In reply to Chester, on the subject of dead mice.

[mapsedge]

I started this as a reply, decided it would make a good post. So here we are. This was predicated on the post I wrote for The Road Less Ordinary, Of Mice and Traps.

To Chester:

Michelle has watched (correction, helped, she says) her grandfather, an avid racoon hunter, skin and field dress a racoon on several occasions (I'm pretty sure it was a different racoon each time). She has changed a variety of diapers. She held me once while I was being violently ill from a bad reaction to a prescribed pharmaceutical. She will insert her hand into the body cavity of a dressed chicken to remove the giblet package and scrape away any innards the butcher might have missed.

But she will not touch a dead mouse, or bait a fishhook.

I told her yesterday as we were making pizza that I'd like to try rabbit. She agreed, guardedly, like she knew there was more coming. There was: I told her why.

Our neighborhood is lousy with rabbits, making them a cheap source of edible and, with the right seasonings and cooking method, I would guess delicious protein. As my predation creates less competition for food, their population would grow, providing more food for us, and so on. It's a win-win. Outside the city limits this is "normal." Inside them, it's "weird." I don't get the distinction.

We try to eat naturally and seasonally. I can field dress a broccoli blindfolded, chop an onion with nary a tear, and I am ... curious ... to try my hand at our world's fauna, to pay, as Michael Pollan says, "the full karmic debt for my meal."

I'm a kid of the suburbs. I am not a hunter or trapper, but I am keen to try.

Comments

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

That is a gorgeous picture! I'd be afraid to let our dogs have any portion of the rabbit - as indoor dogs raised on dry food, who knows what kind of messes we'd have to clean up after they ingested that.

[hurricanedeck.livejournal.com]

Oh, they get a little gassy, and we have to make sure to worm them, but it's the reward they get for flushing and then retreiving for us.

Mr. Tracker is waiting on Daryl to look at him and call him - I was able to snap that picture of him. Tracker takes all of his prizes to his papa!