An old shed in the woods. Nick Rizkallah (2024), Unsplash.
About the Work
In the Meat Shed is a series of three related, original poems that were conceived and initially composed while participating in the day-to-day routines of provision of sanctuary for rescued wolves and wolfdogs.  Â
These poems are offered in hopes of bringing readers into the sensory wash of emotions and thoughts that often occupied me as I labored as a volunteer in a site within the sanctuary known as the “Meat Shed.” As part of an autoethnographic and personal commitment to being fully present while there, I found myself conducting my research not just among but also with the physical bodies of three sets of animals: the bodies of the discarded and donated (the “meat”), the bodies of the wolves and wolfdogs (the “rescued”), and with my own embodied organismic assemblage (the “me”).  Â
Working intensively with death, even in the service of sustaining life, can be especially hard work for the uninitiated. In such spaces, “moral harms” in the form of sorrow, grief, guilt, and fatigue mix readily with more rejuvenating affective states such as empathy, care, compassion, sense of community, and renewed sense of purpose. But so too does one leave this work with the uneasy weight of grievance, especially in reflecting on the seemingly endless cycles of desire and demand that determine the fates of the nonhuman animals that these poems are fundamentally about. Â
Thank you for taking the time to enter the Meat Shed with me. Â
-Monica
About the Author
Monica Ogra is a Research Fellow at PAN Works and Professor of Environmental Studies at Gettysburg College (USA). She is keenly interested in the places and spaces where animal studies, environmental sustainability, and equity/ethics/advocacies meet, both materially and discursively. She is currently working on a long-term project, Labors of Love, which examines commodification of “the wild” and what this means for the nonhuman animals caught up in related complex human networks of representational and cultural politics, institutions, and trade pathways. The project also takes up questions about why we continue to need rescue and sanctuary for nonhuman animals, and what happens to (and for) the humans who care for them, too.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to my fellow PAN Works community members, especially to JU and MdC for suggesting and encouraging these efforts and to LB, KS, and BK for sharing valuable insights about care work and grief. My thanks to the many fellow volunteers and sanctuary staff across the country for their collective generosity of time and support. I am grateful to Gettysburg College and the Environmental Studies department for fieldwork support of the larger project that this work is embedded within, and to “Perspectives” editors NR and WL for offering this space to share it. (All positions and opinions represented in this series are my own, and are not meant to represent the views of Gettysburg College, its Environmental Studies department, or PAN Works.) Finally, written words alone can’t carry gratitude to the souls of those whose lives are written about in these poems; the reader’s inner voice, however, gives my words a wind to float on in search of you.