The Farm-to-Table Sheep

^{by Viviana Hammond
Cite As: Hammond, Viviana. 2025. “The Farm-to-Table Sheep.” EAS 590: Critical Animal Studies, May 1. https://asianpacific.duke.edu/blog-post/farm-table-sheep.}

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Picking Out the Lambs

In March 2020, my younger brother Kaden and I went to a local farm to pick out two lambs with our dad. I grew up in rural Vermont in a proud farm-to-table family. Vermont prides itself on its long history of farming and consuming local products such as dairy, maple syrup, and apples. Living farm-to-table was also a common experience. After years of buying meat from local farms, my dad taught himself how to raise livestock, starting with rabbits and ducks. In hopes of sharing the value of ethical consumption, he also taught us how to take care of livestock and, on that day, let us pick our own lambs. The lambs we were looking at were all three months old. I picked out a tiny black one and named him Beans; Kaden picked a white one, Rice. They stuck close together, and not wanting to separate them, we brought both home. They were both males, which means they would likely be slaughtered and sold as baby lamb meat. By taking them home, we allowed them seven extra months to live.

According to Sunaura Taylor (2022), we have an ethical responsibility towards domesticated animals because they rely on us for all aspects of survival. But, if animals are bred into dependency by and for humans, does that responsibility justify their deaths? Do they owe us their lives? How does caring for animals shape our emotional and ethical relationship with them in ways that are not predetermined by consumption? This essay explores these questions through my experience full of conflicting feelings surrounding interdependence while raising meat lambs. Rice and Beans, my lambs, relied on my family’s care for food and shelter. This dependency ultimately ended in their slaughter. Rather than using dependency to justify their deaths, I want to explore how my family navigated the fine line between companionship and consumption as we entered an unexpected ethical terrain through the acts of caring for them.

Raising Rice and Beans

At first, our routine with Rice and Beans was simple; feeding them, letting them graze, and putting them back in their shelter at night. However, the longer we spent with them, the more we began to value them beyond meat. Since we brought them home my dad, Kaden and I fed them each day by hand, washed them, built shelters, and tried baa-ing to talk to them. During the summer, we would spend all day roaming outside freely alongside them. We would play a chasing game with cracked corn, shaking the container to get their attention while they chased after us. When they caught us, we would hand-feed them the corn as a special treat. Deborah Slicer says, “We don’t eat those with whom we play, joke, laugh” (Adams and Gruen 2022, 107). These words rang true as we continued to bond with Rice and Beans through play, making it more difficult for us to see them just as livestock.

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Growing up, I never had a pet. I have always been jealous of my friends with cats and dogs. And before I realized it, Rice and Beans became my companions. This experience was new to me because, having raised other livestock, I had never questioned the distinction between livestock and pets before. The ducks on our family farm were scared of me and constantly ran away when I approached them. When it comes to rabbits, there were just so many of them (six to eight every month), which made it hard for me to connect with them as individuals. Such lack of emotional bonds made it easier for me to consume them. But the sheep were different. We named, touched, and connected with each of them as individuals, rather than counting them as a litter or a flock. Unlike the ducks and rabbits, I felt Rice and Beans trusted us. I would not necessarily define Rice and Beans as pets. But our connection made them something more than “livestock.”

This bonding experience was shared by my family of five as well as others. When we had friends and guests over for bonfires or barbeques, they added to the social atmosphere—unlike the ducks and rabbits who hid in the background. We would let Rice and Beans roam free, and our friends would enjoy petting or feeding them. Unlike other livestock, the sheep were central to conversations. As much as they relied on us for food and shelter, we ended up relying on them in ways we had not expected, for companionship and entertainment. In practice of ethical consumption, the closeness we felt through raising them ourselves was supposed to make the process of eating meat more “ethical,” but the hands-on care was also what made it so difficult. I grew from proud to ambiguous about the farm-to-table lifestyle— as our attempts to “ethically consume” meat turned into grooming Rice and Beans for the dinner plate.

From Care to Consumption

By early fall, Rice and Beans had grown from 20-pound lambs to large, independent animals weighing over 100 pounds. As they matured, they grew horns and began head-butting each other. One day, they turned this aggression towards us. Rice rammed into my dad, pushing him down the hill. We could never make sense of this behavior and took it as a reminder of the wildness of the sheep, something that lies beyond humans’ understanding. Afterward, my dad and I researched “ramming,” and we learned that it is a way for lambs to test their physical abilities, or to show affection, like playful sibling fighting. When it happened, though, we did not know that. We just thought that we could never train or control the sheep the way we could a pet.

Then, finally, the time came. October was their ten-month anniversary, the end of the window before lamb becomes tough mutton. On their last day, we let Rice and Beans have free roam of the backyard, eating from the garden beds and even my mother’s flowers. We sat with them, thanked them, and hugged goodbye. The butcher was supposed to come at 6 am the following day. I couldn’t imagine myself being there and escaped to my friend’s. The butcher, a local farmer, shot them with an A.22 to the back of the head, which is seen as the quickest and most humane method. The older farmer took the organs home as his share, and my dad took the body to another butcher for processing. The remains (skin, head, hooves) were buried in the depths of our backyard by the swamp. Rice and Beans had been integrated into the surrounding ecosystem, rather than merely “domesticated” by us. We had sheltered them from predators, allowed them to graze on overgrown grass, and moved them to the garden area, where their manure fertilized the soil. We tried to balance humane treatment with environmental responsibility as their presence created future benefits for us and the land. Even in their death, they remained part of this cycle with their remains providing food for nearby foxes and coyotes.

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While I am proud of how we raised Rice and Beans, we still operated under an outdated welfarist approach, prioritizing animals within systems that exploit them. I thought our acts were justified, keeping them well-fed, safe, and allowed to roam, but importantly, we did so while accepting the “humane use of animals by humans” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 3). Despite our intentions to eat more ethically and sustainably, we placed Rice and Beans in a moral hierarchy where their well-being depended on our needs. Their quality of life was secondary to their benefits to our diet and local ecosystem.

Elizabeth Costello, a fictional character in The Lives of Animals (Coetzee 1999), describes two types of animal lovers: hunters who value animals on a technical level—tracking, killing, and eating them—and those who love animals from afar, protecting them by not consuming them in any form. My family falls in the middle, giving Rice and Beans a life of freedom but still valuing them in anthropocentric terms, ultimately slaughtering them for food. Elizabeth also states, “There is no time to respect and honor all the animals we need to feed ourselves” (Coetzee 1999, 52). Yet my family eats meat raised ourselves or purchased locally, to make sure that those animals did not experience harsh conditions. We honored Rice and Beans in every way we could: we protected them, ensured their deaths were painless, and made sure no part of them went to waste. I tried to convince myself that this humane treatment made their deaths acceptable—but instead, I was left questioning whether any degree of care could truly justify slaughter.

The Dinner Table

When the time came to eat them, everything changed. I raised them knowing they would be food, but when Rice and Beans were served on the dinner table, I hesitated. Before we ate, my dad gave a speech, thanking the lambs for their lives and expressing our gratitude. Being completely self-sustainable has been one of his main goals, and he was proud of this step. My mom and older brother were emotionally removed from the process and ate the lamb without hesitation. Normally, I would not have reflected on what I was eating but having spent so much time with Rice and Beans, I couldn’t view them as food, even when they were cooked and on the dinner table.

Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis(2020) explores how industrial farming strips animals of their individuality, reducing them to abstract commodities in the food production process. Factory workers are told not to make eye contact with the pigs to distance themselves from the reality of animals’ lives and deaths. Rice and Beans were not part of the exploitative factory farm system, where “a new pig is killed every three seconds” and every body part is commodified, squeezed for value until almost nothing remains (Blanchette 2020, 3). Blanchette explains, these systems aim to “turn diverse pigs into ‘the pig’”, reducing animals to standardized, interchangeable units, contrasting my personal individualized relationships with Rice and Beans (Blanchette 2020, 17).

Our farm-to-table model aimed to eliminate the unethical practices described in Porkopolis. I had made eye contact with Rice and Beans every day and experienced their individuality at multiple moments. Our sheep were never objectified as commodities, and profitability was never a concern for Rice and Beans. If anything, we lost money buying them feed as a treat or building them shelters. They were never subjected to the brutality of industrialized farming. Yet, despite all the differences we had made, I still couldn’t bring myself to eat that first dinner. The fact that Rice and Beans met the same fate as factory-farmed animals brought me closer to the uneasiness at the heart of human-animal ethics. Contrary to our expectations, raising meat made eating it more difficult—not easier.

Does providing food animals with a good life justify their eventual slaughter? My experience with Rice and Beans represents the ongoing complexities of animal-human relationships. Rice and Beans have altered how I view every single animal product ever since. While my dad’s goal was to find the middle ground between industrial farming and animal liberation, he raised more questions than we started with. The farm-to-table approach was meant to be more ethical. Instead, it just eliminated the comforting separation between farm and table. This reveals how the distance between care and consumption has clouded our ethical judgement – and perhaps their coexistence is necessary for the future of animal-human relations.

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About the author

Viviana Hammond is a junior undergraduate at Duke University, majoring in Public Policy and International Comparative Studies with a minor in Spanish. She is interested in climate policy, social impact, and community resilience. Last summer, she worked in a remote region of Puerto Rico on climate disaster preparedness and sustainable agriculture projects.

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References

Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Coetzee, J. M. 1999. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Slicer, Deborah. 2022. “Joy.” In Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, 140–158. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Taylor, Sunuara. 2022. “Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care.” In Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, 140–158. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.