The Work of Killing

A visceral heritage of eating animals

Note: this post contains graphic descriptions.

Art by Kelsey Breseman

Did you know that a halibut’s heart continues to beat long after it’s been removed from the body? There it sits on the cutting table, a pulsing red pyramid the length of my thumb.

They’re resilient, these bottom-feeding giants.

My father says that sometimes a fishing boat would catch a two-hundred-pounder, ice it overnight in the boat’s hold, bring it in to be gutted, bled, and flipped up onto the freezer slab — and it could still flop so hard it would fall off the shelf.

Unless you’ve killed your own meat, you might not know the shivering strangeness of the twitching dead: the electrical system outlasts life itself.

I didn’t grow up killing animals. The first time I was asked to, I was ten: a boat on the Alsek River, thick gloves of orange rubber on my hands. My Tlingit grandma had passed down gillnetting rights, and my aunt had little patience for my squeamishness.

“Pop the gill,” she told me. For the net-tangled salmon, that meant a quick death — but my heart and fingers were both too soft for the job.

My dad, by ten, would have been hunting birds and helping with deer in autumn, fish in summer. That’s the difference one…