| One of the things I'm grateful to my parents for is teaching me where meat comes from. I mean, I knew it was a dead animal, but to really know... We lived on a county island in our small city (now larger) in California; so we could have farm animals on our property. My parents raised ducks, chickens, rabbits, geese, pigs and one time a cow. We had "farm fresh" eggs every day; in fact, we had so many my mom would sell them from the house as a way of making some side money as a stay-at-home mom, while my dad worked for the county (road maintenance). I was witness to numerous chicken beheadings, and know exactly where and why the phrase "running around like a chicken with its head cut off" comes from. I even help to pluck the carcasses with my mom. I later watched my dad skin and gut our rabbits, which we later cooked and ate for dinner. Same with the pigs and the cow (we had a local butcher come and shoot them, they were then pre-prepped for transport to the butcher's shop, where he aged and prepped/packaged them - we had a large chest freezer to hold the meat after). I have no illusions about where our meat comes from. I have no illusions that it was once living and breathing. If there is anything that disturbs me about our current "factory farm" system of meat, it would be the occasional piece of chicken - almost always a wing piece - where the bone is broken, leaving me to wonder whether that happened pre or post-mortem. I don't want any animal to suffer before death, even if I am going to be eating it later. |
It must happen near processing time otherwise I suspect they would not be healthy enough for human consumption. There must be other ways to use the most damaged animals.