I've never been a vegetarian --- not quite --- though for the first twenty odd years of my life I ate meat sparingly and mostly under duress.

I blame my budding vegetarianism on pacifist parents who looked on in amusement the summer that I decided it was immoral to kill anything. Soon thereafter, I spent a week in the Outer Banks of North Carolina stoically and gently brushing mosquitoes from my skin.

And now I'm a chicken killer and soon to become a deer killer. What happened?

The chicken or the egg?

It all started when I bought a few hens to provide eggs for my table. I slowly came to realize that vegetarians who eat eggs but not chickens are deluding themselves into believing they cause no pain to another living thing.

The cycle of egg production is rife with blood and gore, even assuming the chickens were raised humanely on pasture. After her first year or two of life, a hen's egg production begins to taper off and a new batch of hens must be raised to take her place. The old hens, who could live for another decade or so eating you out of house and home, are then slaughtered and eaten.

At the same time, the new hens which are being raised to take the old hens' place hatch from eggs which produce half males and half females. A good flock of chickens will have about one rooster for every ten hens, so the other nine roosters will go into the pot along with the old egg-layers. Basically, that seemingly pristine egg you just ate for breakfast sprang from a bloodbath.

Feeding the soil

So now I've probably scared all of the vegetarians in the crowd into taking the plunge into veganism. But consider this --- a healthy, self-sufficient organic garden is best fed with animal manure as well as plant-based composts.

I keep my chickens in tractors which I slowly move across soon-to-be garden sites. The chickens greedily eat weeds, scratch over-wintering pests up out of the soil to be ingested, and fertilize the soil in the process. After a few passes with the chicken tractor, the ground is ready to be turned into rich raised beds for next year's vegetable garden.

Just as vegetarianism often stems from a soul-searching moral decision, my new belief in eating meat is based on an expanded awareness of the agricultural ecosystem. Although steering clear of chickens while eating eggs gives many people the impression of guilt-free protein, I can't help but feel that the healthy agricultural ecosystem includes meat-animals. For me, life on the farm involves meat.