Calamity Meat 

Picture this: it's a hundred years ago in rural Ireland, on the rocky rolling hills of east Mayo, perhaps, or the heathery bogs of Connemara. Beautiful country, but poor, poor: you can't eat landscape.

People live frugally. There is so little food that nothing goes to waste. Yet every once in awhile something disturbs this necessary thrift. A cow dies suddenly and is immediately buried. Not so much as a steak is cut from its flank before its fearful owners hastily push it into a deep ditch and cover it over, crossing themselves as they walk away from the rough grave. "Calamity meat," they called it. The result of accident or mishap, calamity meat was never to be eaten. Say the cow stumbled into a ditch, or over a rocky cliff, or into a marshy stream. When the body was found, everyone understood what was to be done. For what lay on the ground was not-so the belief went-the real animal, which was at that very moment kicking up its hooves in fairyland. The real cow had been stolen away by ancient powers never mentioned by name but always by euphemisms like the Good Neighbors, the Gentry, or simply Them. In place of the stolen beast, They put a fairy cadaver, upon which They cast a glamor-a spell-so that passersby saw only a dead cow, fallen helplessly to its death.

Whatever were impoverished people doing, wasting meat in this way? Perhaps 500 pounds of good beef gone wanting, buried while children scrabbled in the mud for potatoes, all because of the fairies. Such foolishness! Most folklorists who have recorded such beliefs dismiss them as quaint, unreasonable, possibly damaging superstition, deriving from a magical worldview long since replaced by our modern, far superior mechanistic one.

But I wonder.

I find myself thinking about calamity meat these days as the animal holocaust blazes across Europe. Hundreds of thousands of animals, many of them healthy, are being slaughtered to stop the spread of a disease not usually fatal to the animal. Then why the killing? Because the disease causes weight loss and dries up milk, making it unprofitable to feed the animal until it recovers. Then why not inoculate or vaccinate the healthy stock? Because that would change the import designation of the countries in which the disease has struck.

This is reasonable?

My Irish ancestors are often painted as superstitious peasants whose labor-intensive and inefficient farming practices have been rightfully replaced by modern, scientifically-sound ones. But modern science is based a belief that one can fiddle with one part of the machine without affecting the rest. This works fine for machines; current science has brought us thousands of inventions that make life easier (if rarely simpler). But animals are not machines. We are not machines. Our relationship to animals is poorly served by this mechanistic vision.

I do not mean to glamorize the past, to cast a spell over it that transforms it into something it was not. Diseases of domestic herds are not the result of contemporary farming practices. Plagues have struck animals as often as they have people; Scottish chronicles tell us that an epidemic in 1129 killed most of the pigs and cattle in Ireland. Imagine the fear such a disaster struck into the human community, as farmers watched their herds sicken and die from something both unpredictable and uncontrollable. Although the chronicles do not say so, surely human death-directly from starvation or the weakened immune system that comes with it-followed upon the animal loss.

Thus when I lament the massacre of so many animals, I am not fantasizing a perfect primal world in which ancient humans and beasts lived in contented security. But in addition to questioning the practices-farm monoculture, feedlot fattening, subsidy-encouraged overgrazing-that lead to the current horror, I distrust the worldview that led us here. Cattle have been reduced to numbers on an accounting pad because we fail to acknowledge that we are intimately connected with, not rulers over, our herds. Positioning ourselves as Masters of the Universe, we are brought up short-over and over-by what we do not know.

Take mad-cow disease. Someone thought up a way to increase the profitability of animal slaughter: just feed the unappetizing parts (hooves, horns, bones and the like) back to the animals. Alas, cows and sheep are not naturally carnivores, much less cannibals. So you have to grind up all the offal and form it into tasty pellets before you can trick vegetarian animals into eating not only meat, but the meat of their kinfolk-possibly even their mothers and siblings.

If I were a cow, I'd get mad too.

Mad-cow would be a rare disease except for these inventive modern practices; it does not pass readily between cattle in a herd, one of whom could remain infected for years before dying of the disease. Humans consuming the flesh of an infected animal would gestate the illness for up to a decade before their brains turned to swiss cheese. That there little evidence of frequent death from mush-brain in the past is mysterious in light of the disease's long period of development. How did our ancestors avoid this disease? It was thinking about mad-cow that led me to consider calamity meat. That cow falling over the cliff to its death-pretty uncowlike behavior, wouldn't you say? A healthy cow does not usually perceive a cliff as anthing but dangerous. But should something damage the animal's perceptions or muscular control, it might go where cows normally fear to tread. Perhaps such an animal was infested with parasites; perhaps its brain had been eaten up by mad-cow. Animals that act in ways that are unhealthy or fatal to them may become meat that is unhealthy or fatal to us. Thus this "old superstition" may have protected my ancestors from diseases we now dread.

But why all the fuss about the fairies? Why not just say that animals get diseases that might affect us? Why be so unscientific as to claim the influence of Them?

I can think of two reasons my ancestors might have created the legend of calamity meat. One is that they functioned in an oral rather than a written society. Information had to be encoded in a way that could be readily remembered, generation after generation. If, say, mad-cow struck once a century, that would mean several generations would not see its specific symptoms; indeed, by the time of the next outbreak, no person still living might remember the last outbreak. And it's harder to remember facts than stories and images, which have an emotional power that sheer fact does not. The vivid image of a rotting fairy cadaver being bewitched to look like a cow is repulsive enough to keep anyone, even someone quite hungry, from carving off a rump of calamity meat. Thus the legend may have protected untold generations of superstitious Irish peasants more adequately than our exact contemporary science seems able to do.

Beyond that, the legend of calamity meat acknowledges something that mechanistic science does not: that we are not in control. That we don't know everything. That there are forces at work that can kidnap away our predicatable world and put something else in its place. Wasn't foot-and-mouth supposed to have been completely conquered by modern science? The thousands, perhaps millions, of healthy animals now being executed could give witness to the hubris of that idea.

The world is not a machine. My ancestors lived in awe, sometimes in fear, of its complexity. The legend of calamity meat-like similar myths and rituals about our connection with the animal powers-was not just a roughhewn version of our exhalted science. It was a humble bow to the universe in all its intricate grandeur. I say, let us bow like that again.

INTERESTED IN KNOWING MORE?

Regularly updated information on the Fire-Eye project in Ireland, 
which will offer prayers for the healing of both animals and the human-animal connection, is available at www.fire-eye.org