This past weekend I went to a wedding that was held on a vegan farm animal sanctuary. The farm sanctuary is near Woodstock in upstate New York (“upstate” is technically anywhere in New York that is north of the five boroughs though people who live in Rochester or Niagara Falls might beg to differ—Albany might be a more suitable line of demarcation). This was not in the suburbs, but in a rural area where the crowded noise of the city does not reach until we bring it with us.
The bride in the wedding is an earnest young woman whose love of animals knows almost no bounds. I was bound to respect her wishes, though I’m not sure my belt and shoes were not leather. I thought it best to tread close to violating the sanctity of veganism rather than risk dressing like a hippie at a friend’s wedding. The groom was Joey Steel, one of the hardest working and intense men the punk rock scene has ever known. His progressive politics make Jello Biafra look like Ted Nugent.
A friend and former coworker who is a vegan was delighted that I was going. She sponsors a pig there named Julia and asked me to send her a photo.
We arrived a bit on the late side, as driving there meant contending with traffic and a hotel that said we could check in early and then said we couldn’t. As we pulled into the farm sanctuary, a woman came out of a small guard house to greet us. We told her we were going to the wedding and she told us where to go, asking us to drive slowly and be careful of children or animals that might wander onto the dirt road.
I did not mention to the woman that I would every gladly kill and eat every animal on the sanctuary or that she was missing out because chickens, cows, and pigs are all very delicious. That would be rude to say, but I could not help thinking it as we rolled past tasty-looking animals. My wife learned from speaking to some of the staff that the eggs that the chickens produce on the farm sanctuary are cooked and fed back to the chickens, in a strange horror show of avian cannibalism.
After the ceremony, the bride and groom invited guests to take a tour of the facility, which resembled a farm in many ways. The animals there have come from various farms and people can often go into their enclosures and pet them. I got to feed a very large cow named Elvis.
When the tour reached the pigs, I asked the tour guide which pig was Julia the pig. The tour guide said she did not know of a pig named Julia there, that perhaps I was confusing their animal sanctuary with another one. Apparently this place has not cornered the market on hippie vegan farm sanctuaries where people pay for farm animals they can’t eat. Who knew? I was sure that this was the place though and sent my friend a photo of several of the pigs to ask if one of them was her Julia. I hope no bad fate has befallen this pig. I hope that she really exists and is not just a scam to wring money out of kind-hearted vegans.
It is a sign of comfort and stability that people in our society can not only be vegans but invest in livestock that will never be eaten. In many parts of the world, people cannot afford to not eat their animals or the milk or eggs they produce. An abundance of food and reliability of agricultural yield are great benefits of the First World no one wants to give up. Even at my lowest points of unemployment and poverty, I never thought starvation was a remote possibility.
One of the reasons I got into hunting was because I believe that if you eat meat, you should be willing to hunt. You should know first-hand about the spilling of blood that puts food on your plate. Death is part of life; to sanitize our experience with death is to provide a false version of life. Vegans and hunters are similar in this way: they both acknowledge that the central defining act of eating meat happens not in the presentation on the plate, but on the floor of the forest or the slaughter house.
The Catskills are inspiring and my wife and I are grateful to have been invited to such a great wedding in such a beautiful place. And as much as I enjoy hunting, I can be a vegan for a few hours for my friends.
