Killing Them Softly
1999 Schweitzer
Sermon
Unitarian Universalists for Ethical
Treatment of Animals
Proposal letter
Worship service
Sermon
March 9, 1999
2069 N. 16th
Laramie, WY 82072 Rev.
Gary Kowalski
First UU Society
152 Pearl St.
Burlingon VT 05401
Dear Rev. Kowalski,
I saw the announcement of the Schweitzer Sermon Award in The
UU Leader this month. About a year ago, I presented a sermon at
the UU Fellowship of Laramie (where I am currently chair of the
Board) that would seem to be appropriate for the conditions of
this Award (reverence for all life with relevance to animals and
the natural world). I have taken the liberty of enclosing a text
of the sermon for your consideration.
I realize that my approach is a bit unconventional, in that I
make my living (in part) by developing methods to kill animals in
their natural settings—hardly an activity that would seem to
match the goals of the Schweitzer Award at first glance,
particularly given the theme at GA of a special worship service
dedicated to animal abuse and deep ecology! However, I hope that
my intimate relationship with animals and nature puts my task
into a compelling (if not convincing) spiritual context. The
issue of how we ought to relate with animals and the natural
world is sufficiently complex without muddying the waters further
with notions of "good killing", but perhaps my
perspective is sufficiently provocative as to enlighten, rather
than confuse, our thinking.
Thank you for considering this submission to the Schweitzer
Sermon Award contest. If you require anything more (or different)
with regard to a submission, please do not hesitate to contact me
by phone (work: 307-766-4260; home: 307-721-2081), fax
(307-766-5025), email (lockwood@uwyo.edu)
or regular post.
Wishing you Peace and Unrest,
Jeffrey A.
Lockwood
Professor of Entomology
Worship Service
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Laramie
570 Corthell
Laramie, Wyoming 82070
June 1998
Chalice Lighting | Opening Words | Meditation
| Closing Words
Chalice Lighting
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a
spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with
deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
—Albert Schweitzer
Opening Words
Loren Eiseley
was the finest mystic scientist of our century. His prose and
poetry captured the most moving and, in some cases haunting,
experiences of his journeys into the natural world. Once, while
contemplating a Stone Age tool Eiseley noted that,
"... if [a] savage can pluck a stone from the gravel
because it shone like crystal when the water rushed over it,
and hold it against the sunset, he will be as we were in the
beginning, whole—as we were when we were children,
before we began to split the knowledge from the dream."
Meditation
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night
at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s
lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his
beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their
lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of
still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting
with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the
world, and am free.
—Wendell
Berry
Closing Words
Our closing words this evening come from a poem that I found
in Eric Carle’s wonderful anthology "Animals
Animals". I have shared this poem with my children many
times, and so I dedicate these words to all of our
children—and especially mine, who struggle to make sense of
what their father does and why:
Hurt no living thing:
Ladybird, nor butterfly,
Nor moth with dusty wing,
Nor cricket chirping cheerily,
Nor grasshopper so light of leap.
Nor dancing gnat, or beetle flat,
Nor harmless worms that creep.
—Christina
Rosetti
Killing Them Softly
Introduction | Story 1 | Story 2 | Story 3 | Some Lessons
First, Taking Life—Like Giving
Life—Is A Sacred Act
Killing Well, Like Living Well, Is Part Of Being
Extreme Views Are Easy, Simple, Satisfying And
Wrong
Rational Analysis Is Necessary But Not
Sufficient To Understand This World
Introduction
My motivation for developing this sermon was ultimately
selfish. In a religious tradition such as ours, one can reveal
the darker side of oneself without the fear of recrimination or
the emptiness of platitudinous endorsement. While I gain from the
cleansing value of catharsis, my story is also intended as an act
of sharing and trust. I have been deeply moved and affected by
listening to members of my Fellowship and understanding how
Unitarian Universalism allows a spiritual integration of their
lives. I have heard how a fellow member puts his work as a
merchant into the context of his experiences in Central America;
how a musician draws upon an intense mysticism; how a Buddhist
member struggled long and hard to make sense—and then to
stop making sense—of the world; how a physicist beautifully
integrates energy, matter and metaphysics, and how a computer
scientist is enriched by profound explorations of consciousness.
From these people I have discovered that individual experiences
and efforts at integration of mind, body, and soul are ultimately
personal, but we can learn a great deal from one another—at
the very least we find that we are not alone in the struggles of
life.
My job . . . is to kill. I
was hired by the University of
Wyoming’s College
of Agriculture 13 years ago with the primary objective of
understanding and ultimately limiting the damage done by
rangeland grasshoppers
to the state’s ranchers. Usually I describe my profession in
euphemistic terms—applied ecology or pest management. In
fact, I flatter myself with the belief that I have made
substantial contributions to science through the necessity of
understanding that which I am mandated to control. While
agriculture is viewed as the means of bringing forth life,
entomology's existence as a discipline is largely premised on the
taking of sentient life. The bottom line is that I was hired as
an assassin, and it is my job to extinguish life. I am expected
to do it well—efficiently and professionally. This year, if
all goes as planned, I will direct the killing of no fewer than
800 million grasshoppers and something close to 5 billion other
creatures—mostly insects. Their accumulated bodies will
weigh over 5,000 tons and would fill this room XXX times. That's
a lot of killing, and each year it gets harder. The insights
necessary to put this responsibility in a spiritual
context—to make sense of the carnage—is among the
greatest gifts that I have been able to accept from my religious
community. Their stories, provocations, music, doubts,
explorations, and love have allowed me the context to begin to
understand myself as a "taker of life." But let me
begin at the beginning—and tell you three stories.
Story 1
I was trained as a behavioral ecologist, exploring how the
actions of individuals affected, and were affected by, their
ecological condition. My first summer in Wyoming was invested in
savoring long, lonely hours sitting in a field watching
grasshoppers to see how they spent their days. These were
tranquil but challenging times—it demands considerable
discipline to remain focused, especially when the grasshoppers
are lolling about in the morning sun or taking their siesta in
the heat of afternoon. But in the words of the great animal
behaviorist, Konrad Lorenz,
"It takes a very long period of watching to become
really familiar with an animal and to attain a deeper
understanding of its behavior; and without the love for the
animal itself, no observer, however patient, could ever look
at it long enough to make valuable observations on its
behavior."
It might seem difficult to
become so intimately connected with a grasshopper but not really.
To begin with, they have a number of endearing physical features.
Stephen Gould noted
that humans protect and nurture infantile forms; the big head and
eyes of a baby melt our hearts. So, it is no coincidence that
Disney chose a cricket for his first insect character (SET UP
DOLL) —Jiminy's features trigger a subconscious parental
instinct. It also turns out that grasshoppers are really rather
innocent and gentle creatures, with little propensity towards
violence and no ability to grievously harm one another. Although
they can be a bit scrappy and intolerant when crowding around a
particularly tasty morsel, including a recently deceased comrade,
they really are affable creatures.
Upon close inspection their physical beauty emerges as well.
In Wyoming, we have Dactylotum
bicolor, a gaudy pink, blue, and black species known as the
barberpole grasshopper; we have Boopedon nubilum a species
in which the flightless, obese females are a mottled brown but
the sleek males are a velvety black with azure hindwings. Then
there is Brachystola magna, an immense, green and pink
grasshopper that rivals a mouse in body mass and lumbers across
weedy fields munching sunflowers. There is Hypochlora alba,
a ghostly pale green grasshopper that vanishes before your eyes
when it tumbles into a patch of the sagebrush that constitutes
its only food. It turns out that entering the world of
grasshoppers is a glorious journey, giving rise to a
connectedness which makes one wonder if all this splendor was
really a necessary consequence of evolution—maybe we were
just lucky, or perhaps, even blessed.
Story 2
Having been educated as an organismal biologist and having
started by relating to grasshoppers one at a time, I was largely
of the opinion that populations were basically collections of
individuals. That is, until one hot summer day on a desolate
tract of grassland near Kaycee, Wyoming where I came to realize
that populations are real beings. These vibrant, living entities
are not just anonymous mobs of individuals, anymore than you and
I are just seething masses of cells. My research associate at
that time was Larry DeBrey, an honest, decent, humble, and
perceptive man. He was never fond of the culture of science with
all of its pomp, posturing and pretense, and hence he retained a
childlike capacity to cut through the fog of scientific
obfuscation.
We were out in the middle of absolutely nowhere on a expanse
of sun-baked rangeland where we were attempting to monitor an
outbreak encompassing over 10,000 acres. Larry and I were on our
hands and knees digging for grasshopper eggs, when he looked up
and started laughing. Now, Larry was prone to sudden insights
regarding the absurdity of the human condition—so I sat back
on my haunches and patiently waited for his explanation.
"Why here?" he asked.
"Why here what?", I replied.
"Why am I digging this damn hole precisely between these two
clumps of grass in the middle of a this?" he answered,
sweeping his arm across the horizon.
Indeed it was preposterous, and I realized that the object of
our work, the grasshopper population, was a living whole, and
that sampling any portion of this entity was like extracting a
single neuron to understand the brain. Populations were real
beings, no more abstract than you or I. And we were embedded in
the bowels of a diffuse creature comprised of 5 billion cells
stretched over 15 square miles.
I have never again been able to think about holistic entities
in the same way. There is solace in knowing that ecologists, far
more eminent than I shall ever be, have shared this transcendent
moment. Aldo Leopold
admonished us to "Think like a mountain", and it is
said that he gained tremendous insight regarding the forces that
shape mountains by lying on a slope and becoming a glacier for a
few thousand years of dreamtime. I have found that it is possible
to "think like a population". For fleeting moments I
have become a population as Leopold became a mountain. But as
with any waking dream, as soon as one begins to think, the
mystery evaporates—the knowledge and dream are divided.
Story 3
I took a sabbatical in Australia, a continent known for its
capacity to touch the human spirit—as manifest by the
aborigines. These native people experienced a Dreamtime in which
their world was formed, and dreaming remains their most powerful
means of understanding the world. Outsiders seem perplexed as to
whether aboriginal dreaming, is a literal, symbolic, or
transcendent affair. It seems that the aborigines simply do not
recognize our classifications of consciousness. Recall again the
words of Loren Eiseley,
"he will be as we were in the beginning, whole—as we
were when we were children, before we began to split the
knowledge from the dream."
I spent several days in the outback working with the agency
responsible for managing the Australian plague locust. I had
always wanted to experience a locust outbreak—a bit like an
artist wandering the Louvre or an astronomer traveling into
space. My first contact with locusts occurred on an unusually
wet, gray morning—my guide located a band of nymphs by
looking for the flocks of birds that feast on these enormous
all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets.
The nymph is the immature, wingless phase that aggregates in
staggering numbers forming sinuous bands. A typical band is
perhaps 10 feet wide and a mile in length. With 2000 nymphs per
square yard, a band may include 100 million insects—more
than the human population west of the Mississippi River. As the
morning sun warms the nymphs, what appears to be anarchy soon
develops into a surging, leaderless, mass—and the march
begins. On a quiet afternoon you can hear the faint rustling of
millions of mandibles grinding and bodies tumbling, as the band
rolls across the grasslands. These waves of life are so thick
that they can be seen from the air—at 500 feet they appear
as arching shadows with rings of bare soil in their wake, marking
the places where they stopped and fed on previous days.
A month later, I returned to the outback in search of the
swarms of adults that develop from the nymphal bands that are
missed during the initial control programs. During the day, these
swarms appear to be shimmering dust storms. Most of their flights
are at night, so that during the day they rest until something
provokes them into an aerial stampede. Grains of sand, stars in
space, locusts in flight—the sheer numerical splendor is
terrifying and joyous. As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of
being suffocated by an undefinable, expanding mass—this
primal sense of being swallowed by an enormous presence that is
absolutely indifferent to oneself came back to me that day, but
it provoked wonder rather than fear.
Early the next morning we traveled to the site of a spray
program. I had participated in such programs in the US, but never
one in which death was so apparent. Perhaps it was the size of
the insects, their phenomenal numbers, the recency of the
insecticide application, my empathy with having been engulfed by
a swarm the previous day, or my detachment from the farmers who
benefitted from the program, but I was stricken by the horrid
scene around me. Everywhere the locusts were lying on the ground,
some were dead but many were still twitching in the spasms
brought on by the neurotoxin. They were suffering horribly. I am
told that some bombardiers in World War II were unable to
continue with their duties once they witnessed the carnage on the
ground. It was as if I had seen, really seen, for
the first time what it meant to dole out wholesale death.
I have since realized that I had felt and suppressed the
revulsion of waging war on innocent creatures several years
earlier following a treatment for Mormon crickets near Edgerton,
Wyoming. They had been sprayed a few hours earlier, and I arrived
to find the insects staggering about on the hillsides. The
poisoned crickets were unable to hop uphill, so each movement
brought them down into the ravines. At the bottom of the dry
creeks, they accumulated in what looked like stagnant black
streams, comprised of thousands of writhing bodies piled atop of
one another. I was unable to turn away—it was horribly
fascinating—the scale of death and suffering was captivating
in a dark way that we repress in our daily, civilized lives.
Some Lessons
So what do these stories mean? How do I make sense of the
slaughter? I can't claim to understand killing, as death is
perhaps the most difficult aspect of living and causing death is
even more challenging. But I think I know more than I did when I
started. There are a few things of which I am sure, and many
others of which I have only the faintest notions and fleeting
glimpses.
First, Taking Life—Like Giving
Life—Is A Sacred Act
I feel a responsibility for an organism that very few people
have taken the time to understand. For me, the relief that comes
with distance from my victim wanes as the gap narrows with each
passing year. Most pest managers are governmental executioners
who are only aware of grasshoppers when they become our
competitors and pay no attention to these animals when they
quietly and faithfully structure the vegetation, consume
poisonous weeds, recycle nutrients from dead plants, and feed the
birds and other wildlife of the prairie.
I have glimpsed what the Native Americans saw when they spoke
of brother Earth and sister Sky. While my worldview has not
nearly encompassed the breadth of the Indian's, I have become a
sibling of the grasshoppers. I recall in fourth grade that my
older brother, who occasionally gave me a thrashing in our
younger days, leapt to my defense when a seventh grade bully came
after me. The ruffian never again accosted me, but my brother
did. You see, the love of a brother transcends the scraps and
tussles of growing up. Following the logic of love, if there is
such a thing, it makes sense to me that I can do violence to the
grasshoppers because I understand them. But I will defend them
from tormentors and bullies who understand little of their nature
and care even less. So, I continue to develop and define my
relationship with the grasshoppers. Perhaps it seems
paradoxical—if not hypocritical—that I can claim to
understand them well enough to take on the burden of treating
them as pests when conflicts arise—in short, to kill them.
I first participated in the intentional killing animals when I
worked for a veterinarian 20 years ago. One morning a woman
brought in her family dog, who had become suddenly vicious. An
X-ray revealed that a porcupine quill had penetrated the poor
creature's sinuses and an abscess had invaded the brain. The dog
had to be killed, as there was no treatment and its behavior was
not compatible with the life of a family. The woman insisted on
holding her friend as he died. She had come to understand the
animal, to love it, and in so doing she accepted the
responsibility of participating in its death.
Killing Well, Like Living Well, Is Part
Of Being
A few years ago the USDA
planned to bring a new disease to our shores with the intent of
forever infecting and thereby suppressing the native grasshoppers
of the West. Most of my colleagues supported this effort and
could not understand my long, bitter, and eventually successful
fight to stop this program. From an environmental perspective,
long-term suppression of a major component of the prairies was
misguided and from a compassionate perspective the suffering
caused by disease is no less than that induced by poisons. Waging
biological, rather than chemical, warfare on Nature is not a
great moral leap forward. But my objections ran deeper
still—the proposal struck me as being too eerily similar to
providing smallpox laden blankets to the Indians. I do not want
to offend anyone by suggesting that I am morally equating the
Native American people with insects, but the mentality that
allows us to treat other beings, whether humans or grasshoppers,
as simply means to our ends is an ethic that reduces the sacred
to the profane. (PAUSE)
So, I continue to engage in research and teaching that
involves killing, but now it bothers me—and that is good. I
am obligated to help the good stewards of the land, but it is
evil to kill. At least, it is wrong to kill without respecting
and honoring your victim. A good hunter loathes the kill, and
perhaps only those who have hunted understand this paradox. For
those of us who depend on others to kill so that we may
eat—do we know whether our hired assassins are killing well
on our behalf?
I respect and understand the ranchers whose livelihoods are
threatened by grasshopper outbreaks. I have come to know, and can
not help empathizing with, those individuals who live with
the land and whose families are deeply rooted to a place. These
people are critical to the health and wellbeing of the ecosystem.
Having spent years trying to understand rural grasshoppers and
rural people, I refuse to despair at the possibility of
respectful coexistence of these two entities.
The American Indians asked permission or forgiveness of the
animals they hunted, and perhaps modern agriculture would do well
to be spiritually pained by the control of pests. For some, the
idea of a mystic scientist is oxymoronic, but in the final
analysis I believe that this combination of virtues is necessary
for our agriculture and civilization to flourish. As one comes to
understand and eventually connect with a portion of the natural
world, as the scientist rediscovers the curiosity and wonder of
the child within, we begin to reintegrate the knowledge and the
dream.
Extreme Views Are Easy, Simple,
Satisfying And Wrong
The longer one works and lives with another being, the greater
the empathy and the more difficult its destruction. In his book On
Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman notes that we are largely
unable to kill without considerable social facilitation. With the
demands of authority, group absolution, and distance from the
victim it becomes easier to kill. For me, all of these factors
become less compelling with time, and there may well come a point
in which I am no longer able to kill. However, for the moment I
continue to struggle with what Joseph
Campbell called the ultimate existential dilemma—we must
kill to live.
If my current projects succeed, during the current grasshopper
outbreak we will reduce our insecticide use by 5,000 tons and
limit our killing fields to less than half of their historical
scale, but the carnage will not be avoided in its entirety. That
is the ugly middle ground, disparaging called compromise or
capitulation. I am convinced that it is easier to be a member of Earth First! or the Chemical Manufacturers Association
than a member of neither. The atheists and the theists have it
easy.
Allow me to digress with a short account of a documentary that
has haunted my memory for years now. The film followed a
condemned killer over the course of his last days. Ironically,
the most compelling character was not the convict, or his family,
or the victim's family—it was the warden. Here was a good
and kind man burdened with the obligation of premeditated murder.
The warden acted with dignity and compassion; he was gentle
but not fawning, supportive but not patronizing, regretful but
not apologetic. He struggled to make the most difficult of all
social responsibilities as decent as humanly possible. While I
oppose and protest against the death penalty, is my righteous
indignation any more spiritually meaningful than the gentle hand
of the compassionate executioner? What if all the good and decent
people absolve themselves of the sins of our society by becoming
moral hermits and refusing to engage in the impure and dirty work
of life in the trenches?
I sometimes wish I could throw myself at one of the
extremes—environmentalism or anthropocentrism, mysticism or
rationalism, religion or science. But to do so is to become
truncated, half human, stagnant. The work of life lies neither in
the presumptuous pronouncements of the positivists nor in the
rarified rantings of the relativists. It is easy to be
sanctimonious about the environment, human rights, and other such
causes, but as one truly enters the world of these conflicts the
simplicity of pretension gives way to the complexity of the
moment. I often encounter those who preach about how the world
ought to be, but rarely do these futurists wish to engage in the
actual work of getting us from here to there. Of course, the
middle way risks the pitfall of rationalization, as we talk
ourselves into perpetuating the status quo. This is indeed
a very grave spiritual risk that I accept as a positive
incrementalist. As long as each day and month and year takes us
one step closer to a just and compassionate future, I am willing
to slop around in the muddy world of the here and now.
Perhaps that is why I am attracted to situational ethics, in
which we understand that the world is far too complex for a
simple set of ethical rules but that the slippery slide of
relativism leads to moral despair. The absolute standard for our
actions is Love—a complex and evolving principle that can
not be reduced to simple laws nor expanded to permit all
behaviors. Each situation will demand a loving resolution on its
own terms, and sometimes killing is part of loving. My point is
that one must engage this ugly-beautiful world—there is no
shortage of architects of our future—what we lack are
bricklayers.
Rational Analysis Is Necessary But Not
Sufficient To Understand This World
Let us recall the beautiful words of William
Blake,
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."
For me Nature is manifest by the grasshoppers. They have been
patient and forgiving teachers. They possess not just
information, not simply knowledge, but a wisdom of place that
transcends our compulsive accumulation of facts and data. In the
collective, they flourish through diversity, perseverance, and
humility.
Many of the most influential and esteemed scientists of our
age contend that all of biology can be explained by
physico-chemical processes—no real scientist would deny
reductionism. Grudgingly, some scientists allow that religion has
its place but lest there be any confusion on the matter—they
insist that the world is dichotomous. The expanding halls of
science shall not share office space with the temple of religion.
Scientists often attack mysticism, spirituality, and religion,
and I believe that the reason is fear. Loren Eiseley posed
the following challenge to scientists,
"Is there something here we fear to face, except when
clothed in safely sterilized professional speech? Have we
grown reluctant in this age of power to admit mystery and
beauty into our thoughts, or to learn where power
ceases?"
We train students in science to suppress the subjective
element of their humanity, to truncate themselves so as not to
confuse objective reality with individual experience, to avoid
moral thinking in developing their research agendas, and to not
muddle the material with the divine. We allow them a quick tour
of the humanities and the arts (if it's Wednesday it must be
Poetry), but insist that they do not tarry in these foreign
lands. I suspect that many scientists are hostile to spiritual
notions in order to keep their demons of uncertainty at
bay—to prevent the impure thoughts of transcendent
experience from confusing the rational process of analysis. Like
a prayer or a mantra to keep the scientific fundamentalists
focused on one-half of what it means to be human, they chant the
denial of that which transcends science. Without such an
expenditure of energy it is very difficult to keep from being
drawn into a respectful, caring, even loving relationship with
the objects of our study. It would, indeed, be impossible to,
"... be as we were in the beginning, whole—as we
were when we were children, before we began to split the
knowledge from the dream."
