The ethical carnivore
In the first of a 12-part series, ‘virtually vegetarian’ farmer’s daughter Louise Gray explains why she has vowed to only eat what she has killed herself
It’s the beauty of the animals that stops your heart, even through the sight of a rifle. Perhaps especially down the blurred black barrel of a gun. I am on the heather lying upwind of a herd of red deer. I can smell the musk on the stags; it is so strong at this time of year. The fine heads of the animals move up and down as if synchronised. This seething body of animals is never still – nostrils flare, ears twitch away the midges and cloven hooves stamp.
The doe closest to us spots movement and lets out a warning bark. ‘Get up! Move! Move!’ For some reason, like most men and children, they are ignoring her and the group remains relaxed.
We have spied a couple of potential targets. An old stag with just one antler and a young buck with one point on each of his antlers. I have the ‘pointer’ in my sights.
My hands are sweating and my stomach is turning. I’m trying to remember all the advice from a recent tutorial. Position yourself so that the rifle is held fast by bones and earth, not muscle that can shake. Double check you have a safe backdrop. Don’t forget to breathe.
The cross hair floats over the ‘boiler room’, the heart and lungs, where I have been told to aim the bullet. His fur is black from wallowing in the peat as he prepares himself for mating season, his annual chance to pass on his genes. He looks up, passes his tongue over his nose and looks right at me with big brown eyes.
I turn to the stalker. ‘No, I can’t do it, not this time.’ I pull back the bolt and the bullet falls to the ground, unspent.
I bottled it. Not a good start for someone who has just started writing a book about killing animals. But I am not a person who would normally be crawling around the Highlands with a gun. Climbing a mountain? Sure. But not with a gun. I hate guns. I am frightened of them. I always will be.
Yet I eat meat. And therein lies the rub. We eat meat, we are carnivores, yet somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten the link between meat and a dead animal.
I’m a journalist. I make my living asking questions. It bothered me that no one was asking this most fundamental of questions – how did dinner get to my plate? If you are what you eat surely you should have some understanding of where your food comes from?
At the time, I was Environment Correspondent on The Daily Telegraph. Every day I was writing about climate change. I knew livestock pumps out more emissions than transport. I knew one of the easiest things I could do to reduce my carbon footprint was to give up meat. But every time I made an attempt to become vegetarian, I would come home to Scotland and my granny would serve roast beef from a local farm or my Dad would offer venison from one of his recent stalks. I knew this meat had had a happy life, was sustaining jobs in the countryside and, in some cases, was being killed to preserve the wider environment – in the case of deer to protect baby trees.
So I made a drastic decision to only eat animals I have killed myself. To be honest, at first I kind of meant it as a joke, and to shock people at dinner parties. But it soon took on a life of its own.
Without realising it, I had touched a raw nerve in today’s society. We are more than aware we are disconnected from the food we eat. You can see it in the television schedules and patter of celebrity chefs, who are constantly wittering on about ‘provenance’.
On investigation, I found my new ‘kill-
to-eat diet’ was not entirely original. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, made a New Year’s resolution to only eat animals he killed himself. Alan Clark, the late diarist and Tory MP, was also vegetarian, except for the animals he had personally dispatched.
My unique selling point was that I wanted to write about it. I started to write a blog and pretty soon Bloomsbury the publisher got in touch. My book was given a provisional title, The Ethical Carnivore, and I am working towards publication in August 2016.
There is plenty to write about: gender politics, animal rights, even spirituality, in the sense of connecting with animals and our environment.
I also moved back home to Scotland, such a rich landscape for wild food. It is certainly easier to access the farmers, stalkers, ghillies and country folk who can help me find animals and kill them humanely.
Over the next year, through this column, I hope to introduce some of the wonderful char- acters, countryside and even recipes I find along the way. Each month I will write about a different species and new experiences. So far, I have eaten mussels, trout, mackerel, lamb and rabbit, and although I remain largely vegetarian, I am also spending time visiting a whole range of slaughter houses and abattoirs to see how the animals we buy in supermarkets are killed and processed.
Already I am learning so much: how cattle are butchered; how every last bit of a pig ‘except the squeak’ can be used; how it feels to hook a fish when you thought all hope had gone; how it feels to have a living animal in your crosshairs.
It is turning out to be a deeply personal journey.
I am a farmer’s daughter and have been around stalking, shooting and guns all my life. But until this point I had never taken any interest. I was shockingly ignorant, to the point where I didn’t know the difference between a rifle and a shotgun. I know that is difficult for
some readers to believe, but I am also a product of my age, having been brought up around television and convenience food. And perhaps, as a woman, it never seemed accessible.
Taking responsibility for sourcing meat myself means learning new skills and developing new relationships with people. It means lying in a ditch in the early hours of the morning waiting for a roe buck to emerge; it means being able to spot the presence of partridge, harriers, hares and other wildlife.
In many ways, it is changing how I think about nature. I feel more connected to the countryside through having to understand how animals behave. My gastronomic odyssey has also changed the way I eat. Even when this year is over, I suspect that I will cook far more vegetarian food and think far more carefully about the meat I eat.
I thought that I might be targeted and abused by animal rights activists, but people are being so supportive. Even my vegetarian and vegan friends – I do have some – like the idea. They can see that, ultimately, I advocate eating less meat – or at least viewing meat as a treat. I have certainly gone off factory meat, having been to an abattoir and considered the comparison with hunting my own game.
I am glad I let that first deer go. I wasn’t ready. The whole point of this journey is to illustrate how difficult it is to source meat ourselves. It is not the same as going to the supermarket. It is a living animal and if we are to eat it we have to take responsibility for killing it.
As Ernest Hemingway said in his bull-fighting paean Death in the Afternoon, a writer cannot justify the death of a living animal but you can describe it, then people can make their minds up for themselves.
‘There is always death and I should not try to defend it now,’ he wrote. ‘Only to tell honestly the things I have found true about it.’
‘I am glad I let that first deer go. I wasn’t ready’