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"Meet Your Meat"

Ode to A Calf Named Blacky
By Derek Goodwin

My grandfather on my mom’s side was a dairy farmer in rural Kansas. I loved visiting my grandpa in Kansas because his farm was so foreign to my reality living in a cozy white neighboorhood in suburban Central New York during the 1970’s. My grandfather lived in a two story farmhouse with my uncle and they still used an outhouse which was a few yards out from the front door.

The farm itself seemed to be an endless playground with a silo and a two big red barns surrounded by acres upon acres of land. Inside one of the barns was a stainless steel tank which took up the whole room it was in, with tubes running along the walls delivering milk to it. On the other side of that room was a door which led into a room about twice the size, where the cows were milked. This room had one door where the cows came in along a concrete walkway that was eleveated about 3 feet off the floor my grandfather and uncle stood on to milk the cows. A series of steel rails kept the cows from moving in any direction other than forward or backward and held the cows in place while tentacled suction devices were attached to their udders in order to pump the milk out of them, through the tubes that ran along the walls and into the giant tank in the other room.

At milking time the cows were herded outside the barn in a large fenced-in holding area with a cement floor. At any given time the manure in this area was a foot or two deep, and I loved to put on my grandpas big rubber boots and wade through the pungeant muck. The cows were big and mysterious creatures to me then as I watched the ritual they went through having the strange machines attached to their bodies and the milk taken from them. I was a little afraid of them, as they seemed to barely put up with people and I was warned that sometimes they kicked. There was a part of me that was very attracted to them as well, that wanted to pet them and be their friend.

When I was about 10 years old we went to visit and I got to feed the baby cows. The babies were kept in stalls in a larger barn that was next to the milking barn. The calves were far easier for me to bond with than the adult cows, as they were closer to my own size, had big loveable eyes and were always happy to see me when I had the half gallon bottle of formula for them to drink. The bottle looked like a giant baby bottle and once they got the nipple into their mouths it was all I could do to keep it in my grasp while they hungrily emptied its contents. On this trip I bonded most with a calf who was entirely black and held some special appeal to my young boy’s heart. I named him “Blacky” and spent lots of time with him, even taking some photos of him that made it into the family album. I loved him as much as I loved my big black cat midnight, boundlessly and unconditionally.

It was a couple years later that I was looking through our photo album when I saw the photos of Blacky and asked my mom how he was. That was when I first was consciously made aware of the fate that awaits male dairy calves. My mom told me he was probably sold at auction to be made into veal. There was still a strange disconnect as my mother told me that Blacky hadn’t lived much past the age I had last seen him and was instead made into a meat I was unfamiliar with called veal. It struck me as horrible but it didn’t quite circle around in my mind to the point where I understood my own complicity. I certainly didn’t realize that Blacky’s short life was a byproduct of my own species demand for dairy products. I loved my parents and my grandfather and if I did have the mental capacity to fully understand the implications then I would have had to acknowledge that we were all part of a system that brought beautiful beings like Blacky into the world just to kill and eat them. I have since met many people, mostly women, who have had experiences like these at a young age and became vegetarian. I instead filed it away in my subconcious and went on with my life, perhaps eating more chicken and less red meat, but not concerning myself much more with the whole affair.

It has been nearly thirty years since I fed Blacky formula from a bottle while my grandfather milked Blacky’s mother and sold her milk to a company which pasturized, homogenized and bottled it along with the milk of thousands of other mother cows, to end up being drank by the only species of mammal who drink milk beyond infancy, the homo sapien. My path in those thirty years led me to photography, which gave me an outlet for my creativity and a way to speak to people more powerfully than with words alone. It was while I was earning my degree in Fine Art Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology that I finally confronted the ethical dilemna which Blacky first awoke in me. In search of a healthier diet I read John Robbin’s “Diet For A New America” in 1994, and was overwhelmed learning of the atrocity of modern animal agriculture. By 1996 I had become completely vegan, foregoing all animal products including meat, dairy and eggs.

From that point on photography and veganism have been two of the main driving forces in my life. Through a series of connections and events I ended up becoming the unnoficial photographer for Farm Sanctuary, one of the largest animal rights organizations in the US. Farm Sanctuary runs two shelters for farm animals, one in New York state and one in California. It is through these shelters that I got to reconnect with cows and also meet some of the other animals that typically end up in the human food chain. Through getting to know dozens of pigs, chickens, rabbits, turkeys, sheep, goats and cows I have found them to be individual beings with their own personalities and interests fully deserving of our compassion. I have since dedicated a large portion of my lifes work to sharing this epiphany with others who are ready for the message, and planting seeds in those who aren’t quite there yet.

One of the main ways I have been able to be a voice for the animals is through my photography. In much of popular culture the portrayal of farm animals is trivialized. They are represented as creatures with no common sense or innate intelligence, and no individuality. I use my camera to show their beauty and the emotions that they share with humans; happiness, pleasure, comfort, hunger, pride, fear, sadness, and pain, among many others. Each species has its own social order, each animal her own personality and disposition. They each have the innocent complexity of a human child, and the same urge to live without being confined or abused. I want to show that. I want my photographs to be windows into their souls.

This summer while attending an event at Farm Sanctaury’s New York Shelter I was given the “Friend of Farm Animals 2006” award. I had tears in my eyes as I went up to the podium to give my acceptance speech. I jokingly asked “Who is going to get a photo of me getting this award?” since I was the one documenting the event. If the honor had not been a total surprise and I had time to consider my acceptance speech I surely would have thanked Blacky along with the other folks I named. The more I look back on my life, the more I realize what that one small calf meant to me.

For me veganism has been a process of opening the parts of my heart that I have been encouraged all of my life to close, in the name of culture and tradition, in the name of some small fleeting pleasure that I am told I should enjoy at the expense of another being. My love for Blacky was innocent and pure, the innate love of a child for another being. Thirty years later that love is reawakened in me and extends out to all the creatures who are to share his fate. It is surely larger than I am and it guides my camera, it guides my eye, it guides my thoughts and my actions. I have been lucky enough to touch many lives with my photographs and to open many hearts with my activism.

So here is to my friend Blacky; I do this to honor your memory, to bring your light into the world, and in the hopes that someday my species will stop oppressing yours. Because only then can we truly acheive peace on Earth.