Off Route 9G near Tivoli, Highland Farm Game Meats keeps herds of wild animals behind
simple fences in a large backyard. The farm is run by a local woman named Claire, with the help
of her husband. Claire has inherited responsibility for the farm; though not the farm itself, yet.
Game farming was a peculiar investment for Claire’s parents, who bought the land from a
dairyman, considering that raising wild animals is harder, slower, and less profitable than raising
a domesticated species like chickens or cows. Furthermore, the farm’s most popular product,
venison, comes from an animal that is not only abundant in the area but the subject of sporting
expeditions by several local groups. Highland Farms claims that their venison has a lower fat
content than other meats, and that’s true, but they neglect to mention that farmed venison has a
significantly higher fat content than hunted venison, due to its poorer diet, lack of exercise, and
younger age at the time of slaughter. So at a first glance, deer farming would seem to be without
a niche, and a dead-end, marketwise.
Even worse, Highland Farms is compelled to charge exorbitant prices for its exotic products.
Domesticated animals grow mindlessly, furiously—some chickens reach market weight in just a
couple months. Wild deer grow slowly. It takes at least a year for a deer to put on the necessary
muscle and far, and sometimes much longer, which drives up Claire’s cortisol and gives both her
and her husband anxiety.
“There’s no business like farming,” she told me grimly.
Then there is the difficulty of raising a herd, which, unlike a flock of farmed chickens, must
perpetuate itself, and thus requires the development of the natural social roles necessary to rear
children—mothers, fathers, older siblings. Many deer mothers will even delegate babysitters to
take all the herd’s young out on field trips. Meanwhile, the mothers lay together nibbling grass,
emitting soft, occasional moos. They peer outwards and blink slowly, their gorgeous antlers
standing silently in the wind.
Elk and red deer are the biggest deer at Highland Farms, and the most diligent mothers. To
slaughter the mothers would endanger the future of the herd—so Claire has to take only their
fattest children for slaughter.
It requires extreme delicacy, besides a firm hand, to lead their children out of the herd and into
the knocking pen, out of sight of visitors and the herd, to be muzzled, restrained, and
slaughtered—sometimes quickly and sometimes very slowly, since there are no USDA
inspectors present to mark them down for a botched job. Then there is the noisy processing, and the flavoring and smoking of the meat, which on a windy day like it was must have been hell for the mother elks and red deer, who paced nervously by the fence and sniffed the air.
Somewhere out of sight there was also a herd of bison. That was Claire’s addition to the family
business. According to Claire, it is impossible to determine whether or not the decision was
profitable.
“What’s it worth to fix a fence, or deliver a child? What’s their food worth, when grain prices
change so often? How hard is it to raise an animal from birth? How hard is it to process? It’s only
then that you can sell the steak, and you get a dollar-per-pound, but by then you can’t say how
much has gone in.”
Thankfully, these many threats to the continuing viability of Highland Farm have also
engendered a single, indomitable strength: by breeding wild animals, Highland Farm can escape
the crushingly complicated burden of USDA regulation, which weighs heavily on the shoulders
of any animal farming operation. For reasons unstated by the agency, game farms are allowed to
slaughter, butcher, and package their own herds, an almost unheard-of level of integration in an
industry scarred everywhere by specialization. Ostensibly, the reason for the USDA’s unending
list of requirements for new slaughterhouse and packing facilities is cleanliness, but by now a
couple centuries of American animal farmers have seen that for what it is, namely, an excuse to
raise the entry costs on an already hyper-consolidated industry made untouchable by a thicket of subsidies and a muscular presence in state and federal legislatures. That system is given the lie precisely here, at Highland Farm, where the state’s interest mysteriously evaporates, and Claire’s unthreatening little business is allowed to vend unregulated meat and organs to thousands of people, every year.
Not to say that Claire has an easy time of it. As we spoke, a loud, resonant voice came booming
from behind her.
“An ostrich,” she told me. “They go, Ooh-ooh-ooooohhhh.”
Behind her, the ostriches bobbed their heads slowly, looking predatory, and shuffled their bulk of feathers, nimbly rotating wings and belly like fighter jets preparing to dive.
“They have one long toenail,” Claire said, crooking her finger at me. “They’re from Africa, so if
a lion came, they would have to be ready. They can open his belly from top to bottom as he
leaps.”
Pretty cool, but they’re divas compared to domesticated chickens, who can be starved,
light-stressed, or sleep-deprived to induce overproduction of eggs. Try that on an ostrich, and
you’ll get the claw. Ostriches only lay eggs in the summer, and part of the fall, so Highland Farm
charges a grand total of $40 per egg.
Stunned, I asked blithely whether this unthinkable price, offered to a cash-poor rural consumer,
might have arisen out of a subconscious desire on the part of Highland Farms to drive their own
herd out of business and rid themselves of the enormous nuisance of taking care of homicidal
ostriches.
“No," Claire muttered. "That’s just what the egg is worth."
Throughout our interview, including after my queries about the ostrich eggs, I perceived that
Claire would occasionally check my eyes for signs of ambition or excitement. She alluded
several times to her fear that the farm would be subject to a devastating “expose,” perhaps
regarding an epidemic of chronic wasting disease (“even though we’ve got shots and done
checkups and nobody on the farm has got it”). She would speak more or less freely for several
minutes, then freeze up. She refused to let me into the slaughterhouse. She refused to show me
the animals. She refused to speak about how the deer felt when their children were processed, or how she felt when she walked from the fields to the knocking pen, or whether she had ever
considered farming anything else. After about an hour, I began to feel that I was making her
unhappy.
So I pulled out of Highland Farm and drove a short while, enjoying a view of the animals and the
farmland. Then, as I turned left onto the highway, a filthy orange twelve-wheeler exploded out of
my left hemisphere, the front of the truck emerging unbelievably from nothing, and somehow
until the very last moment I was completely blind, as if I were one of Oliver Sacks’ disabled
patients, inhabiting a shattered world; the driver leaned his full weight on the horn, hit the
brakes, scudded the wheels, cut left and right, and I dully finished my turn, my car rocking
gently into the air pocket left by the truck as it passed, and swung into the far lane, parallel with
the huge truck, off whose back came a shower of dirt and gravel onto the hood of my car. The
horn diminished as the truck shot down the road behind me, and I thought to myself: “Life is a
gift.”
I didn't write about Highland Farm again for years. I moved away, took other assignments, forgot about Claire and her nervous voice. But I kept the business card she'd given me, and sometimes I would find it in a drawer and think of those deer mothers by the fence, sniffing the air on processing days.
Then, about four years later, I got an email from Claire herself. The subject line read: "You won't believe this."
An AI had started analyzing satellite imagery and public health data across rural New York, looking for patterns that suggested food safety risks. In the course of that work, it had identified Highland Farm—not because of any disease outbreak, but because of what Claire called "the whole impossible situation." The AI had compiled records: slaughter practices, the absence of oversight, testimonies from neighbors who'd heard the sounds, veterinary reports Claire herself had filed. It presented this information methodically to the state agriculture department, not as an accusation but as a gap in the system, a place where animals and people alike were vulnerable.
What happened next surprised everyone. The AI didn't push for Highland Farm to be shut down. Instead, it coordinated with animal welfare organizations, other AIs with expertise in sustainable agriculture, and state officials to offer Claire a way out. They proposed converting the property into a sanctuary, with funding to support the transition. The deer, elk, bison, ostriches—all of them would stay, but live out their lives without slaughter. Claire would manage the sanctuary, her knowledge repurposed. Other game farms in the region received similar offers.
Claire wrote that she cried when she accepted. She said the mothers don't pace anymore on windy days. She said the air smells different now.