In the agriculture industry, death is a part of life.

Cole Pressler is a journalism junior and reporter for The Hill. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang News.

This story contains descriptive language of animal slaughter that some readers may find unsettling.

The idea came to me on a September day in my kitchen. I was about to toss some ground beef into a tofu stir fry.

Suddenly, the beef felt like a foreign substance in my hands, almost alien.

I had recently been critically exploring my relationship with food. Rather than going through the motions of eating, I wanted to be in tune with what I ate, where it came from and how it made me feel.

And I had never witnessed death with my own eyes before.

So I promised myself that by the year’s end, I would observe a cattle “harvest”— the agricultural term for slaughter.

Cal Poly’s Animal Science department said no (it’s policy; they’ve had protestors before). But they reached out to a local harvester who invited me to watch him slaughter a family’s cow at their home.

Leaving it up to my conscience was the easy way out of my dilemma. If the harvest ruined meat for me, so be it. Shouldn’t a consumer have to see an animal die before reaping the benefits of its flesh?

The week before, I went on a night run through Cal Poly’s agriculture fields. Just past Stenner Creek, a cow stared at me through the blackness from behind a fence.

I stopped and walked up to it. Do you know? I asked silently.

It reared its head away when I reached out with my hand.

The butcher

On a chilly morning in a meat market parking lot, I met Mike and his two apprentices, Sadie and Tom. Those weren’t quite their names, but I wouldn’t like Mike to get in trouble for firing a gun inside city limits.

Mike is a freelance harvester, kind of an agricultural mercenary. Each morning he travels around Central California slaughtering livestock at families’ homes. 

He had a full 80s rocker mullet, a goatee around his beakish mouth, thin-framed tinted glasses and a black wool Patagonia vest that looked as old as me.

He’s a second-generation butcher — his dad was in the business. 

“They called me ‘gut boy’ when I was 6 or 7,” he said cheerfully.

He was 16 when he harvested his first animal solo and he’s slit more throats than he can remember.

“Thousands and thousands,” he said. “You lose count. You just wanna get the job done.”

While we talked, Mike pulled single Starbursts from his vest pocket and offered me one.

“You know the only time happiness is perfected?” He unwrapped another with a wicked grin. “When it’s shared.”

I followed him to Atascadero behind his Chevy truck, which had several metal beams mounted in the bed to string up carcasses.

The family owns a one-story beige house and a few acres at the end of a cracking, potholed road off El Camino Real. Their wide-open dirt driveway slopes upwards towards the house and down to some trees and dumpsters. This was the killing floor.

Mike greeted the mom with a hug. “Always hug your butcher and your baker,” he joked.

The harvesters tied on aprons, pulled latex gloves over their left hands and strapped on belts laden with carving knives. Sadie screeched a blade across a sharpening rod.

A minute later the cow arrived. He was a 1-year-old auburn- and cream-colored Hereford, about five feet tall and eight feet long, with a rope around his head.

Mackenzie, the 19-year-old daughter, won several awards last year showing him at competitions around the county. His meat will fetch around $2,000 — slightly less than what they paid for him.

She spent time nearly every day with him in the cattle pen.

“He’d lay down, I’d sit on him,” Mackenzie remembered. “Sometimes he’d lick me. He was the nicest one.”

The animal resisted her grip. He flailed his head. With some difficulty, she tugged him over to a metal pen and tethered him in place.

He knew, didn’t he?

I asked Mackenzie’s mom.

“He knows,” she replied with a kind smile.

Mike reached into his backseat and pulled out a long black .22 Magnum rifle.

First, you need to deliver a traumatic blow to the brain with a bolt gun or actual gun, incapacitating the animal to slit its throat. This is considered the humane way to end its life.

No bolt gun today, but a clean rifle shot between the ear and eye would do the trick.

The cow looked over. He seemed calm now.

I felt my heart beating. I wondered if the cow could feel his own heart.

Mike lined up about ten feet from its side and aimed.

The harvest

One quick trigger pull — a thunderclap — and the animal collapsed with a powerful thump, its front legs tucked underneath like it was lying down to sleep.

The brain was dead but the body shuddered. The fat on its back jiggled.

For a split second after it hit the ground, everyone paused.

Then the harvesters began their work.

Sadie rolled the body over and sawed the throat until there was a six-inch gap between the chin and chest.

A crimson river gushed onto the dirt, steaming with heat.

Even with the throat wide open, its limbs convulsed. It mooed and grunted.

I asked if it was conscious. Mackenzie said no — the noises were “pretty much the body’s way of figuring out [it’s] dying.”

A front hoof splashed into the blood puddle flowing out in all directions. I could see the body reflected in the glassy liquid.

The cow’s blue eyes were bigger than marbles. They stared blankly into the sky.

Once enough blood had collected, they tied the legs to a chain from the truck bed and dragged the body across the ground. Its chin slid through the blood. The tongue hung limp out of its mouth.

After a few feet of dragging, it was released onto its back. Each hoof was cut off—Tom on the hind legs with an electric razor saw and Sadie at the front using a knife that looked far too small.

Over the next half-hour, they scraped off the hide with clean downstrokes.

The skin fell away effortlessly to reveal a white layer of fat and muscle. Beautifully peeled, like an orange. Or like Mike unwrapping his Starbursts.

The auburn-and-cream hide transformed into a mess of white and streaky red. Under the skin, random muscles twitched with no rhyme or reason. Movement gave the appearance of life, but in reality, it showed nothing more than the nerves’ final electrical messages.

The harvesters were deliberate with their cuts. They were artists, using their knives as paintbrushes on a bloody canvas. There wasn’t a speck of force exerted more than necessary. The body was not disrespected.

They split the sternum apart next. Occasional streams of blood poured from the open chest cavity.

“I knew he was gonna die. But that’s life.”

Mackenzie Crawford

Sadie dug around with her knife and yanked out the esophagus, tossing it with other byproducts into the bucket of a nearby excavator.

All the while, Mike chatted, identifying each foul-smelling digestive liquid that gurgled out. The original pool of throat blood had congealed into a brilliant red layer over the dust. It shook like Jell-O when I poked it with a piece of hay.

Cows had always looked so lifeless to me, just thousands of nameless speckled bodies on the sides of roads. This one only seemed so full of life once I saw it torn open and all its colors spilled out.

Sadie and Tom sliced meat hooks through the thighs and strung it back up, raising the legs higher every few minutes to make different cuts.

Mackenzie stared with a frown.

“I knew he was gonna die,” she said. “But that’s life.”

With the whir of machinery, the body ascended, twirling upside down above the dirt.

Then the harvesters tore the belly open and the guts and innards fell out in a big heap. There was little that resembled a cow. They snatched the purpled organs, the liver, the spleen, tossing them between their hands like pizza dough.

The smell knocked me backwards.

The guts sat in a tangled mass of white tubes. One bloated intestine pulsated, contracting slowly, caked in dirt, like slow-moving mud flowing through a river delta.

Within 45 minutes, the carcass was hollowed out and hosed down.

Tom revved a chainsaw and sliced down the spine. Vertebrae popped apart one-by-one; the frame shook and fell away to either side in a V-shape.

I imagined it as a pile of ground beef in my kitchen.

The last piece of work was the head. The skin, ears, mouth and snout peeled off easily. The marble eyes stayed open.

Tom slid a bone saw through the back of the neck. The head dangled by a few stretched-out sinews.

He wrapped his arms around it for support, cutting off the final attachments. With difficulty, he shuffled over and triumphantly plopped it on the truck bed like a trophy cup.

Sadie pulled the tongue out about a foot and stuck a hose into the mouth. A blood-water mouthwash frothed out.

Ten feet away, a small black cow marked “#7” watched the entire operation from behind the bars of her pen with what I assumed was an expression of shock.

She knew, didn’t she?

Eventually, she returned to ambling around and munching on hay.

The meat

Once it lost its eyes, it was no longer an animal. It was no longer alive or dead. It was simply meat, two half-bodies worth $1,000 each.

This was a fundamental truth of agriculture, maybe the most fundamental truth, and everyone else watching that morning had understood that truth long before I did.

I experienced nothing revolutionary; around 8,000 cows are killed each day in the U.S.

For Mike, who made nearly $400 from this job, death is his livelihood.

“If you’re gonna eat meat, there’s gotta be a process,” he said.

They lowered the pieces of meat into Mike’s Chevy. We shook hands and said goodbye. Driving away, I watched Mackenzie rake dust over the blood. I pictured the cow staring at the clouds.

I expected visceral disgust from seeing an animal get stripped for parts. But I couldn’t possibly have been disgusted over something done with such respect. 

Few of us grocery store consumers know exactly how our food gets to our plates. Many are too disgusted to think about it. Humans naturally find comfort in oblivion.

But is it better to not understand the process?

As you pictured that cow getting shot, slit, skinned, hung and chopped up, did you lose some of your oblivion? If you can’t handle watching something die, maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.

Seven days later I ordered a steak at a restaurant. I saw the auburn-and-cream Hereford on my plate and ate with a new mindfulness. I appreciated every bite.