Participation in the cycles of life & death

Honouring the flesh

“For the longest of time, humans have hunted wild game for consumption, participated within the seasonal harvests and honoured the whole animal, today in the modern world, we are more disconnected from the rawness of death than ever before, something that once was an act of daily living is now so foreign to the modern humans mind”

I’m going to go there, it’s a topic that causes so much conflict & emotions but it is so essential to our humanness to have a real relationship with the food we eat, especially if we are choosing to eat animals.

The horrors of the mass production & consumption of meat in todays world is utterly wrong in every sense of the word. It is no wonder that so many people opt for a non confronting vegan or vegetarian diet. I was vegetarian for a decade, from my mid teens to mid twenties. I grew up with a vegetarian mum, so the main meat exposure I had growing up was chicken & the occasional spag bol with beef mince.

I was pretty set in those ideas as a young adult, that eating meat was unfair, unjust, not right.

If you told that version of myself that in a decades time I would be taking the lives of the animals Im eating & teaching others how to butcher, I would have probably cried or been in a firm stance of denial..

Young Eva, unknowing of the wild future ahead..

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I remember viscerally eating my first mouthful of red meat after so long being vegetarian. I had the opportunity to take part in a 2 week long survival foods challenge with a friend, he warned me prior that by partaking in this challenge, i would have to eat wild meat & even help process it all.. Surprisingly, I was more at peace with this situation than I would have guessed. I guess there was something deep down that was drawn to the idea of eating wild foods, meat included, it made sense to me in that moment. What we eat is our direct source of connection, so if we consume the plants and animals around us, we are sustaining ourselves with wild energy.

No points for presentation here, it’s all about raw & wild jerky.

I slowly put the piece of roadkill Kangaroo jerky into my mouth, sitting by the smokey fire in beautiful dry sclerophyll bush, my home ecology. Accompanied by gymea lillys, old man banksias, tea trees & towering stringy barks, eastern yellow robins & golden whistlers bringing me even more into the moment.

I chewed the foreign chewy substance in my mouth, inspecting it with my tongue and teeth for longer than usual, the flavour of smoke instantly was comforting. I swallowed, took a moment to process what felt like a big deal to me, I felt like in that moment my blood was ringing with life & energy connecting directly to place, I felt more closer with the bush in that moment than I ever had before.

That was the beginning of my 6 year journey of eating primarily wild game meats. I adopted the practise of “scavenging”. Yep its a term for humans as well!

I was no hunter, so i chose to find ways to obtain wild meat, i became well versed in identifying deceased animals & how long they had been deceased for, I made friends with hunters & local butchers that sold wild game meat. I sustained myself & friends for an entire 2 seasons whilst living in a bush camp off free, fresh, local wild game meat that we had butchered ourselves.

My values led me to embark on a lifestyle that forced me to learn skills that allowed me to live within my values. It was really quite simple. I learnt a lot from watching others process animals but really taught myself through hands on experience.

I have taken the life of over 10 farm animals over the last 5 years & have butchered and broken down dozens and dozens more.

I am very comfortable & confident working with animal bodies in this way.

When i take the life of an animal, it is not done in some senseless manner. Even after many times of doing it, I still get emotional & a knot in my stomach leading up to the moment of cutting the throat. Death is a part of life on earth, yet it is still a very huge & raw thing to take part in within such an intimate unfiltered way. I think it is inhumane to be able to kill without feeling anything, it is a sign of years of disconnection. Taking a life asks for utmost respect & reverence. It is one of the most realest things we can do, up there with giving birth & dying.

When we have demonstrated the humane and sacred act of taking a life at the gatherings we run, we create a space of stillness, presence & safety. Talking people, adults & children gently through the process of a humane harvest. Some choose not to watch as we go through the final moment with the creature, others choose to sing gentle songs, shed some tears. Death has always been processed within the village.

Once the solemn density of the last moment passes gently, a wave of curiosity & fascination arises, how often does one get to inspect the body of an animal up close and personal?

I know for me, my journey with animal processing has been my greatest teacher in anatomy & biology. Learning the detailed intricacy of the fascia, the bone structure, the organ placement, the blood and getting to feel the padded feet, or soft nose, or sharp claws. My awe for creation is heightened when I am working with the body of an animal, it is the finest form of art.

It is this form of connection that we miss out on due to being so far removed from real life experiences such as animal processing.

For someone who is striving to live as close to the land as possible, learning how to obtain & process your own wild game is a huge foundational skill of food sovereignty & land connection.

»»»» The Sacred Hunt

It was the day after the last full moon, I was up at home with a friend preparing for the womens rewilding gathering we had coming up that weekend. My partner had been trying his luck at bow hunting wild deer for the months prior. He had a location nearby on private property where he had been observing intently, learning about the deers patterns and behaviours.

After putting in so many hours and not harvesting anything, the excitement of the potential of providing wild deer for us was fading as the rut began to slow down.

Still he persisted & was meant to stay on the hunting property for a couple more days.

I hear his ute driving up the long & bushy driveway, he was a day early. I immediately looked at my friend and said “the only reason he would have come home so early is if he caught something!”

Sure enough, as I run out the front door he exits the car with a tender yet glowing look in his eyes and says gently, “I got a yearling”.

We all laid hands on the majestic, beautiful, incredible young fallow male deer as we placed it on the grass, at that moment, we are at the alter of creation, giving thanks for the most precious gift of the forest.

After saying our prayers of gratitude we string the creature up by the bottom legs, take out the intestines, body still warm as the life force had only left so recently. As we remove the intestines & collect the organs, we see exactly where the arrow hit, straight through the heart. An ethical & honourable kill. No suffering involved.

We begin removing the skin, using very gentle focused cuts of our knives to seperate the skin from the flesh, we then begin to use out whole hand/fist to do the job which gets its done much quicker & takes away the risk of accidentally scoring the hide with your knife. Once the skin is removed, we secured the neck so the body was stable while we began to break it down, limb by limb, cut by cut.

We use every part of the animals we harvest, the skin, the hocks, the hooves, the bones, the organs, the intestines, the stomach, the trachea, the brain, the fat, the entire body is utilised in some form or another and this really shows you how abundant the gift of an animal is.. There is no shielding ourselves from the rawness of the flesh, bone, innards, stomach juices, we embrace the entirety of the body with reverence & awe. There is nothing “gross” about it, for me, it is very normal & just a part of the process of eating animal. What is gross/sad to me is meat that has been dyed with colour, pumped full of hormones and wrapped in plastic to be sold like some kind of food item that is seperate from the animal body it came from. That is gross & disheartening.

That afternoon, after hours of butchering & cleaning & sorting cuts into bags. We cooked up the heart, the brains & the testicles. Usually we use the brain for tanning but we wanted to eat this one as it was so fresh.

Such sustanence from one animal, we took a shoulder to the womens gathering we were running a few days later and the beautiful caterer cooked it up into a delicious deer curry. To our surprise, there were vegetarians & vegans who had a bowl.

I guess hearing the detailed story of the hunt, knowing where it came from (which was only about a 20 minute drive away), who hunted it, who butchered it, really hit home for everyone.

We have many tasks ahead now as we slowly chip away at craft projects using the animal parts.

This way of being is so old, its not new at all, its actually been a fundamental component on shaping us as the humans we are today. I hope more & more take the brave steps home into the cycles of life & death this way, as it has been the most profound teachings I have encountered to date..

One of the last deers we processed with a stone tool.. (above)

Deer hocks we will eventually tan & sew into pouches.

Cutting the deer meat off the bone to make into wild jerky.

As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read this blog & I hope you gained something from it.

For the Wild,

Eva

If you want to listen to myself and my partner talk on this topic further, we were recently on a podcast with Accurate Hunts, listen here: