Cull

It’s a turkey shoot

February 6, 2007  7 comments

What do you call the killing of a huge number of birds? A British outbreak of the H5N1 strain of “bird flu” (itself an oddly cutesy name for a virus that may become fatally pandemic in humans) has prompted the killing of 159,000 turkeys, reported in the news as a “cull”. A reader has written in to wonder about the origin of this euphemism, noting that the primary sense of “to cull” is to select. This is indeed the first meaning given in OED, which notes that “cull” comes from the Old French cueillir, to collect, gather or select, and offers George Crabbe’s definition of good literary style:

1807 Words aptly culled, and meanings well exprest.

We are also given examples such as culling strawberries, culling quotations from a book, and culling knowledge, or even culling the most courageous men from society (not so as to kill them). Indeed, even when applied to animals, to “cull” seems originally to have meant to select the ones you want:

1929 There were a few lean, dejected cattle, the best of them having been culled out hours before [by buyers].

But, confusingly, what was left when you had culled or culled out what you wanted had sometimes been called, since 1611, the “culling” or “cullings”. And apparently via usage of the term in forestry (to throw out a log that will not make good timber is to “cull” it, in 1904), the verb “to cull” itself came to have its emphasis inverted, so that it meant selecting what you wanted to discard, rather than to keep. Its first use in the context of killing unwanted animals comes in 1934, and is then ironically acknowledged here:

1964 The experimental shooting of hippo – culling is the polite conservation term for it – had begun.

You might think the killing of 159,000 turkeys is rather too indiscriminate to be sufficiently faithful to the selective meaning of “cull”, though I suppose the appeal is to the national turkey flock as a whole, of which 159,000 birds may be considered a (potentially) diseased part, to be eliminated for the health of the rest – and, more importantly, for the health of humans. Still, “cull” is a peculiar sort of euphemism, because it is only one vowel-sound away from being homophonous with what it is euphemising, “kill”.

The BBC’s report wobbles strangely between euphemism and directness: birds are “culled”, to “dispose of” them or to “get rid of” them; though there is also talk of a “means of extermination”, a “slaughter”, and a way to “kill” them – indeed, the most “humane method”. What is this most humane method of disposing of birds?

Mobile gas chambers were delivered to the Holton farm over the weekend. All 159,000 turkeys will be placed into crates, “forklifted” into the chambers and gassed to death.

None more humane. In some ways, this represents a logical end to the lives of battery-farmed animals. Personally, I am sufficiently speciesist to consider the life of just one human being worth more than the lives of 159,000 turkeys. Nonetheless, like other euphemisms of industrial agriculture (such as beak “trimming”), the word “cull” comfortingly unspeaks the reality on which many roast dinners depend.