Photograph by Laura Schaeffer / Connected Archives
WORDS BY KATIE REVELL AND OLIVIA OLDHAM
It was early evening but already dark—the final weeks of the Scottish winter. In Katie’s kitchen in Glasgow, vegetables were roasting in the oven, its warm glow a welcome contrast with the cold and damp outside. On the stovetop, two sirloins seared in a cast-iron pan, crackling the air like radio static and filling it with the aroma of cooking meat. A little butter, salt, and pepper: We decided to keep things simple.
It was a typical steak dinner in many ways. But in one sense, it was unique: We knew more about the cow these steaks had come from than any other meat either of us had ever eaten. The day before, we had visited the farm in Aberdeenshire, Scotland where the cow was raised. We met his siblings. We saw how he lived. We learned that his name was Dougie.
The next day, as we ate the steak, we couldn’t help but think of Dougie’s life and death on the farm. We experienced a new kind of appreciation for the food on our plate—but also a newfound hesitation. If everyone knew this much about the meat we ate, we pondered, would we still eat so much of it?
This meal was part of our new podcast series called Less and Better? for Farmarama Radio. In eight episodes, we explore what a more ethical future of meat might look like. We’ve worked in food, land, and agriculture—Olivia as a researcher and Katie as an audio producer. And we also both eat meat.
Industrial meat production carries a laundry list of sins: greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, poor animal welfare, and labor rights abuses, just to name a few. As meat eaters, we wanted to know what it would take to realize a production system of “less and better” meat—one that was free from the current system’s many vices. What we learned on that Scottish farm and elsewhere is that the future we long for might require a deeper, more intimate connection with the animals we eat—both in life and in death.
Some people, understandably, respond to the reality of industrial meat by looking away. As one contributor—a meat eater from southeastern England—told us, “I’ve never given it any thought, apart from when I see things on the telly about mass meat farming in America. But I’ve always tried not to think about it, just because I like eating meat.”
Not everyone has the same capacity to engage with the horrors of the meat system. If your budget barely allows you to put food on the table, then ethics are rarely top of mind during grocery runs. Moreover, we are rarely confronted with the realities of the food system—it takes time, energy, and effort to learn how our food is produced.
What we learned on that Scottish farm and elsewhere is that the future we long for might require a deeper, more intimate connection with the animals we eat—both in life and in death.
And even for those of us who are in a position to inform ourselves and make a choice, determining the “right” approach is not straightforward. For some people, the obvious and necessary thing to do is to remove meat from their diets altogether. But there are also compelling reasons to challenge the idea that we need to end animal farming entirely. For example, some grazing practices have the potential to enhance biodiversity and improve soil health. Animal husbandry has significant cultural value in many parts of the world. And eating animal products, including meat, can have health benefits.
So is there a way to move beyond this binary—meat versus no meat—and instead consider how we might do a better job of raising, and killing, animals?
In Highland Perthshire, Scotland, we met hill farmer Seonag Barbour. During our visit, Barbour observed that something was amiss with one of her cows—she could tell just by the way the cow was standing. Shortly after, Barbour’s daughter called to tell her that that same cow had given birth. For us, it was difficult to fathom how intimate Barbour’s relationship with this cow must have been to be able to interpret such subtle details in her behavior. But for her, this seemed as easy as noticing that a friend was sad or uncomfortable.
Farmers like Barbour and her husband, Andrew, place great value on having a close relationship with their animals. They know them individually and are sensitive to their needs and wants. This not only helps them to feel connected to their cows—it makes them better farmers.
Recognizing and respecting the sentience of farmed animals—and, some argue, their capacity for emotion—demands that we move from treating them as objects to treating them as subjects. And that requires us to provide them with environments that don’t simply minimize harm, but also provide opportunities to play, to form and maintain social bonds, and to make choices about where to be, and what and when to eat. Obviously, in any farming context, these opportunities will be limited—but within those limitations, there’s a great deal of untapped opportunity to facilitate this kind of “positive welfare”.
Biologist and animal welfare researcher Françoise Wemelsfelder has developed a tool called qualitative behavior analysis, or QBA, to help farmers assess and track how animals are feeling based on their behavior. By doing so, farm workers can draw on their existing knowledge to better honor and respect their animals as sentient individuals.
“The animal’s not a complex thermostat or a computer that we can take apart and then reassemble and model and develop algorithms,” Wemelsfelder explained. “We have another being, and you enter a more relational paradigm. You enter, in a way, a moral domain.”
This moral imperative isn’t just about providing care in life. It also extends to death. In our reporting for the podcast, one model for compassionate slaughter that we turned to was religious tradition.
Hibba Mazhary, an animal welfare researcher at Oxford University who focuses on the British halal meat industry, shared with us some Islamic traditions that encourage an intimate relationship with animals, like the practice of halal slaughter. By requiring the slaughterperson to attend to the moment of each animal’s death with prayer and to pinpoint precisely when and why it died, Mazhary told us that halal “force[s] a reflection on death.”
Is there a way to move beyond this binary—meat versus no meat—and instead consider how we might do a better job of raising, and killing, animals?
We also met Sara Moon and Samson Hart, cofounders of Miknaf Ha’aretz, a grassroots collective dedicated to building an earth-based, radical-diasporic Jewish community in the U.K. The pair had experienced ritual slaughter as part of the Adamah Farm Fellowship, a Jewish agricultural program in the U.S.
“It felt kind of very beautiful and also painful and terrifying,” said Hart. “Because of the ritual way in which we did it… and then the way in which we ate the animal after. You know, we made a big soup on the fire and it fed a lot of people and it felt like, wow… that’s honoring a life.”
Even though neither of us is religious, these stories gripped us. They forced us to grapple with the reality of what it means to take a life to sustain our own—or, indeed, to please our palates. The emotional impact. The awkwardness. The uncomfortable truth.
Many of the farmers we spoke to echoed this sentiment in different ways. Nikki and James Yoxall, the graziers in Aberdeenshire, Scotland who gave us those two steaks, name their animals precisely because they are going to be killed. This is their way of showing respect, an intentional refusal to look away that comes from a place of profound care for their cows.
“I recognize that for some people it’s really difficult to square that circle,” Nikki acknowledged. “I don’t expect other people, if they don’t like it, to change their mind or to do it the way we do it. I just think for us, it makes sense… I would much rather know the animal and know the production system rather than eat meat kind of blindly, without care for where it’s come from… for me, that doesn’t demonstrate respect.”
Neither of us has ever killed an animal. But over the past year, we’ve frequently found ourselves wondering: Could we? Indeed, if we aspire to be responsible meat eaters, should we?
We savored the two steaks that Nikki and James gave us in a new light. With each bite, we thought about—and talked about—Dougie, whose flesh we were eating: the life he had had, and the fact that that life had been taken to turn him into food.
As we wrote this piece, we reflected on whether our meat-eating habits have changed as a result of making the series. To be frank, they haven’t, really. But, in some ways, that’s kind of the point.
The way the meat system is currently set up, there’s a huge gulf between the animals raised for food and those of us who eat them. It’s an almost impenetrable veil that, in some ways, seems designed to encourage us to look away. So as we imagine what less and better meat might mean, maybe a useful question to ask is: What would the raising, slaughter, and consumption of animals look like if getting to know them was a feature of the system? Maybe, their stories need to be impossible to ignore rather than impossible to chase down.
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.
What We Learned From Eating Dougie the Cow
