Respect for the honest man

Gennady Soloviev preparing trap

A couple of weeks ago I watched a documentary directed by Werner Herzog called "Happy people: A year in the taiga".  The movie documents the lives of several men who live with their families in a little village along the Yenisei river in the Siberian taiga.  The men spend most of their lives away from home trapping sable and mink; living in solitude, completely self-reliant, with their dog as their only companion.  I was captivated by something one of the men, Gennady Soloviev, said when asked about hunting innocent animals for food when he could live in the village and raise his own.  He said, "come to think of it, we are all killers or accomplices.  Even the bleeding hearts intent to pity everything.  Why? It's very simple.  A man keeps a pig but he knows in advance what he keeps it for; to kill it and to eat it and to sell it's meat.  Even he who is sorry for all  of this buys the pork from him.  The trapper is the same as that pig farmer, only he is more honest.  I used to raise cattle and I could never bring myself to slaughter them.  'It comes to you to show it affection or to give it some treat; instead he gets a bullet in the head.'  In the taiga the wild animal knows no good can come from me, from a man; he tries to escape.  Here it's about who outsmarts whom."

Breeding and feeding for consumption and profits is a filthy practice that the ideology of animal liberation speaks to.  Speciesism is a funny little word used to justify our nation's system of modern meat production.  The ultimate in outsmarting the "lower animals...whose flesh we eat" (Ball et al., 2014).  Our nation's factory farmer spew their mantra "but we're feeding the world"; it just doesn't play out when eighteen people die every minute in this world due to hunger.  Today more than half the grain produced annually in the United States is being fed to livestock.  Grains are not the natural diet of cattle, grass is.  Grains are used to fatten them up quickly and get them to market.  The resources spent on logistics from udder to slaughter lack reasonable efficacy and the costs t our biosphere are mounting.

The lifestyle of Gennady Soloviev and the lifestyle of the factory farm consumer have very little in common.  One must be shrewd in his ability to outsmart the wild animal in order to eat while the other stands at the meat counter and chooses her cut.  Of the two, I believe some animal liberationists could admire the respect the hunter has for his kill.