Struggle

Two creatures fight to the death. We all crowd around and egg them on. "Wasp! Wasp!" some shout. "Get em' Spider!" cry others. The two combatants scuttle and leap after each other, confining their battle to the top of the blue plastic water jug where we wash our hands. After a few seconds of dashing and dodging, they leap together, their many legs grappling furiously as they roll around their arena. The wasp and the spider are about the same size and seem evenly matched. Getting as close as we can, we watch the spider's fangs gnash perilously close to its opponent's abdomen. Before the arachnid's bite can find its mark, however, the wasp shifts position and plunges its vicious looking stinger into the spider's midsection. The battle is over. We cheer, and continue to watch, mesmerized, as the wasp drags its fallen nemesis off the jug, leaping nimbly from leaf to leaf on a nearby bush. At last we turn away and head in for lunch, content that we have borne witness to the fascinating struggle of the natural world.

The idea of struggle is one that infuses and informs much of the philosophy of the martial arts. Struggle is also, I think, one of the major ways in which the martial arts makes itself distinct and different from religion. It serves as a test by which misleading or excessive concepts are pruned and selected against: if a philosophy doesn't hold up when fighting for your life, it doesn't hold up at all. However useful a martial artist's ideas might be in his daily life, they all, in the end, must be useful in a struggle as well.

As a martial artist, I felt especially satisfied by watching the wasp and spider's melee. This, I thought, was truly real combat--not the endless fictions shown on TV and in movies, not the brutal but inherently limited duels of boxing or mixed martial arts, not even our own cherished freestyle sparring--real. So much of our understanding of the world has been built with the thin cardboard of media images and dramatized accounts. Perhaps fortunately, many of us in the West will never see what actual violence looks like or know what it feels like to fight for our lives. This is not a bad thing. We should cherish the peace and safety our civilization has afforded some of us. However, like with so many practices and experiences that have passed from our lives in the modern world, we should acknowledge that something is missing.

I pondered this way for a week.

The other I woke up to wretched cries. Out in front of the house, Shankar and a
fatherly looking man had ahold of one of my host family's goats. My host father held the animal down and hog-tied its legs together. The second man had a strangely shiny clamp device. This man is called a compressor. He carefully positioned the tongs of the clamp on either side of the goat's testicles. The goat struggled. The man squeezed.

I don't think I've ever heard a creature express such pain.

You must understand: goats have enormous balls. They hang hugely and proudly like a pair of blue ribbon apples in a leather bag. One can't help but be uncomfortably fascinated by them as the goats leap around the yard. Goats are also, I've been told, quite rowdy and difficult if not castrated. This is a quite standard procedure in animal husbandry, one that is probably practiced dozens of times a year in Kalimpong alone. I continued to stare, horrified and transfixed, as the compressor slammed the clamp down on the goat's testicles several more times. My host father saw me watching from the kitchen and grinned good naturedly at me. When the goat had apparently been mutilated to their satisfaction, the two men untied it and let it go. The creature staggered a few steps and just stood, quivering, looking out at the mountains.

Shankar went over to the barn shed and picked up second goat. After centuries of domestic breeding the goat was not very smart. Still, I could see its eyes dart from the first goat to the man with the shiny clamp, and I knew that it sensed danger. Again the goat struggled, and again it was overpowered and castrated.

This scene brought my thoughts back to the spider and the wasp that had given me such satisfaction. The way the goat fought as hard as it could, though it was too late, its every muscle pushing futilely against the hold of the stronger, better positioned men. Was the struggle of the goat any less significant than the struggle of the fighting insects? Was the violence inflicted by my host father and his friend any less primordial and elemental than that wrecked by the victorious wasp?

Though I have continued to eat meat, I have long felt deeply unsettled by the way humans often treat other animals. It is an extraordinarily self-centered fallacy to believe that the pain and harm our civilization often inflicts on non-humans for our befit is any different than that which we sometimes inflict on each other for much the same reasons. Watching the casual brutality of animal husbandry not only reinforced these feelings, but caused me to evaluate the issue from the perspective of a martial artist.

The violence and overwhelming odds faced by the goat seems to me to be exactly the sort of situation that we have been training for, with black belts practicing freestyle sparring against two attackers. How then am I to place the scene of the goat's castration into the framework of my larger understanding of struggle? I honestly figured it out yet. What I do know is that that martial arts cannot exclude human violence against other animals from world view, for this violence is perhaps the most common and brutal and archetypal violence that exists in the world today.

The goats have been better behaved the past few days. When let out of their pen, they no longer jump and cavort around the yard, chasing the cats and chickens. They'll walk about docilely, eating what treats my host siblings bring them. Every now and then, though, I'll notice one walk to the edge of the yard and just stand, unmoving, looking out at the mountains.