Confessions of a Horseshoer

Rabbits

188 Rabbits Along with chickens, throughout this entire process, there were rabbits. A farm needs rabbits.This was all back in the protest days when people were giving up city jobs, putting red farmer’s handkerchiefs on their dogs, and running off to the country to live off the land. I couldn’t just run off, so I created my own little farm, complete with meat animals. This was where the rabbits came in. My grandma in Tacoma always served rabbit for our big Sunday dinners, so I decided to carry on that fine tradition for my own family. The kids were ecstatic about the new rabbits, less so after hearing we were going to eat them, but I patiently explained the facts of middle-class America. Almost everybody eats meat and nobody takes responsibility for killing these creatures that we eat. We just buy a nice sanitized package of chicken or hamburger, I explained, and insensitively enjoy the meal, letting others take the rap for the butchering. That’s not how it’s going to be in this family , I promised. We were going to take responsibility. If we were going to eat meat, by God, we would be men (and girl) enough to kill it ourselves! • Rabbits • 189 Of course the children were overjoyed. Now Dad is not only going to make them eat some cute furry little animal, he’s going to make them kill it first. My four-year-old son momentarily found this interesting. “Oh, boy!” he said, but threatened by his six-year-old sister, chose her side rather than mine. They stood firmly together against my new program of responsible meat eating. The red-headed daughter gave me her stern look and said, “Daddy, that is mean!” Once again stunned by the disloyalty of children, I altered course slightly. As soon as I chose the first sacrificial dinner, I knew I couldn’t kill it in front of the children. I wasn’t even sure I could kill it at all. I didn’t even know how. Should I use a gun? A lethal injection? The book (always the book) said you hit it on the head with some kind of a club. I had a club. Then you cut off its head, feet, and tail, slice it open, pull out all the guts, being careful not to break the bladder, always full, or the green bile gland. A miscalculation in any of these acts could turn the entire nasty process into a real mess. I must have read those instructions 20 times. Eventually, days or weeks later, I was ready. I bashed somebody’s furry brains in, did all the messy stuff, and cut the corpse into nice little bite-sized pieces.It looked a lot like chicken. I started up the barbecue and threw those pieces on the grill. Cooked, they almost looked edible. I put the body parts on a plate and brought it to the dinner table where my innocent, albeit disloyal, children sat waiting for their evening meal.Here it is,I said.Your dinner.Rabbit.They looked at the plate, at me, at their wonderfully bemused mother, at each other, picked up a piece and ate it. I was dumbfounded. Totally unprepared for that kind of response. 190 I think I can state with certainty that they didn’t learn a thing from this entire experience, but they did eat the rabbit. I’m not sure what I learned. ...