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The art of butchery

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Re: The art of butchery

#31

Post by vacri »

stegosaurus wrote: post #22
facepalm wrote: post #11

Weird, the second article of this kind I encounter within a day (the other was in German, though). Meat industry submarine? Because I think it's just meat eater apologism. The issues with eating meat don't change if you do the killing yourself or in an artsy way.

The idea of a humane killing is nonsensical to me, really. Imagine a thought experiment in which you could either die painlessly, or live but be required to endure days or weeks of incredibly painful torture (for the purposes of the experiment let's say that it doesn't leave lasting physical/emotional damage). I'd pick the torture. I assume most other people would too. I think that should illustrate fairly well that…

What a strange dichotomy. Who is advocating for the torture of animals?

Re: The art of butchery

#32

Post by sdrothrock »

Falling3 wrote: post #25
LukeB_UK wrote: post #14

I went on a pork butchery course on Friday and it helped me fully connect the animal in the field to the meat on my plate. I'd seen it on TV before, but actually cutting up a pig and getting hands on really opened my eyes.

I find it really strange that people think the way to connect with an individual is to cut up their dead body. I understand the sentiment, but it seems like a far cry from any sort of real connection with "the animal".

I think one of us is misunderstanding what he said.

The way I read it, he was not saying "butchering made a connection between me and the animal I was butchering," but rather that "butchering helped me make a connection between the steak and the animal it came from."

That is to say, I understand him as saying that he now recognizes that a given cut of meat comes from a given place on an animal, rather than being just a piece of meat.

Re: The art of butchery

#33

Post by sfgc »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #18

Raising your own meat is absolutely wonderful, if you have the space. Animals are good for maintaining your property (sheep, goats), for getting the pests out of your garden (ducks, chickens), and so forth-- The more complete your food web is at home, the less effort you'll have to spend maintaining it. The meat tastes really really good, and is much cheaper than buying it at the store-- For example, my ducks cost le…

We raise ducks as well and the effort involved is definitely not huge if you have the space (although you a spending a lot less than us per duck). Just keeping them for eggs is very simple and has a lot of upside... best quality eggs available, nice yard art, fun for kids, life/death lessons for kids, etc. I have been thinking a lot about how much meat my family eats recently and nothing helped put that into sharper focus than starting to butcher some of our own animals. Whereas keeping poultry in order to gather a family's worth of eggs is pretty simple, the idea of producing all our own meat is really a tall order. We eat at least one full chicken a week, and those are pretty big. It would take at least two ducks to supplement that one fat chicken and even then we are eating a lot of other meat. We ended up buying half a cow from a friend and that goes a lot further.

On butchering side of things, raising around 100 birds a year for slaughter would be crazy for us. Going from a full vegan lifestyle a few years back to slaughtering and butchering some of our own food has been an interesting change. I would recommend it if you have second guessed any of the weirdness with how food makes it to your plate. It definitely gives you something to think about. Killing really cute ducks that we raised by hand was definitely tough in the beginning. I had never hunted or killed any animal on purpose before. It's always a bummer but it does get a little easier in time. We've got a bunch of our eggs in our incubator now, hoping for more ducks in 24 days!

Re: The art of butchery

#34

Post by sfgc »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #18

Raising your own meat is absolutely wonderful, if you have the space. Animals are good for maintaining your property (sheep, goats), for getting the pests out of your garden (ducks, chickens), and so forth-- The more complete your food web is at home, the less effort you'll have to spend maintaining it. The meat tastes really really good, and is much cheaper than buying it at the store-- For example, my ducks cost le…

Are you plucking or skinning or breasting?

Re: The art of butchery

#35

Post by crpatino »

stegosaurus wrote: post #22
facepalm wrote: post #11

Weird, the second article of this kind I encounter within a day (the other was in German, though). Meat industry submarine? Because I think it's just meat eater apologism. The issues with eating meat don't change if you do the killing yourself or in an artsy way.

The idea of a humane killing is nonsensical to me, really. Imagine a thought experiment in which you could either die painlessly, or live but be required to endure days or weeks of incredibly painful torture (for the purposes of the experiment let's say that it doesn't leave lasting physical/emotional damage). I'd pick the torture. I assume most other people would too. I think that should illustrate fairly well that…

You are not making a fair comparison.

The (somewhat simplified) options available are: 1. Raise and slaughter animals in the most convenient and/or economically efficient way without regards for their suffering. (standard meat way) 2. Raise and slaughter animals in the most humane and painless way without regard for economic cost. (omnivore's dilemma way) 3. Do not raise any animals. Eat a 100% plan based diet. (vegan way).

There is no scenario where animals can trade enduring pain for anything. We are talking about domestic animals. They are born because we facilitated it, with the expectation of a gain from such activity.

I can see why people would want to be vegan, and while I do not share those opinions I respect them. But, if everybody thought like that, most domestic animal species would go extinct in a few decades. Most people would stop raising them, and if a few misguided folks would release flocks in the wild, those are in general not prepared to occupy an ecologic niche. They will either die off or wreck the environment of the region they were released at.

So, between options 1 and 2. The animals are going to die anyways, because if we did not expected to eat them, nobody would have bothered raising them. The only question left is how much suffering are they to endure in the process of dying. Proponents of #1 say this does not matter as long as the plate is full. Proponents of #2 say it is morally right to eat less meat in order to ensure the animals get killed in a more humane way.

How does your previous comment fits in that debate?

Re: The art of butchery

#36

Post by userbinator »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #18

Raising your own meat is absolutely wonderful, if you have the space. Animals are good for maintaining your property (sheep, goats), for getting the pests out of your garden (ducks, chickens), and so forth-- The more complete your food web is at home, the less effort you'll have to spend maintaining it. The meat tastes really really good, and is much cheaper than buying it at the store-- For example, my ducks cost le…

it's fundamentally similar to taking apart computers/machines etc.

The biggest difference is that you never have to put it back together again in a working state.

Re: The art of butchery

#37

Post by grogenaut »

gus_massa wrote: post #20
ovi256 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend you start by butchering to pieces a whole chicken or rabbit. They're the closest you can easily get to an unbutchered animal, as they're available at most butcheries, supermarkets, etc. They would already be cleaned of feathers or pelt and emptied of viscera, so it would be a simple exercise of cutting into pieces, separating meat from bones, and so on - literal hacking. If someone who knows how to…

You can do part of this exercise while eating a roast chicken. For example, while you are eating a wing, count how many bones each part have and compare it with a (picture of a) human skeleton. Repeat this with a chicken leg and thigh. (Remember to count that thin bone as another bone.)

better yet, try and seperate the parts naturally and with minimal cutting / effort. Roast chickens can be picked apart pretty easily if you go at it right; you can also just smash through the bones with a knife. Try the former.

Re: The art of butchery

#38

Post by beat »

jessaustin wrote: post #3

Squirrel is difficult to skin. I'm impressed that she did it with hands and knife alone. Typically we would nail the front feet to a solid post or similarly immobile piece of wood, in order to use both hands on the hide.

Squirrel is nasty. I hunted a lot as a kid, and we'd get squirrel if we couldn't get something tasty like pheasant that day. They're hard to skin, and they're full of tiny bones. You could stew them in a pressure cooker to break down the meat as much as possible, but there were still those damned bones.

Rabbit was much better, but you had to be careful cleaning it (rabbit bladders can EXPLODE), and Dad hated rabbits... chasing rabbits is the worst habit a bird dog can develop.

Re: The art of butchery

#39

Post by Falling3 »

vacri wrote: post #31
stegosaurus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a humane killing is nonsensical to me, really. Imagine a thought experiment in which you could either die painlessly, or live but be required to endure days or weeks of incredibly painful torture (for the purposes of the experiment let's say that it doesn't leave lasting physical/emotional damage). I'd pick the torture. I assume most other people would too. I think that should illustrate fairly well that…

What a strange dichotomy. Who is advocating for the torture of animals?

Directly? Very few. Indirectly? Almost everyone.

Re: The art of butchery

#40

Post by Falling3 »

sdrothrock wrote: post #32
Falling3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it really strange that people think the way to connect with an individual is to cut up their dead body. I understand the sentiment, but it seems like a far cry from any sort of real connection with "the animal".

I think one of us is misunderstanding what he said. The way I read it, he was not saying "butchering made a connection between me and the animal I was butchering," but rather that "butchering helped me make a connection between the steak and the animal it came from." That is to say, I understand him as saying that he now recognizes that a given cut of meat comes from a given place on an animal, rather than being just…

Oh I understood. I just think he's got a long way to go if the connection merely shows him what muscle group his food came from.
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