A small group of Muslim men from various Middle Eastern and North African countries did show up, however. We didn't get a chance to speak with all of them, but of those we talked to several were graduate students from the University of Maine who were buying goats to slaughter for family gatherings in the weeks leading up to Ramadan. After the auction, those who bought animals could take them to a nearby farm, where there was an area for the goats to be slaughtered in accordance with the rules of Islam. We went with them to the farm, where a chemistry student from Morocco named Aziz explained to us the prayers and rituals surrounding a Halal slaughter.

One of the things we found most interesting about the slaughter was the change in our attitudes toward the animals as they went from livestock to meat. Once they had been bought and segregated by their destiny into one pen, we had a tremendous amount of sympathy for them. I imagined myself in their position, with only a prescribed number of minutes left in my life, and wondered if they had any idea what was coming. One of the wonderful things about Halal slaughter is that it requires other animals to be shielded from the sight of one that has been killed, but I couldn't help thinking that, as intelligent as goats are, they had figured out at least part of it; they all seemed reluctant to leave the trailer.

For Karl, the moment they'd been led to the mat on which they would killed, he felt that their fate was inevitable, and began to see them, even as they lived, as meat. It became an event for him to document, and he saw it journalistically through the lens of his camera. For me, it was the moment at which they were actually killed that brought about that change. But for both of us, though we are animal lovers, our sympathy ceased once they had been slaughtered. By the time the carcass was butchered, we saw it as meat rather than as the goat that we'd been petting less than an hour earlier.

We talked about this a lot on the drive home, and had a couple of theories about why our attitude changed. The first was that we didn't know the goats personally, so their death wasn't the same kind of loss it would have been if we'd known them better. Another was that the ritual of Halal killing, with its inclusion of a prayer of gratitude, brought a closure to the animal's life that made it somehow easier for us to watch. In either case, our reaction to the slaughter was much different than we'd expected it to be.

It was a fascinating experience, though we were disappointed that so few of the intended audience were present at the auction. There was one bright spot, however, in their absence: The Year of the Goat made the front page of the local section of the Monday edition of the Bangor Daily News. The reporter who'd come to cover the auction, similarly disappointed by the turnout, settled for us, instead. — MMH