Rabbits Are The New Chickens
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Whether you’re vegan or not, there’s an article in the NY Times right now that will probably make your stomach turn. The title is “Don’t Tell The Kids.” Yes, you read that right. They’re suggesting that you lie to your children about where their meat comes from.
Not that lying about meat is anything new, but the source of this particular kind of meat is particularly troublesome for children to… er… digest.
From the article:
Rabbit is also becoming popular among those with an interest in raising farm animals but without much space or experience. Sure, rabbits can be fragile. They get scared and have heart attacks. Heat or the cold can knock them off. They can be bad parents, abandoning their babies or worse.
But they breed like, well, you know. That means they produce a lot of meat for not much money. And they’re clean and quiet — especially welcome traits in the suburbs.
“I always say rabbits are the new chickens,” said Novella Carpenter, who built a farm on an abandoned lot in a poor section of Oakland, Calif.,
Why in the world would people be interested in eating rabbits?
Well, the simple answer is that there are even fewer laws protecting rabbits than there are protecting cows and pigs. And the laws protecting cows and pigs aren’t many and they aren’t well enforced. So, raising rabbits in your back yard, torturing them, and killing them cruelly is basically 100% legal. That’s not about to change any time soon.
Many routine animal “husbandry” practices these days would be illegal if inflicted upon cats or dogs, but farm animals are subjected to enormous amounts of cruelty. It’s absurd to suggest we ought to extend that cruelty to other species and suburban environments by raising and killing rabbits.
More from the article:
When the French food revolution changed American dining in the 1960s, rabbit in mustard sauce would turn up at the occasional dinner party or restaurant. But the country never quite got past the pets-or-meat problem.
Ever since the Victorians began keeping them as pets, the relationship between the rabbit and the table has been uneasy.
“Uneasy” is putting it mildly. The whole thing is just sick. Sick and wrong.
(Thanks to Mimi for the link.)
The end of the article gets weird and scary. The people who are slaughtering the rabbits keep mementos and have signature ways of killing? That sounds like a serial killer to me…
“As the pre-slaughter lecture in Brooklyn began, Ms. Carpenter prepared students for the moment.
‘Today is a somber day because we are going to be killing rabbits,” she said. “But I am always psyched after slaughter because I’m like, now I’m going to eat.’”
This is the part in particular that got to me, “psyched’ after slaughtering a bunny?! There is something very ‘off’ about getting off on bunny-killing….
Indeed, LOL, there’s something off about a psyched bunny-killer.