Redneck Sustainability: Eating Your Pets

Posted by Dave on April 1, 2009

Before you gag from the title of this blog, let me explain that my pets growing up included a pig, a few dozen rabbits, some ducks, a few hamsters, an occasional cat, a dog, a calf and a guinea pig.  I will let your imagination tell you which ones I ate and witch ones I didn’t.  After those gory images cease running through your mind, let’s take a minute to learn a valuable lesson in sustainability from the redneck play book of life.

Natives to North America, First Peoples if you will, knew that we should have a healthy connection with the food we eat.  Sometimes they would even ask the noble souls that they killed for permission.  Now it might not be quite the same to whack a domesticated pet in the head as it stares up at you with trusting eyes, but none the less, it is right for us to have an intimate connection with our food.  If anything in the circle of life is out of whack it is that we have domesticated animals and manipulated their breeding, not that we eat them.

Rednecks also have a healthy connection with their food.  Like myself as a child, rednecks often share the ins and outs of daily life with animals that will later go in and then out while playing a role to sustain that daily life. (Now that’s true sustainability!)  You must know, I could never be a vegetarian.  To be so would ignore the noble sacrifice that too many dear friends have made with their lives in order to feed mine.  Who am I to rob animals of a worthy and valuable role they are called to play?  But, I could never be a brute surviving on the suffering of others either.  Meat should be savored not just for its flavor and taste but also for its value and expense.  Enjoying it is not a sin, but wasting it or casually gorging on it is.  This is something that every good redneck knows.  Cooking out over a Smokey Joe is a religious experience.

As a child I was able to gain both emotional closeness and kinship as well as nourishment from animals.  They taught me about life and death and the value of each.  Much can come out of life, but much can come out of death as well.  Pardon my hick-tongue, but redskins and rednecks both have this lesson to teach.