Category Archives: Meat Rabbits

I fully admit it. It’s my fault. I eat meat. I chose to have children. I drive a car powered with petroleum products. I own a dog in the city. I own more clothes and shoes than I can wear in one week.

These things are so much a part of our life, so comfortable, so important to our self image or sense of happiness, so easily justified. Now that I’ve managed to opt out of the conventional food stream I’m trying to do more, but sometimes doing more in one area means doing less in another. Sometimes I have to question if that is really helping in the long run. If I have to drive my car greater distances to a farm in order to pickup local dairy, a chicken package or boxes of tomatoes so that I don’t buy conventional ones in BPA lined cans trucked great distances is that really helping the planet?

It’s true I can find out exactly what the cows are fed in the milking parlor, what percentage of their diet is grass or hay, what type of cows they are, how they are treated, if they live directly underneath power lines or along train tracks or the freeway where food and water are certainly picking up fumes. I can see and feel the soil my tomatoes were grown in and I know I’m not contributing to forced labor situations, bad factory conditions, unsustainable farming practices that are somehow allowed to be labeled “organic”. But if I’m consuming more gas in order to bypass those things – is that the answer? I don’t know.

There are so many variables and disconnected goals. Despite that I feel I have a very clear voice, I myself feel conflicted. I started this journey as a way to protect and nurture the health of my own children. In order to do that I felt like I had to become a food isolationist. By opting out of the conventional food system I am in no way contributing to it’s misguided ways. And by encouraging others to do the same I hope to create ripples that will feed into bigger and bigger movements that may someday create a whirlpool of change in the food system.

Removing chemicals from my food is a natural precursor to removing them from all my household products – cleaning agents, lotions and soaps. This feeds my desire to eliminate a market for these unnecessarily mined and manufactured items. I can see how the number of items in my pantry, cupboards and medicine cabinet have shrank over the last few years. That means less distribution of products, packaging of products, manufacturing of products and marketing of products. I have significantly reduced my garbage and recycling service as well. This feeds my desire to be green and lower my carbon footprint.

After watching Food, Inc. I can no longer eat meat unless I know the quality of life it had, and the quality of death. It’s not enough for me to buy it at the farmer’s market or a local healthy food store. I need to visit the farm, see the life the animals have led and be present at the moment of death. I have added an ethical element to my needs, as well as nutritional and environmental.

Now I know that there is more to chicken than “natural” or “free range” or even “organic”. Even Joel Salatin raises Cornish Cross birds, although he is doing it in the best possible way one could raise Cornish Cross birds – over grass in tractors. After helping a friend process her 23 meat birds a few months ago which she raised in her backyard I’m trying to remove Cornish Cross chickens from our diets. The birds are bred to be ready for market much quicker than their bodies are able to keep up with. The feathers can’t keep up with the body development, they consume and poop large quantities of feed which makes them stink and they are caked in their own excrement because they can’t move around easily. They suffer from all manner of health issues so it’s good they are processed early, in order to put them out of misery. I don’t want to support that kind of “sustainable” or “organic” pastured meat.

Who knew eating would become so complicated? I now need to know the breed of animal (is it a heritage breed that needs protecting or capable of reaching full size in a normal, healthy manner?), the manner in which it was raised (was the animal raised in a manner that’s sustainable to the land it was on? was it treated with respect and allowed a good life?), the diet (was it fed a diet appropriate to it’s evolutionary requirements and was that diet supporting genetically modified crops in any way, shape or form, or the overfishing of oceans?) and the quality of death (did the animal experience trauma or was it ill treated at any point in the process?).

Any one of these things alone makes eating meat difficult, especially when you add in that I don’t want to expend petroleum driving great distances in order to obtain it. I find myself at odds with the whole offshore oil drilling question. Should it be allowed? If I don’t agree with it then I should stop consuming all petroleum products. That is my fault too.

And then there is the question of if we even should be eating meat, ethically. When I went up to Ebey Farm to meet my future bacon I had serious doubts that I could follow through with it. I’ve always had a soft spot for pigs – they are highly intelligent creatures. When Andrea scratched the back of one who was struggling to reach a certain itch, it glanced up at her with exactly the same expression my own dog gives me, of cognitive gratitude and satisfaction. Chubby enjoyed the same things in life that my dog does. If I can eat pork could I not also eat dog? What makes it ok to eat one living creature and not another?

Is it that we can form an emotional bond with some creatures and not others? Because there are plenty of backyard chicken owners whose birds are family. In fact, there is a whole market for chicken diapers so that they watch tv with you. I’ve been following the progress of Baby Jane whose mother did not recover after birthing. It’s obviously easy to form a strong bond with a cow who you breed annually, milk daily and care for from birth to death. Yet emotionally I have no issues eating beef, nor do most Americans. Is a cow such a far leap from a horse? And why are most vegetarians not averse to eating fish? Did the fish not have the same natural instinct to survive that a pig, chicken or cow did?

As a gardener I have no problem unleashing rabid ladybugs and attracting parasite-eating wasps to my yard. That’s my fault too. I allow my children to crush snails or slugs as they find them and I myself have squished plenty of slugs that were devastating our food. Are they too not living things with an instinct to survive? What about my vegetables? Do they not have some level of survival instinct?

Is it easier on our psyches and the planet to consume genetically altered soy beans that have been treated with hexane and a host of other toxic chemicals in order to convert them to the physical forms they take as they sit in their shrink wrapped packages behind refrigerated cases at stores near and far?

I find it interesting that not all Buddhists are vegetarians. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche in Change of Heart says

“It’s a hopeless situation, because if we don’t eat we die. Since we have to eat, how can we minimize the harm involved?…To Buddhists, every life is of equal value. Most Tibetans don’t eat fish because usually several have to be consumed to satisfy a single person’s hunger. Highlanders prefer to eat yak because twenty people can live on the meat of a single animal for twenty days. They often think of lowlanders as non-virtuous because they kill so many beings when they plow the land – beings living in the ground, by exposing them to the elements and the birds; beings living above the ground, by burying or squashing them; and even more beings during the cultivation and watering of crops….None of these people want to create non virtue, but they can’t avoid it. The important thing is motivation. It is highly commendable to refrain from eating meat to spare a being from suffering and death. If your intention is never to eat grains or vegetables for the same reason, that is also very good….All beings exist interdependently. Consuming the flesh of an animal, or vegetables and grains cultivated and harvested at the expense of many insects’ lives, establishes a connection into one of virtue.”

I’m not sure what the answer is. But I do know that whatever your choices are you are just as guilty as I am. This is not a black and white issue so none of us have the right to be judgmental of other’s food choices. I started this post thinking it would be about processing rabbits but realized how conflicted I am about the whole issue. I felt exactly this way when I went up to the farm to process my pig and when I went to my friend’s to help her process her meat birds.

The one thing I do know is that it’s my fault. And I would never have known that if I had simply purchased processed meat from someone and not been involved in it’s demise.