By Chuck Wooster, White River Junction, Vermont

Sometime in the early days of August, the first cold front of the season passes across our section of Vermont. Temperatures fall from the 80s by day and 60s by night to the 70s by day and 40s by night. Snowfall is still a long way off, but this first cold front means that it's not too soon to start thinking about autumn chores.

I raise sheep and grow organic vegetables on an old hill farm in eastern Vermont. One of the first things I have to decide each fall is the fate of our lambs, some of which will be slaughtered, while others will be sold for breeding stock. Making that decision always reminds me that I used to be a vegetarian. Farming has changed my ideas of this subject -- but more on my feelings about raising your own meat in a minute.

My wife and I run a small flock of Navajo-Churro sheep -- 10 to 12 ewes in an average year. They provide us with wool, which we well to quilters and hand-spinners; manure, which we use in our organic vegetable business; endless entertainment and joy, which we share with our friends and neighbors; breeding stock for the future; and meat for the freezer.

The first decision is to identify the lambs we want for breeding. We usually keep a ewe lamb or two each year to add to our own flock, plus we sell a few ram lambs to the other Navajo-Churro breeders in our area who are working to preserve this heirloom breed. For a ewe lamb to be a keeper, she must have been born as either a twin or a triplet, because the likelihood of multiple births is genetically passed down through the female sheep. For a ram lamb to be a keeper, he must have been a fast grower. The rate at which lambs grow is influenced primarily by the ram's genes.

In addition to these characteristics, of course, are the more subjective (yet arguably more fun) characteristics: Is the wool a nice color? Does the ram lamb sport an impressive set of horns? Is the lamb a fan favorite?

Step two of the fall sheep chores is much harder: arranging for the remainder of the lambs to be slaughtered.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has strict rules governing the slaughter of animals and the sale of their meat. These rules make good sense in "arm's length" transactions. These are situations where customers are purchasing meat from a store, not knowing who raised the meat or when and how it was slaughtered. People rightly want to be assured that the meat they are buying came from healthy animals, and that the meat was handled properly during the butchering.

This means that a USDA inspector needs to oversee the slaughtering of each and every animal. For very large sheep operations that do their own slaughtering, this can be as simple as having a USDA inspector right on the farm or ranch. But my flock of a dozen sheep doesn't even support me financially, let alone an inspector. I'm just a part-timer.

Fortunately, the USDA has created two exemptions for small farms such as ours. The first is that any lamb I am keeping for myself, to be eaten by my family and friends, does not need to be inspected. (Friends, according to the USDA, are "non-paying guests," meaning that I couldn't serve my lamb to guests should we ever operate a bed-and-breakfast on the farm.) The second is that I am free to sell whole, live animals to my customers without having to go through USDA inspection, and I can still arrange all the details of slaughtering and butchering.

This "live animal" exemption may seem like a fine distinction, but the theory is that if a customer is close enough to the shepherd to actually see and know the animal being purchased, it's no longer an unknown buyer and an unknown seller, with all the attendant risks. The transaction is between people who have met one another, and it concerns an animal that they both have seen. It's a transaction based on a personal relationship.

Here's how the logistics work. The customer buys the whole, live lamb from me, and writes me a check for it in advance of the slaughter date. The customer then writes a second check to the butcher for the slaughtering fee, and signs a waver stating tat the lamb they are having slaughtered is for their own use and not for eventual resale. I then gather up all the checks, the waivers and the lambs, and take them to the slaughterhouse. (Some years, when we have enough lambs, I have the butcher come right to our farm). After the deed is done, the customers just need to come to our farm to pick up their packaged meat.

It's all much easier than it sounds, and once you and your customers (and your butcher) have been through it a few times, the logistics are easy to manage.

What is far less easy to manage, at least for me, is the emotional side of killing animals. I've been raising thses lambs all spring, summer and fall, and while they have gradually grown to know and trust me, I've returned the favor by showing them the knife. Raising lambs for slaughter has helped me understand why so many indigenous cultures have elaborate rituals in place surrounding the killing of animals: Not only to thank the animal for giving you its life, but also to prepare yourself for the fact that you're about to become a killer. I never understood the second part of this equation until I had a flock of my own.

But as hard as it is to kill you own animals, that isn't even the hardest part. That comes later when, over a can of beer in town, you get reproachful stares from people who believe that killing animals is somehow barbaric or immoral.

"Out of sight, out of mind" is how many people seem to approach meat these days, enabling them to regularly eat steak while they disapprove of killing animals. Although this line of thinking makes absolutely no sense to me, it doesn't make it any easier to hear the discouraging comments. As if killing your own lambs wasn't enough of a burden for one day, you also have to defend yourself against people who view you as little more than a criminal.

There's always the vegetarian option, of course, and, as I said earlier, I myself was a vegetarian for the first half of my 20s. But then I looked around one day and made the rather obvious (in hindsight, at least) observation that you can't grow very much vegetable protein in Vermont. The state is neither warm enough nor flat enough to grow large quantities of soybeans and other legumes. There are rolling hills, regular rainfall and lush pastures around every corner.

Besides, and despite the occasional disparaging remark, I've found that raising animals is a profoundly moving experience. Nothing pleases the eye more than a healthy flock working its way across a green hillside in the spring of the year. Or lifts the spirits more than eager faces lined up at the hay rack, contentedly munching green leaves in the heart of winter when it's 20 below outside the barn. I guess this is why, as soon as we were able to find a farm of our own, I left my vegetarian days behind and began raising animals.

I recently had a chance to hear Verlyn Klinkenborg, a writer and sometimes farmer, on the radio. He was describing how visitors to his farm in upstate New York love to walk around with him and admire the beautiful countryside and all the wonderful animals grazing there. But inevitably, the moment arrives when they discover that many of the animals they see are being raised for meat. "You mean you eat your animals?" they ask in horror.

To which Verlyn gave the best answer I've heard on the subject. "Of course we eat our own animals," he said. "Whose animals do you eat?"

Editor's Note: Chuck Wooster's book, Living With Sheep, has just been published by The Lyons Press of Guilford, Connecticut.

Farm & Ranch Living magazine -- August/September 2005

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