A Friendly Conversation: Exploring Omnivorous vs. Vegetarian Diet

[Steppingfeet]

"One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?"

With this a National Geographic article opens from the July 2012 issue containing windows into a smattering of languages around the world which have relatively few remaining native speakers.

In the section about the Republic of Tuva, a small steppe district in the Russian Federation between Russia and Mongolia, the following section discusses the Tuvan word for a particular means of slaughtering an animal that encapsulates the sacred connection between the human and the animal.

VANISHING VOICES

When I ask university students in Kyzyl what Tuvan words are untranslatable into English or Russian, they suggest khööomei, because the singing is so connected with the Tuvan environment that only a native can understand it, and also khoj özeeri, the Tuvan method of killing a sheep.

If slaughtering can be seen as part of humans’ closeness to animals, khoj özeeri represents an unusually intimate version. Reaching through an incision in the sheep’s hide, the slaughterer severs a vital artery with his fingers, allowing the animal to quickly slip away without alarm, so peacefully that one must check its eyes to see if it is dead.

In the language of the Tuvan people, khoj özeeri means not only slaughter but also kindness, humaneness, a ceremony by which a family can kill, skin, and butcher a sheep, salting its hide and preparing its meat and making sausage with the saved blood and cleansed entrails so neatly that the whole thing can be accomplished in two hours (as the Mongushes [the family interviewed for the article] did this morning) in one’s good clothes without spilling a drop of blood.

Khoj özeeri implies a relationship to animals that is also a measure of a people’s character. As one of the students explained, “If a Tuvan killed an animal the way they do in other places” – by means of a gun or a knife – “they’d be arrested for brutality.”

To the avowed vegetarian, no form of animal slaughter is permissible, no matter how painless and no matter with what respect the animal is regarded. Nevertheless, in my world view what’s mentioned in this NatGeo article offers a needed alternative to current factory farms, and presents a model I support and am comfortable with given my understanding of the principles of the Law of One.

Thought I’d share.