My problem is less with eating the meat of a species that has companion animals and more with eating an animal that might have been a companion animal.
I find the idea of cutting short the lifespan of a companion animal distasteful and disrespectful to whoever the companion animal was attached to, and ... it's the expected thing in the culture in which I was raised that when taking a companion animal, one's signing up to care for that animal the best one can during that animal's natural lifespan.
We had chickens, ducks, and geese while I was growing up. We ate some of the chickens and some of the geese. With one exception, none of the birds had been pets; the exception was Dad's rooster who had a leg problem. He needed to be put down for his own quality of life, and it was deemed wasteful to not eat a perfectly good chicken. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and after that, there was no more of that for birds who had been pets. (There were no few who started out being adored but were unsuited by temperament to being pets, like the vicious rooster Nemka; he was *delicious*.)
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syntheid
(this one talks about hard stuff; the sensitive may want to scroll down.)
Date: 2010-12-04 06:48 (UTC)I find the idea of cutting short the lifespan of a companion animal distasteful and disrespectful to whoever the companion animal was attached to, and ... it's the expected thing in the culture in which I was raised that when taking a companion animal, one's signing up to care for that animal the best one can during that animal's natural lifespan.
We had chickens, ducks, and geese while I was growing up. We ate some of the chickens and some of the geese. With one exception, none of the birds had been pets; the exception was Dad's rooster who had a leg problem. He needed to be put down for his own quality of life, and it was deemed wasteful to not eat a perfectly good chicken. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and after that, there was no more of that for birds who had been pets. (There were no few who started out being adored but were unsuited by temperament to being pets, like the vicious rooster Nemka; he was *delicious*.)