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I
suppose that in order to eat meat and really enjoy doing so, many meat
eaters have to disconnect their minds from certain parts of the process
of choosing, killing, skinning and cutting up an animal.

That
has not always been possible. Even now, there are many people who just
go out, kill what they want to eat, and think nothing more about it.

Up
until about three years ago, you were considered with some degree of
disdain if you bought a chicken from Calabar’s Watt market and hung
around waiting to pay someone to kill it for you: Every well brought up
woman should know how to slaughter a chicken.

I
am the sort of person I’m talking about – the sort that glares down the
middle of a bone in the secrecy of her home, behind closed doors and
windows, sometimes armed with a knife, frustrated that the marrow won’t
detach with even the most fervent and unabashed sucking.

What
is that humbling thought that brings me to my senses? That makes me
give up my frustrated gagging over a piece of animal fat? The
realisation that I am actually sucking on an animal’s bone, and that it
is disrespectful to expect that like some baked biscuit that has had
its aesthetics and conveniences of eating considered, the animal’s
bones should make its marrows easily available for effective and avid
sucking.

The
animal was minding its own business after all. Going about its life
when someone dragged it away, slaughtered it and arranged it for sale
and did so in a way that I would not be reminded of death and pain and
open arteries and gushing blood. Wrapped it up nicely in cellophane and
stuck a supermarket name on it.

I have never killed my meat, and I am a coward. I never will.

It
is becoming fashionable among TV chefs to demand that their audiences
face the reality of what they are eating. It might actually do them
some good to understand keenly that an animal died to satisfy their
appetite. They must look the animal in the eye, take its life,
decapitate and dismember it, or they should have no right to eat it.

If this rule were applied, I would be the first person to stop eating meat.

My
neighbour Andrew Dunn is the Nigerian Country Director for the Wildlife
Conservation Society. He is a meat eater by the way. It was from him
that I first heard the story of Pierfrancesco Micheloni, some surely
eccentric Italian who follows migrating swallows from Europe all the
way to Ebbaken, Boje in Cross River State and back.

Pierfrancesco
is a birder and a conservationist who oversees three million roosting
barn swallows who fly thousands and thousands of miles every year from
Belgium, Spain, Italy, France and even Croatia to spend their winters
in the forests of Ebbaken. The British barn swallow (which overwinters
in South Africa) stops off to fatten up in Ebbaken before braving the
Sahara Desert crossing. It is incredible that a barn swallow would fly
that far, about 200 miles a day, over deserts and oceans, facing death
by storms and hunger, with no guarantee of making its destination. The
facts of this sort of migration are just amazing.

There
is something tragically comical about then imagining some Boki hunter,
without any inkling of how far the swallow has flown, finding his way
through the forest, whistling to himself, his stomach rumbling in
expectation of his dinner of foreign birds. It isn’t funny at all
actually. But every sincere meat eating Nigerian might laugh because we
know what we say and think about eccentric white men bothering
themselves about bush meat and other such things.

But
in our heart of hearts there must be some niggling about the sacredness
of life especially when we are presented with the details of how that
life is expressed.

Cross
River Gorillas are almost extinct. There are about three hundred of
them living between Cross River and Cameroun. But, if one goes to Amana
market situated between Ikom and Obudu, one can buy gorilla meat,
elephant and chimpanzee. If one finds elephant meat, it will most
likely have been killed by ivory hunters, who might have made a present
of the rest of the animal to a village near where it was killed.

The
layman’s rule of conservation is that people should not eat forest
animals or primates. Even pythons, that we love to hate, are
endangered. Porcupines, grass cutters, snails and many other available
rodents are the quick breeding alternatives.

Between
November and December 2007, Ebbaken locals killed thirty thousand
swallows for food, but since then and because of Pierfrancesco’s
initiative and the locals’ goodwill, the barn swallow’s place in the
world is secure for now.

But
of course that is not the end of the story, because vegetarians and
vegans and animal rights people will tell us that if we dare worry
about swallows and gorillas then we have a moral obligation to worry
about goats and cows and bush rats and crickets and rain termites and
the debate will go on and on until we are all forced to give up meat
altogether.

One step at a time is my suggestion. Some people will never give up
eating meat (“as surely as Adam and Eve were given dominion!”). Some
people believe it is “UnNigerian” to empathise with the life and pain
of animals. Some people believe that they need to eat meat to stay
healthy and some eat meat because they just love to eat meat. Whatever
the rationale, I propose that it is at least essential to think about
the life of the animal that one is eating.