration all the time. So there were only a handful of us due to many crises, you know, in the business and in the general economy, there are only a handful of us, like 4, working on the whole farm. And we were milking 7 cows, we were making cheese, we were making wine, we were slaughtering 150 chickens a week, 2 or 3 lambs a week, 2 pigs a week, and selling them all at the farmers markets in the city on the weekends, and running a butcher shop locally. And a restaurant. So there were 4 of us doing all of that. And come to find out, uh, we had our ends right and our, our, our goal for all of our produce, all the animals that we grew— it was all rotational pasture systems, all very small, super small, like we were grazing on the side of the highway, on all over people's yards, all over the island that we lived on.

Nice.

And, uh, our goal, and the really the goal of the owner, was not a, you know, a self-mode— he wasn't an ecological warrior. His goal, his direct goal, was not to build soil. It was to create amazing flavor for people. He was a cook first. That was really his goal. Come to find out that the, the best tasting meat, yeah, is, uh, the one that is husbanded and managed the best and harvested the best way. So that's— it was kind of in that context with no training that I, I started working there. And, uh, it was very much, uh, there was a crisis in the business and he let go of everybody including the butcher one day. And I'd been running the farmers markets on the weekends.

He'd let you go too then?

No, he kept me.

Everybody but you?

Everybody but me and 3 other people, as I recall, maybe 4. And I was going to go to the farmers markets the next day. That was my job. I would do those 15-hour days back to back in the Seattle farmers markets. And we brought fresh meat, so not frozen in coolers, but fresh in deli cases. At a street market. We were selling out of, we just basically set up a fresh butcher shop right in the street. So very elaborate, insanely complex setup. And so we slaughtered every week. And we were doing a very good job. And so the, I was gonna come in on a Friday and I always pack for the market the next day when I wake up at 3:00 AM and catch the early boat to Seattle. Um, but none of the meat had been cut that evening. And so the first time I cut— I carved a carcass into cuts was when I stayed up all night. My wife came, Lauren, she's pregnant with one of our boys, and we stayed up and I, I cut my first 3 lambs and 2 pigs all night and then went to the farmers markets the next day because that's how we got paid on Monday. See, we had to we had to sell meat at the markets. And then I did it again the next week and the next week and the next week. And I could do it because I had like literally the week before learned how to cook meat. And if you know how to cook meat, then you can deduce how it ought to be cut.

Yeah.

'Cause the culinary end is the telos. That's the final cause of all livestock. Is the family table, uh, is the dinner table. So learn how to cook and you can figure out how to cut very well.

Yeah, and that's true because a lot of people don't necessarily know how to cook these, these types of things. I've told people before, you want to become a homesteader, don't even wait for land, don't even wait for a container garden, just start cooking a whole chicken.

Yeah, that's very true.

Do you think that that was the best way to learn for these people out there that are wanting to get— most, most everybody listening to this is just getting started. Is that the best way to learn, just to go to another farm?

Uh, I think so. I mean, it depends on the farm. You know, I was fortunate in that the, the place where I worked had a high degree— I was talking about that chaos order balance— it had a high degree of chaos. And so I— you're kind of on your own, and you had— so I, you know, the first time I shot a pig I was with a guy and we were working together on the farm, feeding the pigs and everything, and it came date to kill the pig for butchery, and he just handed me the gun. And he's like, I don't wanna shoot pigs, I don't like it, you do it. I had never shot an animal in my life. That was the first pig that I shot.

Did he guide you at all?

No, see, he was Honduran, so I followed his example, physically but not verbally, because he was an artisan at manual labor.

Yeah, you know, you know.

So I loved following his example. But, you know, even though I grew up in Southern California, the subtleties of shooting a pig in the head was beyond my Spanish ability and his English ability.

Well, he's Honduran. When I was in Honduras, They hit that head, they hit the head with a sledgehammer. Yeah, maybe he's used to that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he really, he did not like the idea of the gun.

Really?

Yeah, he didn't want to do it.

If there's something there, because I always wondered why they did that. I thought it was, uh, ability to obtain a gun. Yes, a third world country, it's not like you can just go get a gun.

Yeah.

Uh, so tell me more about this chaos. So was this a stressful chaos? Yeah, you smile every time you say it. Maybe you're far enough removed.

Yeah, that's very frustrating at the time, right? Yeah, it was. But, you know, I don't know, it was, um, it meant that we had to take on the burden of the whole business. So I felt like, uh, I was part owner even though I wasn't.

Okay.

Which is kind of my personality, you know. I got to kind of run the show.

Yeah.

And in terms of the farmers markets and the butcher shop, I got to what the product looked like, you know, I was like, with no training, with no training.

Yeah, just here's the gun, shoot the pig. Yeah, and here's the knife, cut it up.

Exactly. And I'm kind of perfectionist, and I did, I did learn how to study things in graduate school, so I— it meant that I could take it in the direction of rediscovering the traditions of our fathers in curing things and in in how they used to butcher things for thrift, you know? And so I could take the whole business that way, the product profile at least, and I was free to do that.

Where'd you study? Are you talking about talking to Mr. Google Pants? You talking about going to the library?

No, finding out-of-print books on the internet. I did a lot of that. Out-of-print books, that's key. Out-of-print books or open-source books. Yeah, stuff that nobody reads. Like, there's a great work called The Cottage Economy by William Cobbett. Okay. C-O-B-B-E-T-T. All right. Excellent writer. He is the best imprecatory prose writer in the English language. So if you want to learn how to dress down someone or some institution, read William Cobbett.

Wow.

He speaks opinions.

So when you're So for the farming aspect, for the pig, for cutting and stuff, what are the old school books?

Yeah, so it was a lot of peasant sources. So what you would— what I would do is go back. You could find anecdotes of how pigs used to be killed in the cottage, the backyard pig, the family pig.

Okay.

You know, everyone had a sty. All the food waste went in there, and this pig was equal parts pet and equal parts food, and those are not contradictory notions. No, you could have affection for your pig. In fact, in England, it was considered unkind to not ask after the pig. It was a matter of politeness to visit your friend and ask, how's the pig? After the pig, because that's how you survive the winter. That's like, that's a serious question. Um, so I would find these old accounts and super old recipes that particularly have a lack of detail are really great. You know, you can find things that— because they didn't write things as recipes, they wrote things as processes, as small stories, and that's how they recorded them. It's only today when we conceive mathematical language or scientific-sounding language has the ultimate authority in our modern era, but that used to not be the case. So we today, we, we make everything an equation. This much salt plus this much pork equals ham.

And you don't like that?

No, because it's inaccurate. In spite of its appearance of accuracy, it is not accurate. It does not account for the diversity of salts, ingredients, climates, pigs. Can't do it. Seasonality, genetics, feed, fat constitution. Not possible to have a recipe for curing things. Truly, what you need is a sensibility. Yeah, you get the— which is a virtue that you acquire through habit, repetition. So you got to do it, and you sharpen your senses, and you learn it, and then you have the virtue of pig killing and pork curing. And you get a big head start if you can receive that, you know, from your grandfather or your dad.

Yeah, it's like the Foxfire books. Yeah, that might be a good example. They're very not step 1, step 2, step 3. Yeah, they almost talking like— I feel like some of it is they are talking like everybody does this because everybody did kind of do that back then, didn't they?

Yeah, yeah.

So there is some like, this is so obvious, this is just, yeah, how we do things.

Yep.

So sometimes it's hard for people nowadays.

Yes, because there are gaps. There's gaps, and there— but there is a strategy for filling in those gaps, and it's not necessarily more research. Okay, you got to do it with the tools that they used. So one great way to fill in the gaps and to do it in a way that is simple is to do it with the old tools.

Hmm.

Because then you'll find out those gaps will get filled because you'll find a hitch in the process I'm like, well, how did they deal with this? Well, you, you can't just go to the crutch of some technology to glide right over that. You got to do it with your sharp knife only.

Yeah.

And that's really— you fill in a lot of gaps that way. So from the beginning, I eschewed a lot of technological buffering, you know, that made the system run more smoothly because some super complex technology was operating smoothly. Yeah, just get rid of that, and then you'll learn how to cure. Cure without a curing chamber. Yeah, and you know, it'll be trial and error. You'll learn stuff, um, but then your knowledge will be qualified. You will have the virtue of curing, not the ability to flip on a curing chamber, which is really not a virtue.

I like what you said there where you said you just have to do it. So think about this: our culture is a culture that we have more pets than we have livestock now. Yeah, we don't for the most part, understand what you just said about it's okay to give them a name, it's okay to pet them and be attached and love them emotionally and have some sort of bond and pet them. You know, people will say, I don't name them because that's the one we're going to eat. So speak to me more about this equal pet Tell me, tell the audience, how do they go in and make their first butcher feeling emo about it?

Yeah, I think it helps for modern people to realize that if they are emo about it, it is no favor to the animal.

Okay.

It is no good. The paradox of this is if you want the— to increase the likelihood that the animal will suffer a very painful death, then pick a compassionate person to do the slaughter. Yeah, and I mean compassionate in the technical sense, not like general feelings of goodwill, but like technically they feel with the pig. You know, they might identify the pain with themselves or the intensity of the situation. 'Cause if they're overcome by their passion in that moment, then you cannot deliver a good kill. And so you actually have to, it's a sacrificial moment for people, especially that know only how to relate to pets in an anthropomorphizing way. Which generally breaks down to being just a very emotional way, an emotionally gratifying way. You actually have to set that aside because you love your animal.

Yeah, okay.

You know, and that helps people clear the fog a little bit. Like, you are a priest at the service of the sacrifice. Yeah, you're not— that's what you're doing here. So there's no such thing as overkill when it's time to kill the animal. Like, you need to do it and you need to do it decisively. And if you allow— here's the thing— if you allow yourself to feel it a lot, this is just the way we are made, your emotions will overtake your intellect and they'll cloud it so that you can't perceive what you're doing very well. And they will co-opt your will also, so you can't do what you intend. So you actually have to keep your emotions down. You have to control them. So that you're guided by what you know you need to do, which is one bullet only on the exact target, which is the brain and nothing less. And if you let your emotions to get into that, they'll cloud you. And that's when you make a mistake. You know, that's when you start to get shaky. That's when you, you take a risky shot because you feel rushed or hurried. So you got to, You gotta be able to control that with your intellect.

The lamb kill would be a good example. 'Cause you're slitting the throat.

That's right, yeah.

And somebody who's cuddly.

Yeah.

And cutesy with it is gonna be timid on that saw, and they're gonna end up sawing that, and then they're gonna end up feeling this in their neck, and I'm like, that's why I'm telling, the sharp knife is a humane knife, 'cause.

Yes, yeah.

The quicker you can do that, the harder you can do it, the quicker it's over for them.

Yep, exactly. And even a hide, an animal like a lamb, their hide is not full of nerve endings like our skin is. So a sharp knife, they're not feeling too much of that. They'll feel their exsanguination, but it's, yeah. Another example is chicken killing. I remember one of my first chicken jobs that I was hired to do, And I had developed the habit of holding chickens upside down by the legs. That is actually the more humane way to hold a chicken. And I didn't know that, I didn't have that ability to articulate that. So when the owner insisted that I cradle them, I did. And I remember going through that, carrying them from the hutch to the killing cone, basically. So when I cradled them to the killing cone, it was like, They're tense, this is not right. And afterwards I realized that when you hold a chicken upside down, it submits, it surrenders. And that's because you have taken away all of its options for self-preservation. You've taken away flight, you've taken away running. And when you take those away, the chicken submits. It has no other options. It has surrendered. And it doesn't panic. About having no other options like we might. Yeah, it is calm. Same thing with a lamb. If you take away its ability to flee and you lay it down on its side, so you've taken away flight, it will surrender and it will stay down even if you don't hold it down, if you do it properly.

The problem is they're thinking from a human perspective. If you, if you hold me upside down, I'm fighting. If you, if you like a lamb, you pin me down, you I'm gonna bite you, claw you, yeah, whatever you— yeah, but a lamb calms down.

They do.

So you have to think like a lamb.

Yeah, you have to understand that there is an order to being. Yeah, you know, that the grass can grow, nourish itself, and reproduce, but it can't move. Yeah, a sheep can grow, nourish itself, reproduce, and move. And feel, you know, they have sentience, they can react to things, but they can't understand their final end abstractly. That's on the rational animal. That's us, because we can grow, we can reproduce, we can nourish ourselves, we can move, we have sentience, but we can also— we have an intellect and a will, and so we can look at an animal, a creature, and we can understand its nature. And then we have to slaughter it in accord with its nature, not against it, but in harmony with it. And when we do that, um, we're acting in accord with our nature. Yeah, that's our job. It's all on us because no one else is going to do it. You know, you see the way a lion kills a zebra. I would not call that humane. And so it's when humans kill animals, it's a brazen assertion of that order of being.

Yeah.

And since we're the rational animal, it's on us to minimize pain, to not be ruled by our emotions.

There we go. Let's talk about it. Let's keep on— let's hash this out. Yeah, you said emotions, but sometimes people will say I love them so much I can't do it. I can't kill them. Yeah, they might be confused about what love actually is. Yeah, do you think?

Definitely.

Is it this emotional lovey-dovey thing, or is it this laying down your life for another?

Yeah, love is an act of the will, not of the appetites. Okay, not of the emotion. It is not a feeling. So you can actually love a thing without feeling good about it, which is kind of what happens when you sacrifice.

Yeah, right.

Sacrifice doesn't feel good, um, but that is the ultimate act of love, to be sure. And in the case of livestock, so much of it is just sacrificing your appetite for that emotion, because here's the sneaky part of that excessive compassion It's in excess, you know, as opposed to a mean. But the, the sneaky thing about that is you get a little bit of delight in your emotional connection to that animal, and even in your excessive sorrowing of it, it sneaks a little delight in there. And that is— that's the nature of emotion. And so you actually have to sacrifice that. To execute an animal well, to kill it well. Okay, maybe you don't get to have that. You know, you gotta use your intellect to do what you know you need to do.

Yeah. And, um, you're saying it's good to have that delight, but you have to grab a hold of your intellect to—

Yeah, we can delight in excess and sorrow. I, you know, it's, um, it gratifies our appetite, it gratifies the way we want to think of ourselves.

You know, would we be having this conversation 150 years ago about the emotions surrounding harvest?

You know, that's a good question.

With the Cherokee Nation?

Yeah.

The Native Americans who lived around me be having this conversation?

Probably not.

That's where—

yeah, I think it depends. It depends on the people, you know. Because I think we have understood variously over centuries that order of being, and it was definitely something that was articulated explicitly by Aristotle, you know, way back. So they were conceptualizing this, you know, philosophically for a while.

So they had some, they had some it rubbed us wrong. Yeah, there was a conflict.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, you look at the— all of the old sacrificial systems too, you know. You—

did anybody go vegetarian because of it? I don't know.

I feel like at least today that is a luxury of modern convenience.

Okay, there we go.

Probably not possible. And you know, I know someone will bring up an example of, oh no, they've been vegetarian over here for bajillions of years.

Okay, sure, but there's an outlier.

Yeah, there's always outliers. But yeah, to be sure, it's always been a conflict. You know, that's the value of an animal's life has always been among the highest material values that we have, and the entire ancient sacrificial system is based on that. Why did God accept Abel's sacrifice and not Cain's, you know?

Well, you have to explain that more in case people don't know who Cain and Abel are.

Cain and Abel, one of our oldest stories, right at the beginning. The sons of the first humans, Adam and Eve, they were making sacrifice to God. Abel offered a lamb. He had to kill an animal and offer it to God. Cain offered fruit.

And God said nope.

God did not accept Cain's sacrifice, and it's because his sacrifice wasn't worth as much as Abel's.

Ah, that's the— yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, so you don't offer a sacrifice that costs you nothing. Yeah, is the rule.

That's the difficulty. Why? That might be the answer of why people have a hard time killing an animal and going vegan and killing plants and microbes, soil, billions of soil microbes in the, in the, the tilling process of vegetables, ecosystems destroyed in the monocultures. You may be getting at the root of why it's a struggle to Why is every day something dies so we can live? It can be a plant or an animal. Why is it a plant? Why is the animal so— I had a Seventh-day Adventist friend say to me, and they abstain from meat, a lot of them said, yeah, I don't eat anything with a face.

Oh, interesting. What a way to put it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sunflower seed, it doesn't have a face. A potato.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, so that— I think that is a direct reflection of the order of being. Like, you think about, um, how far above a dandelion plant is a pig? How large is that distance on the ontological plane? It's massive, you know, it's huge. And then what is the distance between a pig and us? It's huge. You know, it's enormous.

Yeah.

Um, so there is a— there's a massive difference there.

Yeah.

And, and it's so interesting you said a face, you know, anything with a face. There's obviously symbolic meaning to a face.

Yeah.

It's not just a practical, uh, place to put eyeballs and noses and mouths. It's a reflection of something. Greater. That's true. Because if that— if we share faces with pigs and humans have faces but dandelions don't, yeah, there's clearly a face.

Yeah, there is.

That is, that is, uh, at the top, a person.

Yeah.

And so this is all a completely Christian, uh, order of being, completely. Because at the top of the hierarchy is God.

Yeah.

And everything below is a reflection of him at varying degrees. And so— and we all perceive that. It's totally undeniable. It's inscribed in all of nature. Just the fact that we can generalize these qualities at all.

Yeah.

You know, that we— means they exist.

So even if God values the animal more than the plant in his sacrifice. That gives us a better understanding of why a vegan or vegetarian would opt out, because they too value it, but it's a modern convenience. This is maybe perhaps why the Cherokee Nation wouldn't be having this conversation, because they're going to have to push through that pain if they're going to survive the winter.

Yeah, absolutely. So practicality completely strips you of any illusions of your own compassion that you might have. Whereas modernity kind of, at least especially an urban existence— this is why I think the link to sacrifice is key, like you're saying— in a city, you can actually indulge in the illusion that your existence doesn't cost anything. That you can actually feed yourself without other things dying. But you spent just a little bit of time in the country or at walking through a soy field, and you know that that is not the case. That is an illusion. So why do we have then this— we have like this desire to not be a burden to the world, you know, because there's a very real sense in which when you shoot an animal in the head and say, it is just for me to consume your flesh. Not wrong, not sinful, not immoral, but just. You are encountering the cost of your being in the spilled blood of that animal in a very real way. You must die so that I can live. Yeah, you know, that's a— that's real. And then even, you know, what that animal does to the land so that it can live, so that it can die, so that you can live. Yeah. So now your, your life is reflected in what's going on in the soil. The burden of your existence, of feeding your carcass on the, on Earth, is massive. And in the city, you can start to think that it doesn't— maybe it's not there because it's, it's disguised by all the packaging, all the processes that are invisible because they happen somewhere else that you're not acquainted with.

Yeah.

And so a lot of that, I think, is just a— it's an inflated sense of, um, I can sort of be a disembodied mind and float above this plane and just do good and feel good without any cost, you know. But we have a body. We're part of the natural order. We are part of the ecosystem irrevocably. And so there is a cost and it's in the lives of creatures and the soil and everything.

Sometimes in between harvests, we will run out of something, beef for example, and we've ordered online, US Wellness Meats, had it shipped to our house in a box and shown that on the blog. And I literally got a comment saying, at the next beef harvest.

Yeah.

Why did you kill your cow when you could have— because I've seen you order it in a box.

Yeah.

You could have ordered it in a box.

Yeah.

There is a serious disconnect that what came in the box didn't also get killed.

Yeah.

And what came in that box was not raised and tended to and cared to as well as this.

Yeah.

With such a little herd They get so much attention. They're moved every day. Yeah. And they have names. And that meat traveled from the farm to the slaughterhouse. A big stress.

Yeah.

Uh, yeah. I want to think I'm along this journey and like you had to just learn it all again. Grandpa knew, but And then come into grip with the eating of meat and the killing of the animal. And then finally learn, you know, knowing that I need to feed my family and then learning that, you know, it's okay to be attached and to love, to give it a name. Somebody asked, why would you name a cow? Or why would you name it if you're gonna eat it? It's one word, respect. You name something that you respect. Now I wanna say, 'cause someone has told me, they lean vegan, their dream is to start an animal sanctuary one day. I know, right? Why do you do that? Before I go on.

Because there's no more cruel thing you could do to any animal than put them in an animal sanctuary. You could explicitly torture them, I guess, that would be worse, but yeah.

Because we're assuming, you and I are assuming, which I think what animal sanctuary is, is you're getting an animal before its harvest and you're letting it live out its life. Which for folks that don't know, it gets ill, it gets—

It's so bad. So a couple times I've been called upon to be a knacker, which isn't really a trade anymore, but you ever heard that phrase, I'm knackered? I'm tired, I'm exhausted. Those— the knacker was the guy, he would come and kill your animal when it was not good to eat. If it was too sick to eat, he would come and take care of it for you. Or if your horse died, he— or your, your cow died, he would come pick it up. That's the knacker.

You don't have a way to bury it, whatever.

Yeah, that's the knacker man. So I get called for that every once in a while cuz we don't have a lot of knacker men around. So they call the butcher. And I've done this to where, you know, an animal that ages does not die humanely. They decompose while they are alive. So I have harvested sheep in a field that couldn't walk because they're 15 years old. They were lawn ornaments for 15 years, you know, and one day they couldn't get up. And so I was called to put this animal out of its misery. And possibly turn it into dog food. And so I, I went out to the sheep, and it didn't even have the life, you know, to flee at all, though it was technically alive. And I killed that, that ewe. She'd never lambed, so maybe it's not a ewe. But, um, when I got inside and I eviscerated her, like, she was— she smelled like a rotting carcass. While she was alive. So she was decomposing on the inside. Her liver had disintegrated. I don't even know how she was alive at all when I got there. But all that to say, I can't imagine the pain, you know, that she went through to get to that stage. And if that's what happens at an animal sanctuary, which it is— they keep them alive as long as they can— it's, it's inhumane, just practically. That, that is a— it's a— it's torture for the animals. They don't put them in herds too. Like, animals tend to need to be with their kind, and their entire peace of mind comes from their place in a family unit of other like species, because that's what a family is, same species. And so, and there is a very distinct hierarchy in that unit. And unlike our modern— I don't know— rebellion against the notion of hierarchy, an animal— and I can verify this all day long— an animal finds its peace and calm in its place in the hierarchy.

Yeah, I feel like people are, are bringing the animal up to our level.

Yeah, they do want to bring it up to our level as if it was an equal. But what they need to understand is that you're bringing it up to our level in the sense that it's— the purpose of its existence is fulfilled in being domesticated by us. This is— we got it backwards. We have sort of this primitive ideal that a wolf is more fulfilled than a dog, or, you know, like the wild cow, the, the, the Taurus, or whatever the, the wild cow was, is more fulfilled than a dairy cow. It's fulfilled its nature more because it is wild. But that's not how the order of being works. You know, when a border collie is born almost understanding language, you know, when you see these herders, you can have puppies and they get 'come by,' you know, they get the commands already, and they look at you in your eyes. That animal has fulfilled its nature. Because its nature is to partner with you, with a higher form of being. That's the goal, okay, of all— of every order is to be elevated in partnership, but not to be elevated in some sort of like fantasy that we're the same, you know. Yeah, that's demonstrably ridiculous because it doesn't work, it doesn't pan out. It results in torture, in, uh, you know Those farms that we were just talking about. Shelters.

Maybe this is a side road, but dogs.

Yeah.

How did they, we can't say how did they win and become not livestock, in America at least, because we're saying we've got to do mercy by these animals and harvest them before they get old, but then here we are preserving dogs.

Yeah.

So how do you explain that?

Yeah, well, I think that they are— their fulfillment is in their relation to us.

Okay.

As in working with us. It's just like our fulfillment is beyond our level. It's to know, love, and serve God in this life and be happy with him in the next. So our teleological end is divine.

And that's something different than what you've seen sheep be able to do, for example.

Yeah, theirs is to, uh, build soil with us and to feed us. And that, that is not contrary to their nature. That's not— yeah, coercing them into something that's contrary to how they were made. Um, that is fulfilling them.

Would you have a problem with a culture that eats the dog?

I don't know.

You don't know? Okay.

Probably not, probably not, 'cause I think, you know, yeah, if you can—

Or the horse?

Yeah, oh yeah, I'm sure horse is delicious. I've never tried it.

There's cultures that eat the horse, milk the horse.

Yeah, yeah, you know, it's all about what is the highest and best service that you can put a thing to. Because, okay, yeah, you know, in the end, uh, that is— we don't like— we apologize for, for living only because we can indulge the fantasy that, that we don't have responsibility and that we aren't a cost to the earth. And so we tend to bristle at the idea of dominion, you know.

Yeah.

Um, but, but dominion, all that means is responsibility is that everything is your fault. Yeah, all of it. So it's all on us. We alone can force the pig to be unpig-like, you know, to not fulfill its nature. He won't do it on its own. He will always do— he will always be obedient to his nature. Yeah, he will always fulfill it.

You know, in some cultures they eat a lot of guinea pig.

Yeah, but in this culture, yeah.

Uh, so how do you then know what, what is on the plate and what's not?

That's a good question.

You have these potbelly pigs that people, yeah, adore like a dog.

Yeah, well, I think it might be, uh, with the exception of Horses and dogs, it'd be interesting to see, you know, if it's a recent thing that we don't eat our horses and dogs after they have rendered their life of service. You know, I think maybe practically, I'm sure, you know, guinea pigs and definitely potbellies. Potbellies are just the back porch pig that you would eat, and they were your pet, you know. Today, you know, we do keep horses alive through a lot of, uh, yeah, not, not great things that have a negative effect on their meat. So they're probably not good to eat.

And sometimes in the sense they are decomposing alive. Yeah, a lot like you mentioned with the sheep, the rescue farm, same thing for dogs.

Yeah, yeah, right.

This huge veterinarian bill to keep this dog in misery. Yeah, maybe it's this Are we really being loving to that animal by rescuing it with quotes and putting it in the running a rescue? Is that really loving to the animal or is that loving to ourself?

Yeah.

There might be a line here of, oh, I can't kill my animal because I'm attached and I love it so much. Yeah, but actually, if you love it, yeah, wouldn't you give it the best life? Yeah, and the best death?

That is what your intellect, if you were using it, would dictate. Yeah, I think that what we love— we confuse this on almost every plane— what we love in, in a dog or a pig is not the animal itself, but we love the delight that it gives us.

Yeah, okay.

So we love the way they make us feel, which is fine. There's nothing immediately evil about that. It's just that, um, that's not actually the, the, the end of that. That is not always in the best interest of that animal.

Yeah.

If you let that attachment to the delight you receive from an animal, uh, become excessive.

Let's go back to this animal sanctuary thing. In my journey, what I was going to say is I have come to the point that perhaps I am an animal sanctuary.

Oh yeah.

Can you— in your travels, have you seen a better place for livestock than this farm?

It's pretty nice. I don't think I've ever seen a such a small— and I mean that in the best sense of the word small— a small herd so attentively moved every day to fresh grass. I mean, that doesn't happen. Nobody's doing it on this domestic scale. Yeah, that I've seen.

That's what I found too.

Yeah, no, they're— everybody's is doing great, and it is a sanctuary in the real sense. Like, it's It's set apart, uh, for, you know, an acknowledgment in the— of the order of being. You know, these— you're, you're not, you're not coercing things into an artificial equality by saying you're just like a pig and the pig is just like you. You're plugging them into a, an order that fulfills their nature, which is to disturb the soil and and stir up seed just like you, you know, we illustrated earlier today, and create pasture and put bacon in your baby's tummies.

[Speaker] And I say, it's a sanctuary. You spoke to it. They're moving every day. We're tending them well. We take care of them naturally. We're not giving them any vaccines, dewormers, or anything like that. And we're eating hearty stock. But we're leaving them intact even.

Yeah.

So then they only have one bad day instead of two bad days in their life. When you castrate a male, that's a bad day.

Yeah.

And then death day, nobody's gonna say that's a great day, except for on a pig because you give it the skim milk.

Yeah.

And the next thing, they're in heaven drinking the skim milk. The next thing they know, they're in pig heaven.

Yeah, lights out. Yeah. And I think there's something to that family group too, you know. Large-scale agriculture has caused us to only think of animals in the vast herd sense, you know, and big herds. Um, but for domesticated animals whose nature we have changed over the centuries through selective breeding, um, their essential group is a family group. Yeah, with a bull and a cow and heifers, and, you know, and so I know that Whenever you break down the system to those smaller levels and you are docile to the nature of the animals and to their natural tendency to have a family group, you get unexpected benefit. That always happens when you're going with nature as opposed to against it. You discover serendipitously these extra efficiencies that you didn't know were there. Or maybe you'll notice that over the generations, you know, your bull, his calves are going to be particularly good at this region and these grasses, and their offspring will be even better. You know, they're just going to be more acclimated to your management system because all that is in— it's in the family, it's tradition, it's passed down, and the family group is where that happens.

Ah, the pig's eating the skim milk, you shoot it in the head I don't think they're— whether it's not registering any pain, you blew up its brain.

Yeah, that—

you're a spiritual guy, it's kind of coming out in this with water and stuff like that. Do pigs go to heaven? No.

So pigs have a material soul. Doesn't mean it's made of matter because the soul can't be made of matter, they're immaterial by nature. But, um, it means that they're— they do have a soul though. But it is, it is tied to their body. Or like, a better way to think of it is that they— and the same thing is with us, we have a soul. Um, it's not so much that their soul is in the body, it's that the body is in the soul. So the soul is the animating force. It's the reason that the pig moves and reproduces and digests. It's what the life, the living power is. Yeah, is in the soul. And with a pig, with everybody but humans, it is— it ends when the body dies.

The soul too?

Yes. Yeah, with us, with humans, we have a— our, our soul continues. It's eternal.

That makes sense, maybe, of what— yeah, it makes sense of what Temple Grandin says when an animal is harvested, she will say, where did it go? Yeah, I mean, you, you shoot that pig, you cut its throat, in 3 minutes— yeah, it's right. She's right. Where did it go?

Yeah, yeah, it's almost like— yeah, the soul is gone, but there it is. Yeah, because it's immaterial. It's like the soul has died. Yeah, that's really interesting.

No, it's kind of the same way with humans. You know, when my— when it— when a human dies, you get the same vibe.

Yeah.

Where did it go?

Yeah.

Where did he go? Where did she go?

Definitely.

There's the bodies right there, but they're not there.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's our— it's because our— the powers of our soul are intellect and will.

Yeah.

And pigs don't have an intellect and they don't have a will. They have sentience. They can feel, they can taste, you know, they can move, they can react.

Yeah.

But an intellect and soul, those do not die with the body because they're not material.

Yeah.

Your intellect and your will, like, you can't— okay, just the fact that you cannot predict what a human will choose between A and B, okay, by knowing all of the physical circumstances, okay. Proves that the will is immaterial.

Wow.

Right?

And that's not— has nothing to do with the soul?

Well, the will is a power of the soul.

Okay.

Yep, it's proper to the soul.

All right.

And so is the intellect.

This whole time you'd be talking about this order, and I sense a spiritual there. You've spoke of God. Do you have a leg to stand on with someone who has no sense of God?

I do.

Comments. Okay.

Yeah, and I see it all the time, all my classes, because so we can perceive all of that by nature. I think everything we've said, except for maybe like one thing, does not require some divine revelation to know. We all get it just by perceiving the natural order. And so I— people People resonate with this, with all this stuff, all the time, even if they've never read, you know, a sacred book that is— that has divine revelation in it from outside our experience, telling us things we could not have otherwise known. And it's, it's a lot of people that are, you know, turning back to the land. That's when you get to a lot of your silly notions about the world get dispelled because you're confronting the inextricable reality of the natural order. It's not arbitrary. Like, we're not making it up and imposing it upon the material substrate with our very powerful minds. No, you— there are laws and you run smack into them. I use them every time I go to slaughter a pig because I must, or things will go terribly wrong. It's part of nature. Yeah. And so people, people perceive that because the, the crazy thing that happened, I don't know, a couple centuries ago, is we decided that we can't perceive that. Either that the reality isn't there, that it's all an illusion, or that we are too blind and dumb to get it. And that That's basically the two modern philosophical paths that our minds have taken for the past couple hundred years. Before that, we understood that all knowledge comes through the senses. And so you can actually look at a pig and understand its nature. You can understand what its cause is, how it was made by its parents, how it roots, how it eats, how it nourishes itself, how it acts. And what its end is.

Maybe we can help the audience come to grips with harvesting their own, raising and harvesting their own animals by, let's do this exercise. What's gonna happen to the world if we continue on a trajectory of vegetarianism, chemical meats? What happens if we go down that? Yeah. Making cows illegal.

Oh my goodness. Yeah. Uh, we're not gonna have any more babies. We're all gonna die alone.

Well, that was a good podcast, everybody.

Great.

Better not end there. Yeah, that's not a very happy ending.

No, no, but I mean, that's it. We're, we're all gonna die in, um, in a, in a desert wasteland with no topsoil.

Why? Because are we, are we talking about losing semen, or— Yeah, that's what you're talking about.

We're going to destroy our own—

We're not going to be able to reproduce.

That's what we're working on.

That about—

Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Okay.

Especially, we're working on it as much as we possibly can now through many means. Um, and we already have negative population growth in a lot of places, but Uh, and it's that kind of thinking is directly linked to perceiving human population as a blight upon the earth, right? It's based on that notion that you can indulge as an urbanite, it's easier to indulge as an urbanite, that the problem is the human cost. And so we got to get rid of the humans. It's like, you are part of the order. You can't. We're part of the ecosystem. It's like you got to get rid of the grass. It's like, what? No, you can't do that. We're part of the order. The goal is to be part of it, not to float above it as if we— as if we can, which we can't, you know, without any cost. And so I think that's more on an ideological level as we go more in that way, outlawing cows, you know, mandating veganism or something. You will have to continue to convince people that the greatest evil on the earth are other people, and there being too many of them, which is a complete lie.

There's not too many people.

No, not even close. It's bad math.

This is back to the very beginning in your dad joke. You have 8 children.

Yeah.

There's not too many people in the world.

By the grace of God.

Okay, so do you, you have 8 children?

Yeah.

By the grace of God, you're gonna have more? Does, in your heart, do you think the world is gonna go that far, that doomsday ending? Or in your heart, do you think otherwise?

I don't know, it depends on how long the Lord tarries. You know, I think it really depends on Because there's a natural consequence to removing cows from the land and putting them in feedlots. There's a natural consequence to excessive urbanization. The consequence is the destruction of the fertility of the land to support human life. And you could see that it's a natural consequence and it's also a just consequence. It's a judgment of our retreat and our abuse of the land and the neglect of our primary obligation to our Creator.

Yeah.

And so if we repent, which means we change our path and we put we start acting in accord with the created order rather than against it, then, uh, you know, there's mercy and we can, we can carry on growing grass.

You said if the Lord tarries, what are you talking about?

Talking about the final judgment. Yeah, and however you want to situate it, you know You can call it natural consequence, but if you can see that the world was created by God and that it's totally useless, it's the most compelling argument for me is that this whole thing is totally superfluous, did not need to happen.

This whole thing, what do you mean?

This existence.

Oh, okay.

The Earth, the solar system, the cosmos did not need to happen, so it had no practical reason for being. So it only came into being for a completely, uh, superfluous reason, like love. That's what love is, you know. It's not motivated. We didn't give anything back to anybody because we suddenly popped, we exist. So all of creation is ordered towards love, and that's what created it. And so if we betray that, then we're not— it's not just like God's gonna get mad and he's gonna smite us. It's that we have departed from the laws of the natural laws. Of the cosmos. We've broken those. So when you do that, like when you try to walk through a brick wall, it doesn't work. It just hurts. And that's what morality is. It's, it's just practical reasoning. It's not an imposed ideology that humans made up one day, in spite of what Nietzsche says and all the modern philosophers. You can see morality played out all the time in the natural order. You can see that the best pig, the lead pig in a sounder, is not the biggest pig that manages to get all the food. The alpha pig is the most virtuous pig. He is the best pig. He's not the loud, brazen one. It's usually the quiet pig in the back that all the other pigs respect, and he gets exclusive rights to the food bowl, uncontested. That's because they recognize this order and living in accord with that order that is defined by, for us, by moral judgment, by morality. And so it's just purely practical. So all of that to say, um, it's, it's not just that, you know, there's this punitive deity fussing and getting angry at us, you know, who wants to wipe us out for our sins. It's that we have violated his order of charity by which all things endure, persist, and live and be. And you can only break that law like you're breaking gravity. Like, it— things break down, you know, it doesn't work. And, um, and so that is when, you know I think that warrants judgment.

Do you— growing food, harvesting food, eating meat, opting out of the chemical meat and the GMO soy and corn, all the other new GMO stuff— are your children buying into this? Yeah, how do you know?

They're, uh, because they're more— man, they're more competent than I am at— they're, they're— they are, they are warriors.

How old's the oldest and how, how young is the youngest?

So the oldest is 12 and the youngest is in the womb. And the second youngest, Thomasina, she is 16 months, 17 months.

And you're certain that these 8 will go out and do the right thing? If what we're speaking about is the right thing.

I ask God for that every day.

Okay.

Yeah. I'm gonna give them the best chance I can.

Yeah, you're gonna give your kids the best chance? Yeah, mm-hmm. Okay, speak to that. What's that look like, to give you the kids the best chance to do this right thing? Yeah, what's it look like from day to day?

Well, for us, you know, it's— we homeschool, and a lot of it is giving them good habits. And it's so simple, it's so basic, but that habit, a good habit, is what a virtue is. So you give them habits of not being addicted to sugary foods or highly refined flour. You give them habits of not gratifying their lower appetites for candy all the time, or using candy as a lure or, you know, manipulation tool, or for TV or for video games. You give— because just if you withhold those things from them, they develop habits of mind. And a habit is harder to break, you know, that's ingrained in you. They have to actually, they actually have to make an act of will to break their habit usually, you know, later on when they're older. Oh, you know, so I'm setting them up to not have all these little addictions that tear away at our ability to be virtuous, you know, addictions to the screen, addiction to bad food, bad books, or whatever, you know, just just low-grade stuff. And so, and we were trying to ingrain in them a lot of good habits, so we read them really good books, all the classics. Um, so what are the—

what's the top 3 that come to mind?

Oh man, let's see. Well, the Lives of the Saints is big, uh, so they're reading a lot of those. They love the Lord of the Rings, The Lord of the Rings, of course. Um, my oldest is 12, so he's just getting into embracing, uh, reading of his own will, you know, of his own volition.

Yeah.

Um, and so he's really into The Chronicles of Narnia right now, reading those on his own, and he's loving it. Uh, but we read them all. We read them a lot. Um, there's a couple, uh, I mean, honestly, also, uh, Winnie the Pooh. Oh man, Beatrix Potter for the little ones. That stuff is great. Hilarious. Especially Winnie the Pooh. That's like laugh out loud.

You enjoy it too?

Oh, big time. Yeah, that's a fun one in our family. You know, they're the original by Milne, and they are, um, because the characters ring true because they're broken down along the human temperaments. That we see every day. The melancholic, choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic. Yeah, like he got them all right there in Pooh Piglet Rabbit in New York, and it's hilarious. Um, but yeah, so, but giving them good habits. And then we try to go to Mass every day. We're Catholic.

Okay.

And, um, Mass is— it's not just, again, an artificial ceremony that's imposed on the planet. It's how we re- organize, we reorder creation to its final end, which is to serve God the Creator. That's, that's what the Mass does.

I like it when you said that you try to do this. Well, you said you try to go to Mass every day. You said you try to instill these habits. That means you're failing sometimes. Yeah, a lot of times when we sit on a podcast like this and somebody listens for an hour, they look up to us as an authority and somebody who's got it all right, and this is a textbook.

Yeah.

So what happens, what happens when you fail? What happens when you, uh, fuss at them a little too much, or, uh, they reflect it right back at you? You let them watch something that, that, that, that you regret.

Yeah.

You have a regret. What happens?

Yeah. You know, I feel like the The things that, that would assail your children, that, that could wound them or hurt them or give them bad habits are— there's really 3 categories of that: the world, the flesh, and the devil, historically. And the world is the easiest one to shut out, I think. Okay, that's just circumstance, like, and that involves just keep the filth out of the home. Okay, and go ahead and be super strict about that. Go ahead and overdo it. And if the worst case is they'll be bored and then they'll have to develop the habits of mind to pick up the good books that you've also strewn about all over the house and do that instead. So that's the easy one. So preventing stuff from coming in, like, that's manageable. The hardest one is the flesh because I still have concupiscence, you know. I have my temptations and my weaknesses.

Yeah.

And, uh, so yeah, I think the hardest thing is, is, uh, my impatience towards them.

Okay.

And in general, because I am— you know, it helps to know your temperament too. I'm a melancholic, which means that, uh, hey, I have to exert effort to, to be conversational. Some people, you know, like a sanguine, it's not effort, it's just natural. In fact, they can actually be, uh, rejuvenated. Whereas for me, it's like, okay, you know, I gotta, I gotta recuperate. I'm physically tired. And all of my children are so intelligent and healthy, but they're incredibly verbose. And incredibly interested in everything all the time.

Wow.

Which is wonderful. Like, they're so— they're just firing on all cylinders. Yeah. And so I think, you know, all of our— my own struggle is to just keep up with them in a good attitude and to not get overly exhausted, impatient, or angry, and, you know, try to push them out because because they do want to be into everything all the time. Yeah, everything we're doing as parents, you know, that's what they want to be doing, that. And they don't want to be doing like the silly little kid version of it. Yeah, they want— they want to do the real thing. Like, give me the sharp knife, I don't want the butter knife. Yeah, you know, I want to do this. And, you know, when I— so it's really when I work on my own virtue, when I go to confession and I receive the grace literally the ability to not do it anymore, then that's the best thing I can do.

So you confess it to the priest?

Yes.

Do you ever confess it to them?

Yeah, you know, if it makes— yeah, if I need to apologize.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason is— Jason's here behind the cameras and he can attest to this. I think it was this morning You talk about kids wanting to do big things.

Yeah.

No, it was yesterday. Jonah, 14, shot his first pig yesterday.

Wow.

But Gideon was there. Good for him. 'Cause I asked Josiah, who's 12, 'cause he's the one tending to the pigs, "Boy, do you want to do it?" Yeah. "Because you were the tender, maybe you probably should get first rights." Yeah. And Gideon said, "I want to shoot the pig." I mean, he's 8.

Yeah, of course.

And Jason's like, "You want to shoot the pig?" He's like, "Yeah, of course." If I would've gave him the gun, he would've tried. You're right. So, okay, so let's end it here. So with your children coming and doing this and going the right way, and you have 8, well, that gives me some hope because there's 8 that we hope, and you're trying your best, and I believe it. That then they'll go out and produce real meat for us and rejuvenate the land for us. And when I say us, I mean humans in the future. And this audience, hopefully, will band together with us, you and I, and our followings, and just do the right thing. I have to tell this story. We were in the bed one night. Jonah was a little older. There was a lightning storm. He came into our bed. He must have been 2 or something like that. And okay, he gets in the middle and we just go back to sleep. And then Rebecca wakes me up. "Justin, Justin." "What?" I'm like, "What?" She says, "You gotta get outta here." "Take Jonah and get out of here." And I said, "Why?" She said, "Well," our bed was right next to the window, "Well, that lightning, it's gonna strike you. You and Jonah." And I was thinking, is she asleep? Is this real? I was wide awake. And I'm kind of thinking she's asleep. Well, then she said, I wasn't going anywhere, I was just kind of thinking about it. And she took a deep breath. Be a man and do the right thing. So I think there's this sense in us all.

That's hilarious.

Like, she, a woman, saying— has a sense that that's what it is to be a man.

Go get struck by lightning for us. Do the right thing. Yep.

Do the right thing. Like, Whether that was right to get out of there or not, that doesn't matter. She knew in her heart that's what it is to be a man, to do the right thing. And we're circling back here to butcher the pig.

Mm-hmm.

Shoot the pig. Yeah, it's uncomfortable. Yeah, but it's the right thing.

Yeah, do it well. Yeah, the— it's, it's the right thing to do. And it's, uh, sometimes, you know, one of the— there's a— it's too easy to have an excessive attachment to comfort, especially in the modern age where comforts abound. You know, it's— you actually have to take extra effort to not be comfortable in our time. And if you have an attachment to comfort It is very difficult to do the right thing and be a man when it's time. You know, if you don't have the habit of enduring discomfort, boy, when the time comes and you really have to be uncomfortable, maybe for a prolonged amount of time, maybe just from an illness, you know, um, you are going to have a hard time doing the right thing in that situation.

Yeah.

And that's, yeah, I feel like so much a part of doing the right thing is to be, to have the habit of enduring discomfort, which is the virtue of fortitude. Doing something that is arduous and hard and uncomfortable, but doing it.

So the happy ending to this podcast then is to say your 8 children, our followers, many people listening in on this. Even if you, you're inept, but you have to, like you said earlier about the— but you just have to do it, and that's how you learn. You have to, like Gideon, my son. Yeah, I'll shoot the pig.

Yeah.

And it would He wouldn't know how to do it, but he would, you know, he would learn. And we should take courage from Gideon and say, you know what, if that 8-year-old boy was willing to do it, I should be willing to do it too. So don't you think on the flip side, the doomsday, the infertility, if we keep on that trajectory of chemical meats and veganism. This side of things, can't you imagine if it didn't go that way? And your children and my children and the viewers' children, because the parents pushed through the pain of harvesting the animals, and it comes so normal to somebody like Gideon who's 8. Isn't that a better trajectory?

Yeah, and I think that, like, you know, maybe unlike Gideon, be willing to endure the consequences of a missed shot, the discomfort of that and the moral burden of it.

Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, you missed, you missed, now go kill the pig. Like, yep, you still got to do that, you know. Yeah, you got to get that done. And because so much of why people don't do this is because they're afraid of making a big mistake. Right, which is only because we're afraid of the massive amount of discomfort that it causes us and what it might make us realize about ourselves and our own limitations and weaknesses and, you know, all that stuff. So yeah, but I— that eagerness that, you know, the first step is always the hardest. Yeah, Gideon's gonna go do it. And so you give them a little bit of knowledge of how to do it the best way.

Yeah.

And hopefully tradition He'll learn it from his dad.

Yeah, I missed a cow once.

Yeah, it's horrible.

It stands there bleeding out its mouth. Yeah, I just want to bring comfort to people listening. Yeah, have you missed something before?

Yes. Oh yeah, it happens.

Yeah, you've killed a thousand pigs at this point. Yeah, and it's still— I want to still— I want to tell people, it's still— if you're, if you're right, if you're following my example and you're raising animals in this way on de-bedding or moving them in grass, yeah, and you miss and you get them on the second shot. Yeah, it's still so much better. Oh yeah, then the feedlots they would have been finished on. Yeah, and the trailer ride hours. Yeah, to the wait at the factory.

Absolutely. Yeah, qualitatively it's no question, it's still a much better harvest in every way— nutrition and even quality of life.

Yeah.

Because what they fear more than death and pain— pigs do not have a disordered attachment to comfort.

Yeah.

So if you have a bad shot, they, they don't fear pain like we do.

Okay.

They don't fear discomfort. That's— we get attached to that. They don't have those inordinate attachments. What they fear is going contrary to their nature.

Yeah.

And contrary to their nature is separation from the family group.

Yeah.

From the sounder. So they fear being separated in the trailer and driven to the slaughterhouse. That creates massive amounts of discomfort for them. So yeah, it's definitely still a better way to go.

[Speaker] So I think we can conclude for the sake of the animal, for the sake of the order, for the sake of our health, for the sake of our future, just raise the pig and kill it.

[Speaker] Do it, yeah. And you know, I can help you learn how to do that.

Yeah, okay, that's a perfect segue to the end. Where can people find out about you?

I've got resources on that. That happens to be what I do for a living. So yeah, farmsteadmeatsmith.com is our website, and we have an online membership with that. That's videos and recipes and methods and history and forums, all geared towards harvesting on the domestic scale, on the family scale, all the livestock. We've got everything on there. And then we've got a podcast called A Meat Smith Harvest that my wife and I do.

Oh, fun.

And we do classes every, you know, several a year.

On farm?

On farm that we take the living animal, we kill an animal and we take it all the way down using traditional methods.

Cool.

Into bacon, the finished product.

Yeah. All right, thanks for being on the show.

Yeah, thank you, Justin.

All right, bye-bye.