An existentialist can of worms

Today was a dreary day on the farm... we woke up to the relentless percussion of torrential rain and soon discovered it was too wet to do any field work. We went up to the farmhouse to collect two more chickens for us to feed and care for in exchange for eggs. We clipped their wings (a painless operation) and put them in with our other hens. They immediately started fighting and scratching for the top spot in the pecking order. They didn't stop bickering until I dug up a bunch of worms from the garden and threw them into the fray. I guess it will take them a while to get used to being cooped up together.

But this brings me to the cause of my dilemma. Shortly after our chickens started giving eggs, we noticed that rats and mongeese (or mongooses) were raiding the coop at night and stealing the hens' food and eggs and generally terrorizing them. We hatched a plan to catch these pests by baiting traps with cheese and peanut butter. Yesterday morning we caught a rat in the snap trap. We found it already dead, and we put its body in the larger cage trap, knowing that mongeese are scavengers attracted to the smell of dead animals. This morning we found our egg thief in the trap, scared and very angry. We knew we couldn't let it free again, so one of us interns took it down to the flooded gulch stream and drowned it.

Worms, rats, mongooses, even intraspecies violence, so much suffering in the name of a few nutritious eggs. It has me thinking about the collateral damage caused by our appetites. How much harm is done just do satisfy our desires? Where should we draw the line? Why is it more repulsive to me to kill a mongoose than a rat, and why do I feel more guilt about killing a rat than about tossing a dozen worms to their deaths? Even living on a natural farm, as conscientiously as possible, we cannot help but disrupt our surroundings and make them unnatural.

Some would say that it is "natural" to own domesticated animals and to protect them from other animals with fences and traps and weapons, that causing such suffering is an extension of the violence endemic in nature, where animals kill each other all the time. This kind of rationalizing is a thinly veiled way of shirking responsibility for the hubris and destruction perpetrated in the name of our current way of life. I have already mentioned a number of creatures that would be alive today if not for our taste for chicken eggs. Even our hens have been genetically selected to produce unnatural amounts of meat and eggs, to the detriment of their longevity (why bother to breed a healthy chicken when you plan to eat it when it's 2 months old?). The fact is that we bred these chickens to be totally helpless without human care, placed them in the middle of a forest full of hungry animals, and then feel it is our right and duty to kill those animals for trying to take what is "ours". This is only a microcosm of the many ways in which we take what we want from nature at great expense.

The amount of animate and inanimate resources wasted by human societies is unsustainable and untenable. But how can we mitigate the imprudent and improvident effects of our lifestyles? Is the answer to revert to a prehistoric standard, to erase the benefits as well as the shortcomings of modern technology? Of course not. So how can we live in better harmony with nature without de-evolving into cave people or devolving the responsibility to our children and their children? Perhaps we can come close to equitable equipoise with better accounting of the true cost of our actions and appetites, from giant icecaps to tiny tropical worms.