I have ‘issues’ with killing and butchering your own meat. We already have our quota of death for eating purposes, its called the meat section of the grocery store. And you can go to actual butchers for less common meats like Rabbit, goat and the like.
Just to be clear I love meat and eat it with most every meal. Just to head off any comments that may assume I’m against the whole practice of animal eating. I just find individual hunting or/or live butchering needless and kind of cruel.
I just have issues with eating rabbit as I had several pet bunnies as a child and later in life catered a Lord of the Rings-themed wedding that had rabbit stew for 200… oh gods all the little triangular bones *shudder*
My one and only experience eating rabbit is when I was about eight. My dad gets me to try it, and it tasted greasy and nasty and I freaked out that I was eating bunny.
He tried to get my brother to try it by not telling him what it was, he said it was chicken. My brother, who is more perceptive than me, looks right at Dad and says, “That’s not chicken.”
My first home was one of those houses that was split in two? A new couple moved in next too us. One day they have a bunch of rabbits, and I played with them. They ran around my yard I petted them. Hugged them, They sniffed, jumped over me and one fell asleep in my arms.
Two weeks later I ask to see the bunnies, and the wife tells me, a Child of single digits. “Their all in the freezer.” It takes a moment for this to register. and Then I freak the hell out and start bawling like only a kid who’s just had his heart broken can. It took my mom two hours to calm me down.
From then on I called my neighbors ‘bunny killers’ and avoided them whenever I could.
Ahh Dave that’s awful. Since I had pet rabbits no one ever tried to make me to eat rabbit (though I had an uncle who was a hunter- I had the deer and it was quite good, but flat out refused to eat squirrel).
The catering was actually for good friends- and of course I tried the stew, it wasn’t bad, kinda like chicken thigh but gamier (it might depend on how it’s cooked (and whether it was farmed rabbit or wild-caught) but oh the guilt! I could feel the ghosts of my bun-rabs judging me I swear. While on the one hand I like the idea of raising my own animals for food, knowing they had happy healthy lives before seems nice, I also know myself too well and I know I would get attached and name the silly things and be utterly unable to send them to slaughter.
Also I just noticed the bunny in panel 10 looks sort of wide-eyed and alarmed, nice touch.
I didn’t like rabbit when I tried it because it had lots of bones. Seriously, I was spitting out lumps of them (in the politest way possible, of course). And I think there was a bullet in it as well. You get those in rabbits.
Home grown chicken was great though. Surprisingly, it didn’t taste like chicken. It had much more flavour.
My parents got me to eat Calamari back in the day by telling me it was chicken. It was a… better experience. XD I liked it, but I still wish they’d have told me it was squid! I probably would have still eaten it!
I’m of the opposite view. I think everyone should come face to face with their meat at least once. It makes a person appreciate the sacrifice being made to nourish them. Too many people take it for granted and that’s what I think is cruel.
I have hunted, (and issued a prayer of thanks for my prey’s sacrifice) and I have visited a farm where I even got to meet my cow before it was slaughtered. Both are very powerful experiences.
We can’t afford to get cynical when it comes to life. I think you chug, myself, and everyone else will agree.
Thing is, the argument is that when you butcher your own meat you’re a lot closer to it than if you just buy it at the market, and that that’s actually a lot more respectable. In a world where a lot of kids are apparently unaware that tomatoes grow on a plant as opposed to just being these plastic-wrapped thing you get at the grocery store…
I’m honestly confused as to how getting your hands dirty and dealing with the fact that your meat was once a living creature is more of an issue than buying it looking like nothing that every lived at a grocery store. I’d have thought that it was better for people to admit and deal with that fact that just going to the grocery store and not thinking about matters.
Our brains work in a way that the closer we are to something, the more we care about it. Forcing a child to overcome their love for a bunny – to overcome empathy and slaughter something they love – is not exactly healthy for their psyche, imho.
I don’t agree with forcing it, but if a kid wants to hunt let them hunt (or butcher, if they want to butcher). Either they’ll face the reality and deal with it, or they’ll realize they don’t have the heart to hurt an animal, and either situation gives them insight into their abilities and inclinations and helps them grow up a bit. (I remember stepping on a gerbil, hearing the crunch up through my body, and being horribly traumatized for a while. Made me super careful with other animals.)
And if they seem to take joy in hurting/harming the animal, that’s also something you need to spot and deal with. Being able to kill quickly and efficiently might be a way of life for some occupations, but taking joy from causing an animal to suffer is an indicator of some major psychological problems.
I grew up on a farm and have butchered many animals. Animals need to die in order for you to eat meat, and I really see no problem with me being the one to kill my own meat. Why is it okay for some people to butcher animals, but not other people?
When you raise your own meat, you know what it ate and how it was treated. Since most “grocery store” American meat comes from horrible factory farms that manage to bring cruelty to a new level, I’d rather eat the meat that I know had a decent life and a quick death. It tastes better, it doesn’t have the same degree of suffering, and you can (potentially) help support your local economy depending on who is doing the growing and slaughtering.
I feel better knowing that my Christmas turkey last year lived a much better quality of life than the average Christmas turkey. It shared a spacious area of my garden with my chickens, it had a varied diet (corn and table scraps), and it was humanely dispatched by a local farmer.
It was cheaper than usual (ignoring food costs) and it tasted great.
Killing your own food is good, because if nothing else it reminds you that animals have to die in order for us to eat meat. As long as you kill it properly (ie quickly), it generally has a better quality of life than food from factory farms.
*raises an eyebrow* In high school, one of my friends was so poor that deer hunting actually was part of how they got food. Many places have tried to get hunters to actually take their full quota of deer as opposed to one or two to help cull the population. I’m seriously puzzled by the okay with eating meat but not okay with preparing it yourself.
I disagree. The conditions an animal you care for and the ultimate death it receives at your hand is far more humane than what goes on in the meat industry. I had a friend who’s family haworth by two calves every year. They card for them well, the calves grew up in a large field where they could graze. They invited me to bring my niece by to feed them carrots (not corn, they requested, as it wasn’t good for them) and I stopped by the fence when I drove past to give them a little scratch behind the ear. They were healthy friendly, and allowed to live quality lives until their slaughter which was very quick and without the terror that comes from being forced into a line, realizing the cows in front of them were being slaughtered. They weren’t electrocuted, they weren’t hit over the head to daze them, hung upside down by their hooves then had their throats slit. Instead, a single bullet in the back of the skull they never saw coming. The got proper nutrition that didn’t involve canabalism and they weren’t forced into stalls barely large enough to allow them to turn around, knee deep in their own feces to live their lives being force fed and never experiencing an open pasture to stretch their legs. So, conversely, I assure that is far more humane to hunt or raise your own animals for meat plus more environmentally friendly as you cut out the carbon footprint made by the transport and the slaughter house. It’s not like they are additional animals being killed, the family that hunts or homesteads doesn’t buy meat in the store. It doesn’t mean more animals are being killed, it means some are being killed more humanely. For the record, I eat plenty of meat, I’ve never raised my own meat, and I’ve never hunted nor do I come from a hunting family so this is coming from someone outside of those biases.
There’s actually a reason for people to hunt these days.
Problem is, humanity has pretty much destroyed the predator-prey balance in a lot of regions. If we don’t take over keeping certain animal populations in check, they’ll end up with populations too high for their local food supply to support. The resulting diseases and starvation then sends those animals further into places like cities, where hunger can create enough desperation for them to attack people to defend a food source or even to acquire one, and the diseases can potentially spread to other animal populations and even humans.
TL;DR version: We broke nature, now we gotta play warden.
Yeah, I’m with this one. Hunting is a necessity in some areas for specific reasons.
Some months back I ran across a story of a kid who shot a really nice-looking albino buck, and the outrage over this act. Predictably, the first cries were how people shouldn’t be hunting to begin with… but then there were people saying that the kid shouldn’t have done this BECAUSE THE BUCK WAS PRETTY. They actually said there were plenty of other deer he could’ve killed, he didn’t have to kill the beautiful white unique buck.
After I got done laughing my head off at the reasoning, I scrolled down a bit to find info about albinism being actually a genetic defect that led to problems in a deer’s life (not limited to being easier to spot and therefore more likely to get killed by predators), and how letting it spread into the population would be a bad thing. I don’t know if this is true (some people gave counter-information) but at least “I killed it ‘cuz breeding more white deer might harm the population” is better reasoning than “I decided to kill a different deer because this deer was so pretty.”
Really. I have higher respect for people who kill their own meat—especially as most of the animals killed for human consumption have had horrible lives and super inhumane deaths.
Actually please, please do. Everyone should be away of what sick horrible places they are—even if it means we eat less meat, because we only buy meat that is humanely (PROPERLY) raised and killed. They are bad for animals and bad for human health.
Um, you do realize that plants are just as alive as bunnies, right? And that ripping a carrot up out of the ground and eating it is just as fatal for the plant as butchering a rabbit?
Sorry, but every time I see someone make a “eating meat is murder” argument (or similar), I can’t help but respond with “So, what, you just eat rocks?”
I think most people can see a distinction between a thing that moves around and demonstrates some form of instinct and/or choices (and, perhaps more tellingly, pain response) to a thing that just sits there, gets bigger, and makes more of itself.
But I don’t think anyone here said anything against the eating of meat in and of itself. We seem to be debating whether you ought to at some point have a hand in the death itself, or just buy it from the grocery and try not to think about it having been a living animal at some point.
But that’s just it: A distinction between something that moves around and something that doesn’t is completely illusionary. Both the plant and the animal are alive. They grow, consume nutrients (in gas, liquid, and/or solid forms), make more of themselves, and eventually die.
Consuming plants or animals necessitates ending that life, in order to sustain our own. Reality doesn’t give a crap about human ‘distinctions’. Never did.
Like one of the characters in Wapsi Square said: Good and Evil don’t exist in Nature, they’re just labels, given to concepts from Human imaginations… Nature just IS…
I’m paraphrasing it, because i couldn’t find the exact page to get the quote correct.
From what I understand, a lot of people think our current standard for “humane” butchering practices leaves a lot to be desired.
I’m writing a story with a character who picked up the trait of being concerned about this matter as well, while still being an omnivore. I decided he would have researched humane butchering processes, so I did that myself, and concluded that the kosher method seems pretty decently concerned for animal welfare and fast kills. (And that shocking an animal into insensibility before slitting its throat probably isn’t as pain-free as people seem to think it is… so my character also picked up an experience with a taser, and I’m sure he’s really grateful for that.) So he buys kosher meat, even though he has no ties to Judaism.
The interesting side note is that one of his circle of friends is a Sikh… and Sikhs can’t eat meat that has been ritually slaughtered. So he makes sure to have vegetarian snacks around for her sake.
Kitenkaiba, I find your opinion a little bit disconcerting. You would have meat only come from mass production processes? I feel there is more than 3 no ugh evidence to how this has led to a lot of cruel living circumstances for food animals in the name of profit, and a disconnect in understanding for most people about where their food comes from. Then there’s the issuessentials of genetic modification and various medications used in those environmentsunami influencing our diet….
Do you think there is food waste created by growing one’s own food animals? Do you take the same issue with home vegetable/fruit cultivation? Both of these practices have demonstrated health benefits in addition to reducing demand on factory food systems – it won’t go to waste what is not needlessly produced in the first place.
I wouldn’t say I find it disconcerting, but it seems kind of naïve. As though one wants to pretend meat is stuff that is produced in a sanitized factory in the form you see it in the store, and doesn’t want to be reminded that it used to be animals.
I do agree with sentiments that a kid coming home from school to Fluffy in the oven is harsh, but if you’re going to raise your own food, don’t let it become a pet.
AH!, but that’s what the 4H does… the students going thru the school program where my nieces and nephews grew up (Gladwin, MI. around the middle of the lower peninsula) in that they are required to raise an animal from birth to grave, and it wasn’t JUST fluffy bunnies either, they had kids raising cows, pigs, chickens, goats, and yes, rabbits. the program taught them a whole bunch about the animals and what function they play in our society today, among other stuff that dealt with what a farming community needed in their future-farmers… the kids do indeed sometimes have “issues” with the fact that they sometimes don’t want to finish what they knew was going to happen from the day they started, because they identified too closely with their “Pet” rather than their “Lunch Meat”, but most don’t do too badly.
I am surprised that an eight year old would bring a pet bunny to school and enthusiastically talk about killing and gutting it. And then another eight year old just calls it gross.
Olive skin has a fair amount of green in it. (Actually, if I recall my art classes in college, skin color in general has a lot of green in it.) If you have any difficulty perceiving red, you might see it as more green than the rest of us do.
Ah, a nice and light-hearted comic after all the serious stuff, even if it shan’t last long … What with the delicious bunny meat, the “I’s very powerful”, and the mathlete trophy that is so much cooler than mine, it’s nice to have some happy stuff for a while.
(My mathlete trophy is just a triangular plaque, and it was for fourth place. Granted, that was fourth out of twenty-one teams in the chapter, so …)
Adding another to the list: I am a farmer, current tense, and also in college for agricultural and environmental science. I raise my own sheep as well as keeping several kinds of poultry, and I have been as part of my studies to numerous feedlots, slaughter units, dairies, egg producers, and other agricultural producers.
I would be happy to answer questions (assuming Dave doesn’t mind) for those who have questions. Either way, I agree with Sybarite, in saying that a large part of the problem is that people are very out of touch with where their food COMES from, and with Nergalim, in saying that the ‘natural balance’ of ecosystems is out of whack enough that humans NOT hunting (or otherwise enacting culls, and other problems) contributes substantially to current problems.
Since everyone else is talking about bunny murder this may seem off, but… When I saw Selkie feeling powerful from her Triceratops nose, the first thing I thought was “good thing it’s not a whole costume.” She’d be way more of a menace then Hyperbole and a Half, what with the teeth and venom. http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/10/menace.html
Only seen one comment point it out so far, so I’d like to pose this question: Dave, did you do this on purpose? The bunny due to be killed this weekend has his ears up and looks cute and happy and excited. The kid with the pet bunny has drooping ears and looks scared and unhappy.
It’s funny in a disturbing kind of way. I was just curious if it had indeed been deliberate.
The bunny with his ears down is a lop, their ears do that. The lop bunny was a choice just to make it more distinctive from the food-bunny. Food-bunny, though, is indeed supposed to have an air of… well lets just say “cheerful obliviousness”.
My uncle raised a lot of animals for food. Rabbits included. One spring though, he aquired baby turkies to raise and give to friends and family for thanksgiving . his daughters thought the chicks were adorable and didn’t want to kill the.
Then the turkies hit adolescence and the girls tone changed to “when do we get to eat these ugly things?”
I have ‘issues’ with killing and butchering your own meat. We already have our quota of death for eating purposes, its called the meat section of the grocery store. And you can go to actual butchers for less common meats like Rabbit, goat and the like.
Just to be clear I love meat and eat it with most every meal. Just to head off any comments that may assume I’m against the whole practice of animal eating. I just find individual hunting or/or live butchering needless and kind of cruel.
I just have issues with eating rabbit as I had several pet bunnies as a child and later in life catered a Lord of the Rings-themed wedding that had rabbit stew for 200… oh gods all the little triangular bones *shudder*
My one and only experience eating rabbit is when I was about eight. My dad gets me to try it, and it tasted greasy and nasty and I freaked out that I was eating bunny.
He tried to get my brother to try it by not telling him what it was, he said it was chicken. My brother, who is more perceptive than me, looks right at Dad and says, “That’s not chicken.”
My first home was one of those houses that was split in two? A new couple moved in next too us. One day they have a bunch of rabbits, and I played with them. They ran around my yard I petted them. Hugged them, They sniffed, jumped over me and one fell asleep in my arms.
Two weeks later I ask to see the bunnies, and the wife tells me, a Child of single digits. “Their all in the freezer.” It takes a moment for this to register. and Then I freak the hell out and start bawling like only a kid who’s just had his heart broken can. It took my mom two hours to calm me down.
From then on I called my neighbors ‘bunny killers’ and avoided them whenever I could.
Ahh Dave that’s awful. Since I had pet rabbits no one ever tried to make me to eat rabbit (though I had an uncle who was a hunter- I had the deer and it was quite good, but flat out refused to eat squirrel).
The catering was actually for good friends- and of course I tried the stew, it wasn’t bad, kinda like chicken thigh but gamier (it might depend on how it’s cooked (and whether it was farmed rabbit or wild-caught) but oh the guilt! I could feel the ghosts of my bun-rabs judging me I swear. While on the one hand I like the idea of raising my own animals for food, knowing they had happy healthy lives before seems nice, I also know myself too well and I know I would get attached and name the silly things and be utterly unable to send them to slaughter.
Also I just noticed the bunny in panel 10 looks sort of wide-eyed and alarmed, nice touch.
Oh, and seeing the color one quick correction- rabbit tails are always white, they use them to signal each other of danger/predators.
Doh! Thanks
Rabbit tails are not always white. I show rabbits and personally own a siamese sable netherland dwarf and his tail is all black.
I didn’t like rabbit when I tried it because it had lots of bones. Seriously, I was spitting out lumps of them (in the politest way possible, of course). And I think there was a bullet in it as well. You get those in rabbits.
Home grown chicken was great though. Surprisingly, it didn’t taste like chicken. It had much more flavour.
My parents got me to eat Calamari back in the day by telling me it was chicken. It was a… better experience. XD I liked it, but I still wish they’d have told me it was squid! I probably would have still eaten it!
I’m of the opposite view. I think everyone should come face to face with their meat at least once. It makes a person appreciate the sacrifice being made to nourish them. Too many people take it for granted and that’s what I think is cruel.
My view is similar, with the added thought that when you raise your own meat, you can be certain it’s raised in a humane, healthful way.
I have hunted, (and issued a prayer of thanks for my prey’s sacrifice) and I have visited a farm where I even got to meet my cow before it was slaughtered. Both are very powerful experiences.
We can’t afford to get cynical when it comes to life. I think you chug, myself, and everyone else will agree.
Thing is, the argument is that when you butcher your own meat you’re a lot closer to it than if you just buy it at the market, and that that’s actually a lot more respectable. In a world where a lot of kids are apparently unaware that tomatoes grow on a plant as opposed to just being these plastic-wrapped thing you get at the grocery store…
I’m honestly confused as to how getting your hands dirty and dealing with the fact that your meat was once a living creature is more of an issue than buying it looking like nothing that every lived at a grocery store. I’d have thought that it was better for people to admit and deal with that fact that just going to the grocery store and not thinking about matters.
And yes, I am a carnivore.
Our brains work in a way that the closer we are to something, the more we care about it. Forcing a child to overcome their love for a bunny – to overcome empathy and slaughter something they love – is not exactly healthy for their psyche, imho.
I don’t agree with forcing it, but if a kid wants to hunt let them hunt (or butcher, if they want to butcher). Either they’ll face the reality and deal with it, or they’ll realize they don’t have the heart to hurt an animal, and either situation gives them insight into their abilities and inclinations and helps them grow up a bit. (I remember stepping on a gerbil, hearing the crunch up through my body, and being horribly traumatized for a while. Made me super careful with other animals.)
And if they seem to take joy in hurting/harming the animal, that’s also something you need to spot and deal with. Being able to kill quickly and efficiently might be a way of life for some occupations, but taking joy from causing an animal to suffer is an indicator of some major psychological problems.
I grew up on a farm and have butchered many animals. Animals need to die in order for you to eat meat, and I really see no problem with me being the one to kill my own meat. Why is it okay for some people to butcher animals, but not other people?
We never let people butcher other people except during war.
When you raise your own meat, you know what it ate and how it was treated. Since most “grocery store” American meat comes from horrible factory farms that manage to bring cruelty to a new level, I’d rather eat the meat that I know had a decent life and a quick death. It tastes better, it doesn’t have the same degree of suffering, and you can (potentially) help support your local economy depending on who is doing the growing and slaughtering.
I feel better knowing that my Christmas turkey last year lived a much better quality of life than the average Christmas turkey. It shared a spacious area of my garden with my chickens, it had a varied diet (corn and table scraps), and it was humanely dispatched by a local farmer.
It was cheaper than usual (ignoring food costs) and it tasted great.
Killing your own food is good, because if nothing else it reminds you that animals have to die in order for us to eat meat. As long as you kill it properly (ie quickly), it generally has a better quality of life than food from factory farms.
*raises an eyebrow* In high school, one of my friends was so poor that deer hunting actually was part of how they got food. Many places have tried to get hunters to actually take their full quota of deer as opposed to one or two to help cull the population. I’m seriously puzzled by the okay with eating meat but not okay with preparing it yourself.
I disagree. The conditions an animal you care for and the ultimate death it receives at your hand is far more humane than what goes on in the meat industry. I had a friend who’s family haworth by two calves every year. They card for them well, the calves grew up in a large field where they could graze. They invited me to bring my niece by to feed them carrots (not corn, they requested, as it wasn’t good for them) and I stopped by the fence when I drove past to give them a little scratch behind the ear. They were healthy friendly, and allowed to live quality lives until their slaughter which was very quick and without the terror that comes from being forced into a line, realizing the cows in front of them were being slaughtered. They weren’t electrocuted, they weren’t hit over the head to daze them, hung upside down by their hooves then had their throats slit. Instead, a single bullet in the back of the skull they never saw coming. The got proper nutrition that didn’t involve canabalism and they weren’t forced into stalls barely large enough to allow them to turn around, knee deep in their own feces to live their lives being force fed and never experiencing an open pasture to stretch their legs. So, conversely, I assure that is far more humane to hunt or raise your own animals for meat plus more environmentally friendly as you cut out the carbon footprint made by the transport and the slaughter house. It’s not like they are additional animals being killed, the family that hunts or homesteads doesn’t buy meat in the store. It doesn’t mean more animals are being killed, it means some are being killed more humanely. For the record, I eat plenty of meat, I’ve never raised my own meat, and I’ve never hunted nor do I come from a hunting family so this is coming from someone outside of those biases.
There’s actually a reason for people to hunt these days.
Problem is, humanity has pretty much destroyed the predator-prey balance in a lot of regions. If we don’t take over keeping certain animal populations in check, they’ll end up with populations too high for their local food supply to support. The resulting diseases and starvation then sends those animals further into places like cities, where hunger can create enough desperation for them to attack people to defend a food source or even to acquire one, and the diseases can potentially spread to other animal populations and even humans.
TL;DR version: We broke nature, now we gotta play warden.
Yeah, I’m with this one. Hunting is a necessity in some areas for specific reasons.
Some months back I ran across a story of a kid who shot a really nice-looking albino buck, and the outrage over this act. Predictably, the first cries were how people shouldn’t be hunting to begin with… but then there were people saying that the kid shouldn’t have done this BECAUSE THE BUCK WAS PRETTY. They actually said there were plenty of other deer he could’ve killed, he didn’t have to kill the beautiful white unique buck.
After I got done laughing my head off at the reasoning, I scrolled down a bit to find info about albinism being actually a genetic defect that led to problems in a deer’s life (not limited to being easier to spot and therefore more likely to get killed by predators), and how letting it spread into the population would be a bad thing. I don’t know if this is true (some people gave counter-information) but at least “I killed it ‘cuz breeding more white deer might harm the population” is better reasoning than “I decided to kill a different deer because this deer was so pretty.”
Really. I have higher respect for people who kill their own meat—especially as most of the animals killed for human consumption have had horrible lives and super inhumane deaths.
Don’t ever research how factory farms are run…
Actually please, please do. Everyone should be away of what sick horrible places they are—even if it means we eat less meat, because we only buy meat that is humanely (PROPERLY) raised and killed. They are bad for animals and bad for human health.
away=aware. Need sleep (and an edit button). 😉
Um, you do realize that plants are just as alive as bunnies, right? And that ripping a carrot up out of the ground and eating it is just as fatal for the plant as butchering a rabbit?
Sorry, but every time I see someone make a “eating meat is murder” argument (or similar), I can’t help but respond with “So, what, you just eat rocks?”
I think most people can see a distinction between a thing that moves around and demonstrates some form of instinct and/or choices (and, perhaps more tellingly, pain response) to a thing that just sits there, gets bigger, and makes more of itself.
But I don’t think anyone here said anything against the eating of meat in and of itself. We seem to be debating whether you ought to at some point have a hand in the death itself, or just buy it from the grocery and try not to think about it having been a living animal at some point.
But that’s just it: A distinction between something that moves around and something that doesn’t is completely illusionary. Both the plant and the animal are alive. They grow, consume nutrients (in gas, liquid, and/or solid forms), make more of themselves, and eventually die.
Consuming plants or animals necessitates ending that life, in order to sustain our own. Reality doesn’t give a crap about human ‘distinctions’. Never did.
Like one of the characters in Wapsi Square said: Good and Evil don’t exist in Nature, they’re just labels, given to concepts from Human imaginations… Nature just IS…
I’m paraphrasing it, because i couldn’t find the exact page to get the quote correct.
From what I understand, a lot of people think our current standard for “humane” butchering practices leaves a lot to be desired.
I’m writing a story with a character who picked up the trait of being concerned about this matter as well, while still being an omnivore. I decided he would have researched humane butchering processes, so I did that myself, and concluded that the kosher method seems pretty decently concerned for animal welfare and fast kills. (And that shocking an animal into insensibility before slitting its throat probably isn’t as pain-free as people seem to think it is… so my character also picked up an experience with a taser, and I’m sure he’s really grateful for that.) So he buys kosher meat, even though he has no ties to Judaism.
The interesting side note is that one of his circle of friends is a Sikh… and Sikhs can’t eat meat that has been ritually slaughtered. So he makes sure to have vegetarian snacks around for her sake.
Kitenkaiba, I find your opinion a little bit disconcerting. You would have meat only come from mass production processes? I feel there is more than 3 no ugh evidence to how this has led to a lot of cruel living circumstances for food animals in the name of profit, and a disconnect in understanding for most people about where their food comes from. Then there’s the issuessentials of genetic modification and various medications used in those environmentsunami influencing our diet….
Do you think there is food waste created by growing one’s own food animals? Do you take the same issue with home vegetable/fruit cultivation? Both of these practices have demonstrated health benefits in addition to reducing demand on factory food systems – it won’t go to waste what is not needlessly produced in the first place.
I wouldn’t say I find it disconcerting, but it seems kind of naïve. As though one wants to pretend meat is stuff that is produced in a sanitized factory in the form you see it in the store, and doesn’t want to be reminded that it used to be animals.
I do agree with sentiments that a kid coming home from school to Fluffy in the oven is harsh, but if you’re going to raise your own food, don’t let it become a pet.
AH!, but that’s what the 4H does… the students going thru the school program where my nieces and nephews grew up (Gladwin, MI. around the middle of the lower peninsula) in that they are required to raise an animal from birth to grave, and it wasn’t JUST fluffy bunnies either, they had kids raising cows, pigs, chickens, goats, and yes, rabbits. the program taught them a whole bunch about the animals and what function they play in our society today, among other stuff that dealt with what a farming community needed in their future-farmers… the kids do indeed sometimes have “issues” with the fact that they sometimes don’t want to finish what they knew was going to happen from the day they started, because they identified too closely with their “Pet” rather than their “Lunch Meat”, but most don’t do too badly.
Ok, putting in an immediate request/plea for Panel 8 on a t-shirt.
No, stuff that- Panel 8 on EVERYTHING.
Ok!
http://bluewingedcoyote.tumblr.com/post/111931839350/panel-from-latest-selkie-comic-as-a-t-shirt
OHhhhhh *faints*
Kinda amazed, as upset as the teacher got when Jessie said “suck” https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie151/ that she allowed frikken.
I am surprised that an eight year old would bring a pet bunny to school and enthusiastically talk about killing and gutting it. And then another eight year old just calls it gross.
Really? Have you ever met any 8-year-olds?
I don’t know why, but, when I saw Amanda reaching into that bag my first thought was ‘let’s keep those hands on the table where we can all see them.’
Is the boy in frame 10 supposed to be green?
Either it’s been corrected or the color in your monitor is off. My monitor is calibrated for color and it looks fine on my iPhone, too.
Olive skin has a fair amount of green in it. (Actually, if I recall my art classes in college, skin color in general has a lot of green in it.) If you have any difficulty perceiving red, you might see it as more green than the rest of us do.
Meet your meat, or don’t eat it; my problem is with the marzipan being brought to a school. Schools are crazy when it comes to nut allergies.
Ah, a nice and light-hearted comic after all the serious stuff, even if it shan’t last long … What with the delicious bunny meat, the “I’s very powerful”, and the mathlete trophy that is so much cooler than mine, it’s nice to have some happy stuff for a while.
(My mathlete trophy is just a triangular plaque, and it was for fourth place. Granted, that was fourth out of twenty-one teams in the chapter, so …)
What happened to the road trip to to the Packer game comic? I could swear I saw one last night.
*twist twist twist*
Goes the blade in her wound.
Giselle’s cookies are marzipan? Thanks Dave, now I have Nutcracker music running through my head…again.
Adding another to the list: I am a farmer, current tense, and also in college for agricultural and environmental science. I raise my own sheep as well as keeping several kinds of poultry, and I have been as part of my studies to numerous feedlots, slaughter units, dairies, egg producers, and other agricultural producers.
I would be happy to answer questions (assuming Dave doesn’t mind) for those who have questions. Either way, I agree with Sybarite, in saying that a large part of the problem is that people are very out of touch with where their food COMES from, and with Nergalim, in saying that the ‘natural balance’ of ecosystems is out of whack enough that humans NOT hunting (or otherwise enacting culls, and other problems) contributes substantially to current problems.
I don’t mind at all! I love emergent conversations
The doomed bunny’s face – did you deliberately shade that to look like it’s smiling?
Since everyone else is talking about bunny murder this may seem off, but… When I saw Selkie feeling powerful from her Triceratops nose, the first thing I thought was “good thing it’s not a whole costume.” She’d be way more of a menace then Hyperbole and a Half, what with the teeth and venom. http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/10/menace.html
The moment I read the word ‘costume’, I knew EXACTLY where you were going!
It’s a bunny nose, right, Amanda?
This could go south… VERY quickly…
Only seen one comment point it out so far, so I’d like to pose this question: Dave, did you do this on purpose? The bunny due to be killed this weekend has his ears up and looks cute and happy and excited. The kid with the pet bunny has drooping ears and looks scared and unhappy.
It’s funny in a disturbing kind of way. I was just curious if it had indeed been deliberate.
The bunny with his ears down is a lop, their ears do that. The lop bunny was a choice just to make it more distinctive from the food-bunny. Food-bunny, though, is indeed supposed to have an air of… well lets just say “cheerful obliviousness”.
I wonder why the bunny that isn’t getting eaten is the one that looks sad…
It knows its life has no meaning.
My uncle raised a lot of animals for food. Rabbits included. One spring though, he aquired baby turkies to raise and give to friends and family for thanksgiving . his daughters thought the chicks were adorable and didn’t want to kill the.
Then the turkies hit adolescence and the girls tone changed to “when do we get to eat these ugly things?”