After the bull was butchered

By August 2011, we had made up our minds to move back to India and live off the land. To get a first-hand experience of such a living, I started volunteering at a local organic farm in Cotati in Northern California. This farm had some vegetable beds, chickens, horses and pasture fed cows and bulls. I was working 5 hours every week, doing all kinds of odd jobs in the farm. Since my kids (8 and 5 years old then) were being homeschooled, this was a part of the learning experience. Their "learning" involved picking veggies when they were ready, eating tree-ripe fruit, enjoying time with the farm animals, collecting eggs from the chicken coop, relishing fresh butter and occasionally listening to parts of intense discussions about global economy, climate change, fossil fuel etc.

One day, the owner of the farm told us that he was expecting the local butcher. They had decided to get rid of the 2 year old bull that had contracted an infection. Being vegetarians, we dashed out as soon as we could. We got a glimpse of the big red truck that the butcher had come in. On the way back home, my kids and I discussed the options that the farm owner had, given the current scenario. It was interesting to observe the insights they had about this incident.

Two days later we returned to the farm. The bull was obviously gone and I was asked to clean the fenced open space (roughly 30' X 60') he had lived in. The ground there had caked cow dung. I was to scrape a few inches of the rich deposits and add it to the new compost pile. It took me two hours to finish the job. I had never done this kind of manual labor before. Something about this seemingly mundane job touched me deeply. 

I was thinking of this wonderful gift that the animal had left behind and how this gift will enrich the soil on the farm. Two years of life-span and no trace of waste that would pollute the place where the animal lived!! This seemed phenomenal to me. I began wondering about the amount of waste a human in its place would have generated. 

Thoughts and emotions were racing in my mind: "we, humans, are much smarter than this bull that had died
(at least we like to think so). But our intelligence seems to be detrimental to the state of the Planet. With all our intelligence, we have caused irreversible problems like global warming. Are we really smart? Or is the bull that died smarter than us?"

Interestingly, the farm owners started using the phrase "the bull in the deep freezer" when they had to refer to the bull that died. I was left wondering if this dead animal was now consuming more resources than it ever did when it was alive.

- Hema