“No person among you shall partake of blood, nor shall the stranger who resides among you partake of blood. And if any Israelite or any stranger who resides among them hunts down an animal or a bird that may be eaten, he shall pour out its blood and cover it with earth.” – Leviticus 17:12-13
There are lots of limitations on eating meat. The Torah never wants us to forget the preciousness of life. When we do eat meat, we need to honor the life taken through the method of slaughter, blessings, and, as we see in the above passage, when slaughtering a non-domesticated animal, covering the blood – the source of life.
Our daf deals with the question of if someone can dig up earth to cover the blood of an undomesticated animal (or one of questionable status) on festival days. It also asks if asks from a stove can be used to cover the blood? What about dirt prepared in advance to cover up fecal matter?
While this is not something we need to worry about in our day to day lives anymore (thank you butchers and thank you toilets) – I do wonder about how we can bring that confrontation with the blood of an animal into practice today. How do we honor the life given for our benefit? How do we remove all those layers that distance us from the taking of the life to confront that reality? How do we remain uncalloused to the spilling of blood (of an animal)?
2,711 pages of Talmud. A gem a day. 
I recently watched an interview to a journalist who has been reporting on Industrial Farms. He described horrible practices he witnessed. That is a reality we barely get exposed to. My point is not only thinking about the life given but also about how you that life was taken.
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yes, we often look to those who slaughtered their own animals for food as barbaric, but what we allow others to do for us is far less humane.
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