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Originally Posted by Undertoad
It's a slippery slope! One minute you're killing voles in a field, the next minute you're eating your wife and family and there's not a DAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!
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ROFL Undertoad -- this sounds a lot like something my Glenn Beck-watching husband would say.
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I'm sorry but I can't agree with much of that. It sounds like you're ready to eat your pets and family when they're gone. I'm not sure I can liken accidental killings to deliberate slaughter either, we certainly don't do that in the human world.
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Nope, I personally would draw the line at anything that died on its own. But that's not to say it's morally wrong to eat deceased pets, just 'cause we wouldn't do it. If you grew up on a farm, you might become fond of your cows, pigs, chickens, goats. You might go out and pet them each morning, talk to them while you filled their feed troughs. But then when the time came, yes, you'd slaughter them and eat them. On a farm there can be a fine line between pets and livestock. You don't love them quite the same as you do a dog or cat, which makes it too emotionally heart-rending to dispatch them. (Of course sometimes it happens . . . and that "meat animal" ends up living a long happy life.) *I* could not do it. I mentioned the chickens in my previous post - they're about 4 years old and don't lay anymore, but I'm not going to eat them because I'm too "chicken" (ha ha) to kill one and dress it. I'm not a farm girl, but I know people who are, and I understand it. I don't love the chickens or anything - we never named them (couldn't tell them apart anyway) so if I gave them away to someone who was going to eat them, I wouldn't really care.
As far as the accidental killings - well, say you *know* that there are hundreds of mice, voles, etc. that live in your field, but you have to harvest the crops anyway. Is that really accidental?
There's only so much you can do. My husband's uncle once ran over a baby deer in his field while haying. Cut its leg off. Very sad. Of course being the kindhearted man he was, he took the deer, dressed its wound, put it in his shed and nursed it. That deer lived for two years in his shed as a pet. Was it happy, though? Probably not, really. Would have been far more humane to put down the deer and have baby deer for dinner.
I guess that's a digression -- but speaking of deer, we have umptyzillion of them around here of course. Too many. I dislike the idea of deer hunting, would never do it myself, but it absolutely *has* to be done because they are always overpopulated and will suffer if they are not thinned out. Would that happen if people didn't live in their spaces? Probably not -- but only because there would be plenty of natural predators for them instead, so therefore we have to become the predators.