Raising your own meat is absolutely wonderful, if you have the space. Animals are good for maintaining your property (sheep, goats), for getting the pests out of your garden (ducks, chickens), and so forth-- The more complete your food web is at home, the less effort you'll have to spend maintaining it.
The meat tastes really really good, and is much cheaper than buying it at the store-- For example, my ducks cost less than $4 each to raise, and the whole herd takes about 15 minutes of effort per day. I never thought of duck as 'poor person food' when I was a kid...
Butchering is a huge pain in the ass, but it's fundamentally similar to taking apart computers/machines etc. and doing butchery is a good way to practice your surgical technique, if you have to do that kind of stuff for work or whatever. The downside is that you might start getting hungry whenever you have to cut up rats.
I used to be into squirrels and rabbits-- Truly 'poor person food--' but have gotten increasingly paranoid about disease, as transmissible prion diseases have been 'tentatively reported' in squirrels [0] and tularemia is endemic in rabbits where I live [1].
We raise ducks as well and the effort involved is definitely not huge if you have the space (although you a spending a lot less than us per duck). Just keeping them for eggs is very simple and has a lot of upside... best quality eggs available, nice yard art, fun for kids, life/death lessons for kids, etc. I have been thinking a lot about how much meat my family eats recently and nothing helped put that into sharper focus than starting to butcher some of our own animals. Whereas keeping poultry in order to gather a family's worth of eggs is pretty simple, the idea of producing all our own meat is really a tall order. We eat at least one full chicken a week, and those are pretty big. It would take at least two ducks to supplement that one fat chicken and even then we are eating a lot of other meat. We ended up buying half a cow from a friend and that goes a lot further.
On butchering side of things, raising around 100 birds a year for slaughter would be crazy for us. Going from a full vegan lifestyle a few years back to slaughtering and butchering some of our own food has been an interesting change. I would recommend it if you have second guessed any of the weirdness with how food makes it to your plate. It definitely gives you something to think about. Killing really cute ducks that we raised by hand was definitely tough in the beginning. I had never hunted or killed any animal on purpose before. It's always a bummer but it does get a little easier in time. We've got a bunch of our eggs in our incubator now, hoping for more ducks in 24 days!
Plucking... not considered in the '15 minutes of effort per day.' But scalding at the right temperature and killing before the pinfeathers come in make it easier... and really, pinfeathers don't make a carcass unedible
The premise that the lack of slaughtering/butchering manifests itself elsewhere does not seem to be supported by the evidence. In fact, what we often see is the exact opposite. The introduction of slaughterhouses correlate with increases in violent crimes.
"The findings indicate that slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries."
> The findings indicate that slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries."
Industrial slaughter is vastly different to slaughtering your own.
And the correlation is easily explained - it's well-paid, difficult and unpleasant work, and it attracts men who tend to drink hard. Alcohol and crime correlate very well.
This article makes some dubious claims like lack of butchering our own meat to a rise in slasher films. It reads like nonsense speaking from some unknown authority.
When I was a kid one of my friend's hunted. I remember going over to his house and helping butcher - skin would be the word I'd use - squirrel and rabbit. It seemed more like and anatomy lesson then anything else.
Squirrel is difficult to skin. I'm impressed that she did it with hands and knife alone. Typically we would nail the front feet to a solid post or similarly immobile piece of wood, in order to use both hands on the hide.
Squirrel is nasty. I hunted a lot as a kid, and we'd get squirrel if we couldn't get something tasty like pheasant that day. They're hard to skin, and they're full of tiny bones. You could stew them in a pressure cooker to break down the meat as much as possible, but there were still those damned bones.
Rabbit was much better, but you had to be careful cleaning it (rabbit bladders can EXPLODE), and Dad hated rabbits... chasing rabbits is the worst habit a bird dog can develop.
I've long wanted to learn butchery. I wouldn't want to do it for a living, but it seems a good way to become familiar with how we're all put together (by taking an animal apart.)
I would recommend you start by butchering to pieces a whole chicken or rabbit. They're the closest you can easily get to an unbutchered animal, as they're available at most butcheries, supermarkets, etc. They would already be cleaned of feathers or pelt and emptied of viscera, so it would be a simple exercise of cutting into pieces, separating meat from bones, and so on - literal hacking. If someone who knows how to do it cannot show you, there are Youtube guides.
Speaking from personal experience: start with a chicken, but the first couple of times, do it completely without instruction/youtube/etc. Then look up proper technique, and 1) you are less likely to misinterpret advice, 2) you are more likely to disregard bad advice.
Agreed, and specifically I remember finding an Alton Brown Good Eats segment where he compares the chicken anatomy to a little two legged dinosaur model that most everyone saw in childhood while butchering. Easy way to visualize and "sticks" with you.
You can do part of this exercise while eating a roast chicken.
For example, while you are eating a wing, count how many bones each part have and compare it with a (picture of a) human skeleton. Repeat this with a chicken leg and thigh. (Remember to count that thin bone as another bone.)
better yet, try and seperate the parts naturally and with minimal cutting / effort. Roast chickens can be picked apart pretty easily if you go at it right; you can also just smash through the bones with a knife. Try the former.
I've started butchering most of my own meat and I've found it very rewarding. I've gotten to the point that I look forward to days where we butcher because it's become a social gathering with a great group of people. So far I've worked on pig, goat, lamb, deer (which I shot), and I look forward to helping with a cow.
Almost all of the meat I cook is raised by someone I know and butchered by myself and/or folks I know. I've never been as satisfied with a piece of meat as I've been since I started participating in the processing. I highly recommend trying it if you know someone who can show you the ropes.
I went on a pork butchery course on Friday and it helped me fully connect the animal in the field to the meat on my plate. I'd seen it on TV before, but actually cutting up a pig and getting hands on really opened my eyes.
I find it really strange that people think the way to connect with an individual is to cut up their dead body. I understand the sentiment, but it seems like a far cry from any sort of real connection with "the animal".
I think one of us is misunderstanding what he said.
The way I read it, he was not saying "butchering made a connection between me and the animal I was butchering," but rather that "butchering helped me make a connection between the steak and the animal it came from."
That is to say, I understand him as saying that he now recognizes that a given cut of meat comes from a given place on an animal, rather than being just a piece of meat.
As I mentioned, I'd seen the full process (farm to plate) before on TV in documentaries and I'm fully aware that the pig in the field will eventually end up on my plate, but actually having the dead pig in front of me and cutting it up helped me fully connect the two by adding the hands on aspect of actually being involved.
This isn't about having a connection with a particular animal, it's having a connection with the process.
On one hand, I don't think this is some meat industry propaganda and there probably is a link between the disconnect of meat consumers and the act of butchering to the increase of meat consumption, but I don't agree with the core idea here:
"The way I see it, it's not that there's a desire for the blood and gore, but rather we’re hardwired to deal with the blood and gore, and when that innate machinery goes unused – as it does in a postdomestic society – humans are left with a gap, with something missing."
The fact that we're hardwired to crave something does not automatically imply we should do it. This is part of what being human is about. If men crave sex, it doesn't follow that they should rape women lest they are left with a gap or something missing. I used to love eating meat more than most people I know, but stopped eating it years ago since it didn't make any sense to me that for my pleasure a sentient animal should suffer and die. I have no trouble dealing with the gap...
Note that I'm not judgemental about my friends or any other people that eat meat. Life is not black and white - everyone can make their choices and I know vegetarians and vegans who can take morality lessons from meat eaters - but at least we should call a spade a spade. Unless it's crucial for your own survival, I believe eating meat brings more suffering than joy to the world.
We are certainly not hardwired to crave meat (at least not more than other food). People live in all sorts of situations on the planet. Some eat meat, some don't. The success of humans is probably partly due to being able to dwell on all sorts of diets.
Yeah, except for that whole animal overpopulation thing that happened because we wiped out natural predators... because of the threat they pose to us. I kill things. I eat them. I don't care if you don't like it. The environment is better off for it.
This article and the comment both referred to domesticated slaughtered animals, so your reply isn't directly applicable. But can we assume you exclusively eat wild animals? Otherwise it's completely irrelevant.
The idea of a humane killing is nonsensical to me, really.
Imagine a thought experiment in which you could either die painlessly, or live but be required to endure days or weeks of incredibly painful torture (for the purposes of the experiment let's say that it doesn't leave lasting physical/emotional damage).
I'd pick the torture. I assume most other people would too.
I think that should illustrate fairly well that the distinction between life and death is so much greater than that between joy and suffering.
I really doubt you or most other people can imagine what weeks of torture with death inevitably looming actually feels like. I think almost anyone would choose dying painlessly.
I'd probably pick the torture, too, but I think proponents of humane killing are comparing it with inhumane killing, so it's more like, would you rather choose to die painlessly, or endure weeks of incredibly painful torture before being killed. I'd probably choose the former in that case.
The (somewhat simplified) options available are:
1. Raise and slaughter animals in the most convenient and/or economically efficient way without regards for their suffering. (standard meat way)
2. Raise and slaughter animals in the most humane and painless way without regard for economic cost. (omnivore's dilemma way)
3. Do not raise any animals. Eat a 100% plan based diet. (vegan way).
There is no scenario where animals can trade enduring pain for anything. We are talking about domestic animals. They are born because we facilitated it, with the expectation of a gain from such activity.
I can see why people would want to be vegan, and while I do not share those opinions I respect them. But, if everybody thought like that, most domestic animal species would go extinct in a few decades. Most people would stop raising them, and if a few misguided folks would release flocks in the wild, those are in general not prepared to occupy an ecologic niche. They will either die off or wreck the environment of the region they were released at.
So, between options 1 and 2. The animals are going to die anyways, because if we did not expected to eat them, nobody would have bothered raising them. The only question left is how much suffering are they to endure in the process of dying. Proponents of #1 say this does not matter as long as the plate is full. Proponents of #2 say it is morally right to eat less meat in order to ensure the animals get killed in a more humane way.
How does your previous comment fits in that debate?
My father and uncles used to bring their deer every year to a professional butcher that produced beautiful cuts - butterflied rib, nice roasts, perfect steaks... But then.... I still remember the year they decided they could do it themselves and we had misshapen chunks of meat - Basically fist sized and smaller pieces of meat from wherever on the deer - for at least a few years until they got the hang of it. But even then it was never as good as the real butcher.
The meat tastes really really good, and is much cheaper than buying it at the store-- For example, my ducks cost less than $4 each to raise, and the whole herd takes about 15 minutes of effort per day. I never thought of duck as 'poor person food' when I was a kid...
Butchering is a huge pain in the ass, but it's fundamentally similar to taking apart computers/machines etc. and doing butchery is a good way to practice your surgical technique, if you have to do that kind of stuff for work or whatever. The downside is that you might start getting hungry whenever you have to cut up rats.
I used to be into squirrels and rabbits-- Truly 'poor person food--' but have gotten increasingly paranoid about disease, as transmissible prion diseases have been 'tentatively reported' in squirrels [0] and tularemia is endemic in rabbits where I live [1].
[0] http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tularemia#Epidemiology