Animal Killing: Yea or Nay?
My target practice post sort of started a discussion about hunting and killing, so I've been wondering:
How many of us have killed our own food? I personally have never killed anything that's not seafood: fish, crabs, lobsters, geoduck, sea urchin, conch, and any other sea creatures aren't a problem for me.
I've never had the opportunity to kill anything bigger, but I like to think I'd be able to do it because I don't think people should be allowed to eat things that they're unwilling to grow/harvest or catch/kill. Obviously we live in a society in which most of us will never have the opportunity to grow or catch our own food, but given the chance I'd happily run away and go live on a subsistence farm, at least for awhile.
How many of us have killed our own food? I personally have never killed anything that's not seafood: fish, crabs, lobsters, geoduck, sea urchin, conch, and any other sea creatures aren't a problem for me.
I've never had the opportunity to kill anything bigger, but I like to think I'd be able to do it because I don't think people should be allowed to eat things that they're unwilling to grow/harvest or catch/kill. Obviously we live in a society in which most of us will never have the opportunity to grow or catch our own food, but given the chance I'd happily run away and go live on a subsistence farm, at least for awhile.
posted by Pei at
4:11 PM
3 Comments:
My mom is a Buddhist (well sort of) and she makes me drop the clams and crabs etc. in the boiling water and then when they are not moving anymore, she comes over and stirs in the other ingredients :-)
By
Cat, At
3/22/2007 09:54:00 AM
hey pei
this is ed from sfchowhound. i dunno why gmail calls me 'edward'.
anyway, i totally agree with what you said.
modern life strives to remove the consumer from almost every activity that formerly defined our humanity. just a few generations ago, most people made their own food. not long before that, we made our own clothes, and before that we made our own shelter.
modernity brings many riches, but some things are lost too, and most of these fall in the category of lost connections to our place in the ecosystem and actually doing the things that used to form those bonds on a day to day basis.
of course we can't all go back to the farm now, but if we completely forget our connections to the world, we will have become consumers, not humans. we must remember that meat is the flesh of a formerly living animal.
native americans knew this because every time they wanted to eat meat, they had to go through a very deliberate process to go get it. not only does that mean they ate less, it also meant they understood their relationship to the animal every time they did so.
to bring this back to a topic relevant to us today, how many of us who love foie gras are willing to shove a tube down the throat of a goose and pump food into its distended belly?
not i. so i support puck's decision to cease and desist.
i think we americans, of all people, should be able to find some kind of junk food that a goose will gladly gorge on to become obese more or less willingly. hey, am i right?
By
Edward, At
3/22/2007 02:19:00 PM
by the way, i've caught and killed seafood too, but not mammals (no gun or bow of my own).
and yes, this is also why it's cool that pei can cook damn near anything herself, and makes her own clothes too.
and this applies to other non food aspects of life too. we should all, once in our lives, see and smell a farm, a slaughterhouse, an oil well, a refinery, a mine, a smelter, a water treatment plant, a sewage plant, a power plant, etc. etc.
a well rounded person doesn't just have lots of passport stamps, they know what life is made of, and try to make part of it themselves.
ok, sorry for the soapbox.
ed
By
Edward, At
3/22/2007 02:44:00 PM
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