tegk68 Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 (edited) Not sure if this is controversial or not, or for that matter particularly interesting. It's Bert's birthday today and I am roasting him (or rather have roasted him) a friend of his, as below: That is one of our hens, Mrs Custard. She was nearing 3 years old (not that old really for a country pet/ish hen) and had a lovely life with us. Totally free range, fed organic, GM free food and scraps from the table. Her death was a huge surprise to her and bar a second, immediate. She has been in our deep freeze for two weeks. So I thawed her out for Bert's birthday suprise. Now, I thought that was OK but then I was just speaking to a girlfriend of mine and she say's, in not so many ways (and nicely) 'that's sick' . Is it? Edited December 10, 2007 by tegk68 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KathyM Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 No, it's not sick. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K9Fran Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 Nope, I'd say it was honouring her in a very nice way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phoebejo Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 So what would your friend prefer? For Bert to eat a commercially reared chicken that never saw the light of day in it's brief unhappy life? With morals like that I hope she's a vegetarian. I can't think of a better way for Mrs Custard to have lived. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Helly Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 She seems to have had a lovely life so why not end up being dinner for the dogs. Cant see a lot wrong with it myself Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KathyM Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 I realised I didn't post fully - wanted to say she was very beautiful and it sounds like she had a lovely life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tegk68 Posted December 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 Thank you. I think she see's Mrs Custard purely as a 'pet' and yes to a large degree she was. I am very fond of my hens. I think the idea of having all these animals running round together and thus in her eyes 'friends' and then to go and eat one is a bit wrong. I think that's the gist of it. I do agree whole heartedly with you Phoebejo. I'd much rather Bert, Husband or anyone ate a hen from this background than some of the alternatives. I did actually put that argument to her but she was still stuck on the 'pet' thing and that I'd made some sort of lifetime committment to Mrs Custard I realised I didn't post fully - wanted to say she was very beautiful and it sounds like she had a lovely life. thank you With morals like that I hope she's a vegetarian. She is indeed but then so am I! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happylittlegreensquirrel Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 well I could not do it Helen as i would have buried her because she would have been my pet , but that does not make what your doing wrong I try to feed my dogs only organic , free range animals and i doubt any of them had a life as free range as your hen or died so peacefully so is far less cruel than 99.9 % of food you or you dogs will ever eat ( or me and mine ) Personally I think its far kinder than letting Bert eat a supermarket mass produced chicken pumped full of shite to make it grown faster and live its entire life never seeing daylight in total misery standing in its own mess until it's grossly overweight body causes its legs to misshape before its rammed into a transporter to be slaughtered in conditions i personally do not find humane or as stress free as possible in an ideal world my dogs and cats would not want/need meat but they do ( have tried veggie options ) and whilst they do I have to make choices about their food they eat and I am not comfortable with all of them like I say Helen you are not wrong , at the very least you accept the link between the live animal and the dead one being used for food. a lot of people are not able to equate a KFC meal with the living being it once was,you are but that does not make you sick in fact quite the opposite and to be honest if every chicken in the world lived a life like Mrs Custard the world would be a better place not sure if any of that helped hope so Sam xxxx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tegk68 Posted December 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 not sure if any of that helped hope so Sam xxxx yes it did actually, thank you for that Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cycas Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 I think there is a technical term for that 'don't eat your friend' emotion, I can't remember it though. It's the same thing that happened to our cats a few months ago. A mouse moved into our utility room, and they got used to it and decided it wasn't edible. I can see that the emotion, whatever it's called, has usefulness - I think it's exactly the thing that we rely on when we have multi-pet households which include animals that might normally be expected to hurt one another. You don't want Bert deciding to kill his own chickens, for example. However, I don't think there's any logic to it. It's an understandable emotion, but logically if you are going to eat meat, or keep animals that eat meat, it makes no sense at all to only eat ones that you haven't been introduced to. I don't think there's anything wrong with Bert eating Mrs Custard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tegk68 Posted December 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 I think there is a technical term for that 'don't eat your friend' emotion, I can't remember it though. It's the same thing that happened to our cats a few months ago. A mouse moved into our utility room, and they got used to it and decided it wasn't edible. WOW did they really do that? leave the mouse alone that is? Amazing. Thanks Cycas. Fortunately I don't think any of my dogs are able to make the connection between an oven ready chicken and those in the garden. doG help me if they ever do! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cycas Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 I'm not sure my dogs don't know that there is meat inside live rabbits, but Kjetil the cat definitely does, as he catches his own food a lot of the time and regularly kills and eats wild rabbits. But he knows that my rabbits are not prey and interacts with them very politely. I don't think it's intelligence, I think it's this other thing that your friend is manifesting so nicely. I think there is something about groups as well - about why people are more likely to want to attack people they don't know. The 'them and us' thing. If a chicken becomes 'us' then some underlying thing says it's better to eat other people's chickens. Something like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tegk68 Posted December 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 Ahhh gotcha Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fee Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 No, I don't think it's wrong at all for all the reasons you have given. Your hen had a fantastic life and a quick painless death. If only all hens had the same Having said that I don't know if I could do it myself. I'm possibly traumatised, as a child I had a family of pet bantams (technically my grandmother's) who used to follow me around everywhere. I was left to make the connection between an occasional disappearance and chicken for Sunday dinner Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sproggie14 Posted December 10, 2007 Report Share Posted December 10, 2007 Well I wouldn't do it myself. My chickens were pets and were every bit as dear to me as the dogs. I could no more feed one of them to the dogs than I could cook one of the dogs when they died. But if you're going to feed or eat meat then I think that's definitely the way to do it so that you can be sure that the animal had as good a life as possible and as humane a death as possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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