To Kill a Hornworm (on a No-Harm Farm)

Note: I've now left the farm and moved on to Wyoming, but I began this post a couple weeks ago and only managed to finish it now (at a breakfast buffet in Jackson Hole, surrounded by a gaggle of senior citizens just disgorged from a tour bus). Sorry for the temporal confusion.

***

My favorite farm task, now more ritual than chore, is the hunt for tomato hornworms. The tomato hornworm, for the uninitiated, is an immense green caterpillar – as thick as a thumb and as long as an index finger, with trademark spike rising from posterior – capable of wreaking immense destruction on a tomato plant: a single caterpillar, emerging from its underground burrow during the cool of the morning to feast, can kill a plant in two days.

The spine on the hornworm's ass not only deters predators,

but also picks up satellite radio.

Unless, of course, we capture the hornworm first. They’re well camouflaged, but with experience one can learn to identify the tattered leaves that betray their presence; one veteran farmhand even scans the ground for tiny clusters of hornworm scat. By now the hornworm hunt has abated, a victim of its own success, but during the infestation’s heyday about two weeks ago, 20-worm days were not uncommon. I’m in the minority in this regard, but for me there’s no farm feeling more satisfying than prying a plump worm from a beleaguered stalk and depositing the pest into a bucket to writhe with its fellow captives and await its fate at the bottom of this holding cell.

***

And what fate is that? Well, annihilation, obviously – except at Hell’s Backbone Grill, that answer isn’t so obvious. See, HBG calls itself a “no-harm farm,” which ostensibly means that no animal, no matter how vicious, malicious, or pernicious, can be killed for any reason on the farm’s premises, or the restaurant’s. Not a mosquito may be swatted, not a housefly liquidated, not a grasshopper crunched underfoot. The restaurant owns an honest-to-goodness bug vacuum, a suction device resembling a baster that gulps up insects and spits them outside; the suction-ee emerges unharmed though perhaps disoriented, as if after a spin on a miniature Tilt-a-Whirl.

The no-harm policy was instated by Blake Spalding, the restaurant’s owner. Blake is a Tibetan Buddhist, and her belief system dictates that every organism is possessed of a soul, and thus of the right to life. Insofar as I understand Buddhism (which admittedly isn’t very far), the notion of “self” does not exist, and all beings are components of an interconnected universe; although there’s definitely a hierarchy of organisms, our place in the hierarchy is fungible, and our karma can be reincarnated into any animal, more or less based upon our virtuousness. Follow all that? Because I didn’t. Anyway, the upshot is that humans, despite our karmic superiority (go ahead, pat yourself on the back for not being reincarnated as a nematode), are still but cogs in this universe of connectivity, and we wouldn’t exactly be team players if we ran around spraying RAID on our teammates.

Note: if anyone has a better explanation of why Buddhism precludes killing – and someone must – please post it in the comments. Please?

I don’t find the no harm policy all that remarkable – aside from its basis in religion, it doesn’t much differ from how I live my life. Biting insects and invasive species excepted (I’m looking at you, cane toads and lake trout), I live and let live; I could never, say, flush a spider down the toilet. So I’m not so much interested in the policy itself. Rather, I’m fascinated by the way it collides with the business of running a farm and a restaurant – when and where “no harm” is inconsistent, impossible, or even hypocritical.

When I first arrived in Australia, I was reticent to inflict any injury upon cane toads, despite their vileness. By the time I left, my reputation as ruthless toad slaughterer had spread across the continent. (I like to picture Daniel Day-Lewis playing this version of me in the cinematic adaptation of my life.)

***

Before I came to HBG, I considered farms epicenters of death as much as they were breeding grounds for life. To my suburban mind, farms were the places where young, overall-clad children learned the cold facts of existence, learned that their beloved lambs were eventually destined to confront the Great Meat Hook in the Sky – and that death was a sad but necessary prelude to the birth of new organisms. Having never been to a farm, my impressions also relied upon fiction writers; and the best agriculturally-themed novelist I know, Jane Smiley, sometimes seemed obsessed with death. A single novella, Good Will, depicts the (somewhat graphic) demises of a turkey, sheep and pony in quick succession. Based on that piece and others, I viewed farms as places where death occurred frequently, inevitably, naturally, and moralistically – indeed, maybe the only place in American society where death wasn’t creepy, stigmatized, and postponed desperately. (Healthcare rationing plug!)

So you’ll understand why the idea of a no-harm (read: anti-death) farm seemed inimical to all my notions of, well, farmness. At first I was taken back: the concept seemed impossible. I’ve come to see, though, that HBG doesn’t shy from harm, but rather codifies it, confines it to certain circumstances and methods. Imagine deciding to keep kosher – except, well, you just have to have shrimp cocktails, and what’s one pig-in-a-blanket anyway… and, hell, pass me that ham and cheese sandwich.

***

Hell’s Backbone Grill is, believe it or not, a grill, and it would hardly qualify as one if it didn’t serve meat. HBG offers chicken, pork, beef, and reindeer; for an establishment that takes such pride in its vegetables, vegetarian menu options are slim. This fact creates an absurd situation: while employees are made to painstakingly release every insect that alights within the restaurant, innumerable warm-blooded organisms – with presumably better karma, no less – are dying on the restaurant’s behalf. Fretting over the insects, to me, is a bit like going crazy over piddling executive bonuses after AIG absconds with $170 billion. (There’s probably a more precise analogy that I’m missing. Whatever.)

So is this hypocrisy? Maybe, but it’s solid business sense. A vegetarian restaurant in southern Utah would last about as long as a snowflake – this is a meat-and-potatoes region, and go easy on the potatoes. Without steak (and meatloaf, and filleted trout, and beef posole) on the menu, the restaurant wouldn’t stand a chance, so I certainly understand why the owners sublimated their religious beliefs. (Good thing they did, too: the meatloaf is phenomenal, and big enough so that leftovers often fall into the patient mouth of the wastivore, hovering around the dirty dish section of the kitchen like a hyena skulking behind a pride of lions. I have no shame.) And, to their credit, the restaurant tries to make each animal’s journey into the Great Beyond as pleasant as possible: every creature ticketed for slaughter is fed a special tincture in their last slop bucket or grain bin, which somehow expedites their being’s passage into the next life. I’m guessing the pigs, if asked, would probably prefer a heartier final meal, but if the tincture puts the ownership’s mind at ease, well, at least somebody’s happy.

Don't worry, Buddhists: no trout was harmed in the preparation of HBG's
pecan-encrusted trout. Ummm...

***

And what of those malignant hornworms? Are they laid gently on a leaf, with nary a horn harmed? Hell no: we feed ‘em to the chickens, which use every delectable worm as a tug-of-war rope. These melees (often spectacular to watch, as long as you stay clear of the flying feathers and mutilated caterpillar body segments) are anything but harmless; in fact I can’t imagine a more brutal way for a ripe hornworm to perish. Anybody who considers chickens herbivorous, by the way, couldn’t be more wrong. Not only are they voraciously omnivorous, but to see them pursue grasshoppers among the cornstalks, heads bobbing and beaks thrusting and throats clucking murderously, is to be reminded uncomfortably of a pack of velociraptors. The final moments of the caterpillar’s life, in which he’s shoved unceremoniously through the chickenwire into a thicket of clamoring open maws, must be as terrifying as they are undignified. Even pests deserve better. (No, they don’t.)

Is this, then, hypocrisy? The chicken may be the agent of death, the avian guillotine if you will, but we humans – we, who as HBG employees have sworn to inflict no injury to any living thing – are judge and jury (and really enthusiastic spectators, too). Is it fair to put the onus of ill karma on the chicken? Are we dooming each chicken’s soul to many lifetimes of misery – in the body, say, of a tapeworm, or a Pirates fan – by forcing them to execute the hornworms we’ve sentenced?

(For that matter, are we doing the hornworms a favor by killing them, and thus freeing their souls to recommence in a body higher up the food chain, and one perhaps more sentient? Aren’t we hastening their matriculation into life as a komodo dragon, or a sea otter, or an orangutan? I feel like truly compassionate Buddhists would call themselves the Invertebrate Liberation Army, and go around stomping on every six-legged creature they encounter. When it eventually ascends to Lama-dom, the gnat I just crushed will thank me.)

Despite the weirdly anthropomorphic quality of these carrots, they were not spared the wrath of the HBG chefs. (Okay, fine, this picture has nothing to do with the content of this post; I just think it's really cool.)

***

Well, I’m a pagan, not a Buddhist, and a human, not a hornworm, so it’s all academic to me. I don’t actually think the farm’s owners are guilty of hypocrisy; I think they’re pragmatists, and doing the best they can to navigate some turbulent ethical waters. And I was sufficiently interested in Blake’s perspective to ask her what she thought of my new job, the one I’m starting today (Monday, August 3rd): professional killer.

For those who don’t know, I’ll be working for the Aquatic Sciences Program in Yellowstone National Park, and my job, in a nutshell, is to slaughter as many fish as humanly possible. (To get a sense of how many that is, know that the National Parks Service has killed 275,000 in the last year.) I’m not just killing any old thing with fins, though: I’m whacking lake trout, an invasive species that is edging out native cutthroat trout throughout Yellowstone, thereby wreaking havoc on the park’s ecosystem. Eradicating them, scientists agree, is not only permissible but essential. So the killing’s justified – but would a Buddhist think so?

This beautiful rainbow trout, which I hooked at Garkane Lake, was allowed to live. Were it a lake trout, though, I would not have been so merciful.

One night I accost Blake while she’s crunching the restaurant’s finances, explain to her the murderous parameters of my job, and ask her that very question. She winces when I described the epic scale of the extermination, but doesn’t comment; clearly she’s tactfully reluctant my line of work, but just as clearly she finds it a little repulsive. I still don’t know if I can stomach it, by the way; I guess I’ll find out shortly.

After I’m finished, she concedes, “Well, it’s definitely killing for the greater good.”

That’s right, I say, nodding enthusiastically.

“But it’s not like the trout themselves did anything wrong,” she adds, providing the caveat to her own line of reasoning. “They’re just doing what they do. It’s our fault they’re there.”

Well, that’s true too, I concede. I assure Blake that I bear no animosity toward the lake trout themselves. Like Michael Corleone, my motives are strictly professional, and the trout happen to be Fredo.

Blake taps her pen against the table and looks out the window, at the moths hurling themselves fecklessly against the porch light. No bug zapper on this deck. She turns back to me with pursed lips.

“If I were you,” she says, “I would just try to remember our connectedness to every fish, and wish each one well.” She shrugs – it’s not much advice, but it’s something. And when you’re the Grim Reaper of the piscine world, you appreciate any tidbit that might help you preserve your humanity. So, in sum, for all my lake trout readers out there: best wishes.

(And sleep with one eye open, motherfuckers. I'm coming for you.)

End