Pets or Meat

Image Gallery Brian Orr

Illustrations by Brian Orr

I worried my family had maybe crossed over to the dark side the day my 2 1/2-year-old-daughter cradled a baby rabbit in her lap and sang to it, “Oh, sweet baby bunny! So cute! We going to eat you, baby bunny! Yum!”

Then again, this is what I had, in theory, been working toward for months.

Ella was only 20 months old when my neighbor dumped three pregnant female rabbits on our doorstep one afternoon in February. Our neighbor Tommy is a genuinely nice fellow, and he works at the local dump. People in our rural area take stuff to the dump they don’t want – it’s like the country version of Goodwill. Tommy often brings us leftovers from the dump – a wooden rocking horse for the children, discarded walkie-talkies in perfect working order and, that fateful Saturday afternoon, live rabbits.

“You want them?” Tommy asked.

The children, looking on, definitely wanted them. And I’d read something the week before about rabbits being good Great Depression-type food. They breed quickly and, in a pinch, eat weeds instead of food pellets. It’s a good animal to have in case of emergencies (economic breakdowns, collapse of the food system, nuclear war, asteroid impact, bird flu: pick your disaster).

So we took the rabbits. A few short months later, I had to face the reality of doing something about too many rabbits – like, say, 12 or 13 that needed to go to the Happy Hopping Grounds.

As an omnivore, I’d been determined for some time to avoid the common (and understandable) hypocrisy of meat-eaters everywhere – wanting to eat meat, but not wanting to think in too much detail about the living creatures that died to put meat on our table. Our food system has become so compartmentalized and emotionally sanitized, we don’t have to think about cattle – only about hamburger or filet mignon.

I’ll spare you the details of the ‘harvest,’ which weren’t pleasant. For months, we ate rabbit. We ate fried rabbit and stewed rabbit and rabbit dumplings. We ate Rabbit à la King and Kung Fu rabbit. Many times, I had to just grit my teeth, close my eyes and force myself to eat. My husband would squeamishly take a few bites and put down his fork. Ella, meanwhile, gobbled it up.

In Ella’s world, eating rabbit for dinner became as normal as eating hot dogs might be for another child. I had wanted my children to be clear that some animals – our dog Zoey, for instance – are pets. And others, well, they’re meat. We are nice to them, we try to give them a good life with plenty of food and no stress, we kill them in the most humane way possible, and then we eat them.