Thursday, March 26, 2009

Why Farmers Don't Name Their Animals...

This has been the toughest lesson in introducing Olivia and Cameron to real farm life. Olivia, who is 8, has been a vegetarian and a staunch animal rights activist since she was 5. She will tolerate our carnivorous meals while offering great debates about her point of view, eternally hopeful that we may see the error of our ways sooner than later. But Olivia also falls in love with every baby farm animal she holds and want assurance that THIS lamb or THIS piglet will surely be saved and given a good home for it's natural long life, preferably in our living room.

I guess I am asking for advice here. I truly appreciate her young idealistic values and mores, and I love that I have a self-confident daughter who fights for what she believes is right, but I also want to offer a realistic view of food production and the cycle of life to my children. Perhaps I am unable to come up with the right way to handle this is because I am a bit conflicted with the issue as well...
Posted by at 9:41 AM

1 comments:

  1. I am an animal lover too and used to tend towards veggie-ism. I feel for you having to work this out with your little one.
    I like the food chain reasoning (or the cycle of life). Death is part of life and we are all here for some purpose. They live so that we shall live. But it is important to honor that and treat them with respect. Their life expectancies are not much longer than what they get on the working farm anyway (in general). There are some important things you cannot get from a veg diet no matter what the modern medical system, soybean council and Monsanto would have us believe. We need the fat soluble vitamins to be our most healthy and most of them you cannot get from a plant. And we need animal fat to process the vitamins in vegetables. Babies have to have cholesterol to build their brains...and on it goes. Lots of good healthful reasons can be found at http://westonaprice.org/.
    Good luck! Keep up the good work!
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