(no subject)
I want to share this article as widely as I can, because I think everyone needs to read it. It's important to reserve your judgement until you've read the whole thing, though - at the beginning I was thinking, what the heck is the point of this convoluted story about stolen rabbits? And, well, the vegans are just going to say that the whole problem could have been avoided by not keeping rabbits in the first place. But I found it very, very interesting that the author reports that "...after taking my classes, in which students learn how to kill and process their own animals, many report that they eat less meat. They also tell me that they can’t bring themselves to buy most of the meat they see in grocery stores anymore. I tell them that that is what happened to me too."
And yet in terms of the whole messy stolen rabbit business, he got "the sense that people on all sides of the fight continued to do whatever it is they do. People who didn’t eat meat continued to not eat it. People who hate killing spiders continued to not kill spiders. People with bacon fetishes continued to wax poetic over pork belly. Elk hunters continued to hunt elk. Fishermen continued to fish. Fish continued to eat bugs. Factory farms continued to cram thousands of cattle into confined spaces."
What I take from this is that directly engaging people in the messy business of where their food comes from actually has an impact on their thoughts and behaviours, whereas simply preaching to them about what they should or should not do accomplishes very little. And so I am not going to preach, but I will share with you my own stance on meat: it is precious and expensive and I believe it ought to be that way. The grocery store aisle of neatly saran-wrapped cuts on styrofoam trays at discount prices is frightening and I avoid it. I bought 1/6 of a local organic cow this summer, wrapped in butcher's paper. Three of us went in on 1/2 a cow and we had to get together to divide it up and we each paid over $300 for our share. If you aren't going to hunt it or raise it and slaughter it yourself, you should have to pay dearly for it. But now I'm starting to sound preachy, so I'll stop.
And yet in terms of the whole messy stolen rabbit business, he got "the sense that people on all sides of the fight continued to do whatever it is they do. People who didn’t eat meat continued to not eat it. People who hate killing spiders continued to not kill spiders. People with bacon fetishes continued to wax poetic over pork belly. Elk hunters continued to hunt elk. Fishermen continued to fish. Fish continued to eat bugs. Factory farms continued to cram thousands of cattle into confined spaces."
What I take from this is that directly engaging people in the messy business of where their food comes from actually has an impact on their thoughts and behaviours, whereas simply preaching to them about what they should or should not do accomplishes very little. And so I am not going to preach, but I will share with you my own stance on meat: it is precious and expensive and I believe it ought to be that way. The grocery store aisle of neatly saran-wrapped cuts on styrofoam trays at discount prices is frightening and I avoid it. I bought 1/6 of a local organic cow this summer, wrapped in butcher's paper. Three of us went in on 1/2 a cow and we had to get together to divide it up and we each paid over $300 for our share. If you aren't going to hunt it or raise it and slaughter it yourself, you should have to pay dearly for it. But now I'm starting to sound preachy, so I'll stop.