bunny bourguignon: it's not so easy

“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.

The New York Times today is running this piece on a "rabbit-killing seminar" held in a parking lot in Brooklyn. Full of puns and admonitions like "don't tell the kids!", it's portrayed as yet another way for people to get to know where their food comes from. The paper acknowledges that a lot of the ambivalence towards eating rabbits is due to the fact "the country never quite got past the pets-or-meat problem" with rabbits, something not as prevalent when you're talking about chicken or turkey. Rabbits are popular with kids, kept as pets, and images of Peter and Bugs are icons of childhood. And now they're the new trend on foodie menus.

The question of whether teaching a class full of nervous urbanites how to break rabbit necks in a city parking lot is a good idea is a difficult one. The article emphasizes that most rabbit isn't factory farmed since the animals themselves are so delicate and the demand for the meat is still niche. The idea is for people to raise these animals themselves as they are an "easy" one to keep in the city (anyone who has ever smelled rabbit piss might disagree), easy to kill, easy to butcher, and delicious to eat. A rabbit living in back of someone's co-op does probably live a considerably better life than a factory-farmed broiler chicken, so it's a question of degrees. If you absolutely refuse to quit eating meat, then isn't it better to take responsibility for the lives your appetite demands?

It's the theory/praxis line I come up against frequently: in theory it should never be right to kill an animal. In practice, if people are lining up to learn how to snap bunny necks they're probably pretty committed to their omnivorous diet, and this has got to be better than buying ground beef at discount prices, right?

But there's still a lot of vacillation, even in the people who participate. The idea of forcing yourself through the slaughter of an animal as a sort of trial by fire which, if you survive, absolves you of future concern for the ethical demands of your diet is the opposite of productive in my mind, because if you have ethical concerns about eating meat in the first place it means that, somewhere in you, you realize that there's probably something wrong with it. The effort and ritual of learning how to slaughter and butcher your own animals gives you something else to think about, and doesn't actually involve changing your diet.

And let's be honest: people who are "committed" to ethical meat sources don't make much of a change. Maybe you spend a bit more on the Sunday roast, but when you're out to eat, do you demand the server prove to you that the cow in your burger didn't suffer? Do you exclusively patronize establishments that exclusively serve locally-sourced, compassionately-killed meat? What about the pepperoni on that slice of pizza you're gobbling down at bar time? What about when you visit your folks in the Midwest and the only options for dinner are Outback and the Olive Garden? Are you a vegetarian then, or does your concern for the lives of the animals you eat only extend to a convenient twenty-mile radius around Manhattan?

As Michael Pollan (very revealingly) says in The Omnivore's Dilemma, "How far do I take this... before it ruins my meal?"

Articles like this seem to be appearing more and more often--in the NYT particularly--and they seem to universally end on a note that acknowledges the sense of ambivalence that's almost inevitable to this kind of facing-the-animal-you-eat endeavor. This one is no different.

“When I was the first person to volunteer to break the neck, it all seemed so easy and emotionless that I didn’t realize until after I’d done it that I was shaking,” she said.

But she recovered quickly. After all, there was a rabbit to dress.

Ms. Lippert still has the pelt, the head and the feet. They’re in her freezer, awaiting the taxidermist. But she doesn’t have the boyfriend.

“He ended up leaving me for a vegetarian,” she said.

from UW News

From uwnews.org:

Radical new directions needed in food production to deal with climate change
Yields from some of the most important crops begin to decline sharply when average temperatures exceed about 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 Fahrenheit. Projections are that by the end of this century much of the tropics and subtropics will regularly see growing season temperatures above that level, hotter than the hottest summers now on record.

Regardless of what your views on climate change are (and I myself am confused by all the competing "science", hence the birth of my own internal "why do we trust so much of this science anyway?" debacle), this is a frightening prospect. Heavy reliance on monocrops means that our whole food system balances precariously on a few delicate variables.

The challenge is becoming more difficult, the scientists said, because the world's population is likely to have increased more than 30 percent, to 9 billion people, by 2050.

It's positive that we are trying (with ham-fists, but trying) to confront this before it becomes too great of a problem. However, it seems like science is trying to solve this problem with genetic modification of food crops--manipulating plants to produce even more corn and soybeans on ever-smaller amounts of herbicide-soaked earth. The situation, as solved by UW scientists, involves more questionable practices with poorly-understood consequences, instead of actual, radical solutions: an end to monocropping, an end to investing grain in wasteful meat production, and starting a productive dialogue about overpopulation.

a whole new exciting way to avoid admitting that eating meat is wrong!

An article from October in the New York Times addresses the new "foodie" trend of butchering as art. The classes and seminars (only for the rich, it seems--one internship is 10,000$) feature people who want to know where their food is coming from, what happened to it, and ensure its purity. It seems that these are mostly people who recognize the ethical issues inherent to the killing of sentient beings for their flesh, and are trying to avoid actually confronting the problem. One girl says:

“I feel like if I’m going to eat meat... I don’t want to eat stuff that I haven’t had to work for.”

Does "working for" something you find morally questionable make it any better? Or does it just distract you from the fact that the practice does not sit well with you? The sense of having come through an ordeal--challenging oneself--can be reward enough to overlook the initial problem entirely. Simply proving you can watch an animal die doesn't change the fact that the animal dies.

Killing someone with your hands doesn't change the fact that you're killing someone. No matter how humane you are, you're still taking something of theirs--their most important of all somethings, everything they have--for the minor human pleasure of bacon.

One participant wrote, powerfully:

Animals do not want to die... They can feel pain and fear, and, just like us, will struggle to breathe for even one single more second. If you’re about to run 250 volts through a pig, do not look it in the eyes. It is not going to absolve you.