Comments on Crunchy Chicken: Down the rabbit hole

Hi Crunchy Chicken, I have heard of you from Casub...

2008-07-25T22:17:00.000-07:00

Hi Crunchy Chicken, I have heard of you from Casubon's Book before this, but, LOL, I swear I just sat down with two scrumptious rabbit quesidilla's from meat that I raised in my back yard (left overs from two nites ago as well, waste not want not). I almost choked when I stumbled upon this post and some of the comments. To kill a rabbit is very easy, at least the physical part of it, the pysch part takes me a couple cups of coffee. Just a stick to the back of the noggin. I live right next door to an apartment complex, so I get up early and try to do the deed when the smokers are not out on the balcony committing slow suicide. Like Dad always says, "If you don't want to know the answer to a question, don't ask the question." So I never asked the city fathers for their blessing, I just eat rabbit, oh and chickens as well. As for the shelter, baby, if my kids are hungry and there is mostly free meat, my children will eat. nough said. steven

When did this disconnect between live animal and m...

2008-06-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

When did this disconnect between live animal and meat begin? In the suburbs we go to the grocery store and buy boneless skinless meat packaged in plastic and styrofoam and hardly have to think about where it came from. I think it is a much more honest way to eat meat...to know the animal it came from and know it died for your nourishment and to eat it with thanks and prudence.

Oh...and www.rawfamily.com handles any food concer...

2008-06-15T23:06:00.000-07:00

Oh...and www.rawfamily.com handles any food concern gaps.

If one reads The China Study, the whole issue is s...

2008-06-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

If one reads The China Study, the whole issue is solved...

http://thechinastudy.com/PDFs/ChinaStudy_Excerpt.pdf

I hope this is a joke...One does not adopt a pet f...

2008-06-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

I hope this is a joke...One does not adopt a pet from a rescue league then eat it. I am in disbelief that you should entertain this thought. Anyway, the meat of a domestic rabbit as these are are not edible as wild ones.

Didn't have time to read all the comments, sorry i...

2008-06-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

Didn't have time to read all the comments, sorry if someone else has already suggested this.

Setting to one side the whole vegan vs. non-vegan thing for one moment, and assuming that you have decided to eat at least some meat:

There must be people who get into raising rabbits for meat, but then for one reason or another decide to discontinue. I am guessing that once in a great while some of their rabbits end up in animal shelters. Indeed, this might possibly be the reason for some of the bunnies you noticed at your local shelter.

Might I suggest approaching the local shelter, being honest and upfront about your intent, and telling them that you would be interested in having anyone's unwanted rabbits that were being raised for meat. You might even suggest that if they are contacted by such people, they refer them to you and you'll accept their rabbits. Now you are performing the shelter a service: you are reducing the influx of animals that were not really raised as pets in the first place, might thus not be all that suitable as pets, and thus will just take up space and food and ultimately will have to be destroyed.

I guess that people who believe that any killing of any animal at any time for any reason will still take great exception to this suggestion. So be it. It does seem to me, though, that my suggestion would be quite a bit more ethical than the rather deceptive plan that you described.

WNC Observer

In my area (Midwest) the few times a bunny has bee...

2008-06-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

In my area (Midwest) the few times a bunny has been up for adoption, the adoption fee is $75 to $90. Not exactly "free" meat.

Sharon, you got me musing about the possibilities ...

2008-06-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

Sharon, you got me musing about the possibilities of a local vegan diet here. We eat about 75% local, mostly through our CSA. Occasionally I get a few additional items at the Farmer’s Market and I buy local coffee through the Food Bank. Primary non-local foods currently are rice, sugar, and prepared soymilk. My sweetie loves rice but could give it up if forced to. I could get local honey, at a steep price, but I prefer sugar in my coffee. My CSA farmer doesn’t grow soybeans. If he did, I’d make my own soymilk.

I’m lucky to have a year-round CSA that grows a well-balanced variety of the nutrients needed for life: starchy vegetables, grains, dried beans, nuts, fresh vegetables and fruits. With tweaking, we could live solely on the CSA share, although we’d probably need to get two instead of one. The grains, beans, and nuts do not come year-round but other parts of the share could be traded for extra of those items when they come. Or, as I did last year and this year, we could purchase extra directly from the farmer.

Now the problem with getting two shares just to be sure to get enough of the complex carbohydrates, as opposed to green and yellow vegetables, and fruits, is we’d still end up with more fresh food than we could consume. Sure, it could be preserved, but since the CSA is year-round, we’d still have excess preserved food. But, maybe that would be a good thing since the desert is going to get hotter and drier in this century!

Oh, and the gentleman who founded our CSA? He did live on only his CSA share for six months back when it first started. He lost a lot of weight, but at that time the farmer wasn’t producing much in the way of starchy vegetables (potatoes and sweet potatoes), grains, or dried beans. So yeah, a vegan can do it.

Could I do this in a region without year-round gardening possibilities? With sufficient planting of the starches and proper storage, yep. In any case, there’d be no reason to turn to meat if we were hungry as it’s damn near impossible to devise a diet short on protein if one is eating enough calories. Dried beans would be easier to grow and store than meat.

Melinda, I talk specifically about what we do. Th...

2008-06-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

Melinda, I talk specifically about what we do. The vegans/vegetarian advocates who have posted here have not - they have simply advocated a generic veg/vegan diet. So yes, I'm comparing grass fed, sustainably raised meat eating to standard veganism/vegetarianism, and I don't think it holds up. If someone posts "but I eat a vegan diet produced entirely from my yard and local organic producers" I'll answer that argument - and generally, my answer would be that that's a better choice - for some people, in some climates. Specifics matter. But just "have you considered veganism" isn't an answer, unless you tell me what kind of vegan we're talking about.

The truth is that these discussions need a lot more nuance than they get. What kind of shelter are we talking about? Kill or no kill? Because if the bunnies are going to be incinerated, going home with Crunch is a way better option. And in all our conversations about how these bunnies deserve better, there's no mention of the fact that the one way you can actually honor an animal you are going to kill is by not wasting it - making its life serve something. So if the choice is "death in a big pile of burned animals" (or euthanized, and sent to be made into pet food - yes, they do do that with the cats, and bunnies in shelter - it goes into conventional pet food along with the downer cows) or "humane slaughter to feed Crunchy's family" I'm all over that. On the other hand, lying to a no-kill shelter is, I think wrong - although breeding them for meat would be a grey area.

The same is true of the meat/no meat question. Eating meat raised on land that otherwise can't grow human food, and balancing that with a more sustainable diet is, IMHO, better than conventional veganism or vegetarianism. A vegan sustainable diet would be roughly comparable, but in some places a little inferior, because you probably could produce more human food in total by using animals. That's not true everywhere - but it is true in many places.

And there are side benefits - permanently grazed pastures that are heavily manured ultimately can sequester as much carbon as forests. They are much friendlier to wildlife, allowing human food and animal food to exist together in ways that they can't otherwise, and they make the best use of the space we've got, which is, to me, the ultimate argument in favor of a *light* (about 2oz a day) use of animal products in our diets - because we can't afford to use one single more acre than we have to to feed the world.

That said, I've no objection if large chunks of the population want to be vegan or vegetarian - I think that's a great choice - I just dislike seeing it represented as the best and only choice.

Sharon

Channyn,

Re: paper plates versus china plat...

2008-06-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

Channyn,

Re: paper plates versus china plates. Go with the china plates, which can be purchased at a thrift store if you don't have any. The environmental cost of producing and transporting the paper plates plus the plastic they are generally wrapped in all have to be considered in the equation. We have a big party every summer and use paper plates for convenience and we also compost them but it's not environmentaly the best way to go.

Hey Crunchy, why not check w/ some of the CSA farm...

2008-06-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

Hey Crunchy, why not check w/ some of the CSA farms in your area? Maybe some raise rabbits or chickens, in addition to all that wonderful produce. Or at least maybe one of them can point you in the direction of a small farmer you could buy from directly, rather than setting up your own chicken coops & rabbit hutches in your back yard....

Sally

This blog post adds an extra level of desperation (or, potential desperation, I guess) to the mix: in India, concerns about avian flu have lead many to replace chicken with rabbit.

i knew a peruvian family whose daughter would volu...

2008-06-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

i knew a peruvian family whose daughter would volunteer to take home the class guinea pigs at the end of the year... to be stuffed with herbs and barbequed.
there's a lot of good meat on a rabbit, and they breed like, well, rabbits. i don't have a problem with it, but the breeding pair idea is probably much more economical. think just of the fuel spent going back and forth to the shelter!
-magda

Hi,
My name is Channyn and I've been reading yo...

2008-06-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

Hi,
My name is Channyn and I've been reading your blog for awhile now and I've had some general questions that I thought you might know the answer to, but haven't figured out how to include them anywhere. So here goes...
1. I haven't found it yet, but, have you ever talked about the impact of the meat industry and the benefits of a vegetarian diet on the environment?
There is some info about it here.
2. I have a big family, and I'm wondering if you know if it is better for us to eat off paper plates that I can compost, or to use regular plates and wash them everyday. (this has been praying on my mind).
3. I was glad, and slightly dismayed, to read your post about regular paraffin candles. So, now that I know how bad they are, what do I with the ones that I have now? Is it better to burn them or, if not, how should I dispose of them?

That's all for now, but have you considered a question and answer spot for your site?

Melinda - I was trying to compare backyard vegetat...

2008-06-12T10:24:00.000-07:00

Melinda - I was trying to compare backyard vegetation (with throwing in a couple other critters) to strictly backyard vegetation. Which is why I wasn't referring to beef, but bunnies.

The note on the petrochemicals was in response to the comments about how innocuous a vegan/vegetarian diet is. I sincerely doubt that most vegans eat strictly from their yards.

And, that was my point... you really can't. Well, unless you are the Dervaes, and they have chickens and goats for eggs and milk. I know if I had to only eat from what I grow, we would starve. Hence the concept of supplementation with animals.

Really this was mostly a mental exercise about people's ideas of what's acceptable or not. What they were willing to do now and if it was different based on economic or food hardship.

Personally, the most I would be willing to go for at this point is raising chickens for eggs. We eat chicken or fish once a week at most. So, 20 out of 21 meals are vegetarian.

For the record, I have no intention of adopting rabbits from a shelter for bunny jerky. The thought crossed my mind that one could do this and, hence, the question: what's to stop them?

Jennsconspiracy - How much land do you need to grow quinoa? I wouldn't bother with corn as it takes up too much space for the little amount of food you get from it. How do grain crops compare if one is living on a really small urban/suburban yard?

I'm with Melinda on this one - there are two prima...

2008-06-12T10:19:00.000-07:00

I'm with Melinda on this one - there are two primary issues that are salient to Crunchy's original post:

1. Is it ethical to adopt pet bunnies and eat them. The overall sense from the responses (and my own feeling) is definitely NO. You can buy a breeding group cheap at a feed & supply store, even investigating the kinds of bunnies that make better food vs. pets is in order before considering this kind of decision.

2. Is it better to feed your family a primarily vegetable diet from your backyard or should you add meat? I think veg is fine - it requires less and gives more. Plant some quinoa - it comes in some really great colors and doesn't bleed or scream when you kill it (and yes, bunnies do make a lot of noise and they don't like to be killed).

Mmm.... quinoa!

Crunchy, I wasn't going to comment, but then I rea...

2008-06-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

Crunchy, I wasn't going to comment, but then I read this:

"As for the vegan/vegetarian argument, the amount of petrochemicals (as fertilizer, farm equipment) needed to feed everyone a vegetarian diet has to be huge since the majority of people don't eat all organic vegetation. If the costs of petroleum keeps rising, the costs of eating a vegetarian diet will also rise. Plus there is the shipping and distribution cost. Sharon also makes an excellent point on how 'harmless' monocultured farming is."

Cows, sheep, pigs, bunnies, chickens... they usually eat monocultural crops that usually travel long distances and are very rarely organic. It takes much, much less farmland to feed vegetarians - I could feed myself in my backyard. Organically and sustainably.

And then I read this:

"The truth is that it is easy to be principled when you've got all the food in the world, easy to get your vegan food from monocultured grain fields that support no wildlife (of course it doesn't die, it just magically goes away
:-P), won't support pollinating insects, eating tofu made from soybeans harvested with a combine and drenched in the blood of ground-nesting birds, rabbits, etc... that get ground up in the process."

Come on now. You guys are comparing a conventional vegan/vegetarian diet with a homegrown meat diet. These are apples and oranges. Please compare apples with apples.

A backyard vegetarian diet vs. a backyard bunny diet. That's what you should be comparing. It's way too easy for both sides of this argument to say the other is using more petrochemicals through diesel and non-organic fertilizers and pesticides.

You two reach a lot of people with your blogs. Sharon, you eat 19 out of 21 meals without meat. You can say whatever you want, of course, but I personally think you have a responsibility to get your facts straight and disseminate good information.

Unless you're just saying all this to aggravate people and stir up controversy. In which case I think you can do a better job of agitating people toward action rather than polarity.

Haven't read your entire blog, just happened upon ...

2008-06-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

Haven't read your entire blog, just happened upon it. But have you ever tasted wild game? Argh! Frankly, it tastes "gamey"...horrid. Tasted squirrel once and deer too; made me gag. And I don't care HOW it's prepared, I'll take some pinto beans or soybeans over that any day for protein.

Deception in adopting a pet for food might bring you some nasty karma -- and not all in the next life either.

I think, dollar for lbs the far most ecomomical an...

2008-06-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

I think, dollar for lbs the far most ecomomical and easy to keep source of meat is under your feet. Earthworms. Of course nobody is going to to that, but if your going to keep a "worst case scenario" in the back of your mind, that would be one option. For the time being, I'd look for one or two hens. Certain breeds are more productive layers, and some are more pleasent to be around. If you have bare ground for most of the season, they will find most of the food they require when they scratch. Carefull managment of a small flock can be profitable without to much trouble. Your not going to get rich, but they certainly can pay for themselves. Somewhere on our site we've got a post about processing some roosters last season. I didn't go so far as to scald them, just peeled the skin of like a shirt. A feathery shirt. Don't get a rooster, you don't need one.

Get meat rabbits, just don't do it at the Humane S...

2008-06-12T07:50:00.000-07:00

Get meat rabbits, just don't do it at the Humane Society. They are very inexpensive to raise, produce a very lean meat, and your children will be better off for it. We raised rabbits when I was a kid. It was always understood that they were not pets, they were food. I still have pets but I also have a healthy appreciation for where my meat comes from...and it's not some sterile room at the grocery store!

i think it's an awful idea. i've had pet rabbits m...

2008-06-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

i think it's an awful idea. i've had pet rabbits my whole life, and the idea of doing that sounds terrible to me. you're taking away a bunny, who could potentially grow up in a home, and you're killing it. for what? a single meal? i think that rabbit is worth a lot more than that meal. it also sounds like you're growing a lot of food in your backyard and aren't going hungry yet. it doesn't sound justified to me.
furthermore, how do you explain that to your kids? oh hey kids, we lied to this great non-profit organisation who cares about the welfare of animals, and now we're going to kill this rabbit ourselves (fun!) and then eat it. i don't think it would go over well.

DC, I have never laughed harder at anything I saw ...

2008-06-12T05:36:00.000-07:00

DC, I have never laughed harder at anything I saw on the internet than your screenplay.

I would note, btw, that a major study by Cornell University last year, exploring the question of whether New York State could feed itself found that it could feed a larger population if small amounts of animal protein were included in everyone's diet. That's because animals make use of land and plants that human beings can eat - and they act as speed composters.

I completely agree that none of us (including our pets, perhaps especially our pets) should be eating meats raised on large quantities of human foods - ie, grains. That's one of the reasons rabbits are so ideal - they can eat mostly green products, yard wastes, garden scraps and basically help someone like crunchy produce *more* total food on a small urban lot than she could otherwise.

My meals are vegetarian 19 out of 21, but we also do raise our own meat animals and my kids know it. They like the turkeys and extra roosters - and they understand that they will be eaten. We live where land is hilly and steep, and most of it simply can't be tilled - the only way to make use of it for human food is to graze animals on it, and eat them or their milk or eggs. Since I don't want to see more land put into monoculture grain production to feed me, I'd much rather use the land we have, mow it without diesel fumes - and take advantage of the fact that our pastures also support wildlife in ways that other land can't.

Sharon

ohh look at the fuss this raises. my sister has ra...

2008-06-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

ohh look at the fuss this raises. my sister has rabbits for food, we grew up on rabbits now i live in france where we eat rabbits all the time. its completely natural and a good animal to raise for meat. when my sis write about her rabbits for meat she gets a bizillion hate letters. people love their furry pets.

i did a "meet your meat" month and posted about meeting our rabbit dinner
http://garlic-breath.blogspot.com/2008/03/meet-your-meat-rabbit.html
complete with photo of my and sis when we were little with our pet bunny that was destined for the table.

have you checked the encyclopedia of country living by carla emery? a seattle published book, she is in the pnw and might list a place to get rabbits for husbandry or you can email me and i'll ask my sister to bring some up for you when we are there in july

Bunnies newest prayer

Nope. First, I don't know what they have eaten. ...

2008-06-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

Nope. First, I don't know what they have eaten. Second, I don't think they are a good meat-to-food ratio. Chickens at least give you eggs (and you can get them cheaply or free on craigslist).

I am not opposed to meat or fish that people are raising themselves, but I think there are MANY better alaternatives to meat.