fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4207 ]

[ SECRET POST #4207 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4207 ⌋

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 17 secrets from Secret Submission Post #602.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
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Today I saw something on twitter that made me really sad. A(nother, I’m also a) white woman, who’s a hobby/small scale farmer was saying that it’s racist for white women to ask POC to pay more for roosters out of fear that they’d eat them—which I agree with. But then she went on to say that no-one buys roosters as pets and white women need to just get over themselves and accept that roosters are gonna get eaten. And also that she’s bought, and offered in her post to buy more, roosters from fellow white people who refuse to sell to POC, to give to the POC, so they can eat them.

And, I dunno. Assuming that POC are gonna eat your pets is racist and gross, and I agree with her that the people who do that, and raise prices accordingly, are racist and gross. But I still feel like buying an animal that was raised as a pet to slaughter for food is evil, and I’m fine with anyone charging high enough prices for male animals that eating them would be cost-prohibitive, even though she’s right that almost no-one buys them as pets—but in a lot of places, keeping roosters (and in my city, intact male goats) is illegal. I would totally keep roosters if I could.

Back in December, I gave my accidental rooster to a farm store that has rescue roosters and hens, ducks, geese, a cow, a couple turkeys, and milch goats. They are in no way in danger of being eaten, because the rescue animals are, basically, the employees’ and (white) owner’s pets. They asked me his name when I surrendered him, and I visited every week until he disappeared. But after promising—and advertising on their web page that they were an animal rescue— they’d find him a good home, they used him to demonstrate how to slaughter and clean roosters, almost certainly to white “farm to table” hipsters.

I cried buckets for days. I haven’t eaten meat in 25 years and have raised chickens for 20. If I could legally keep roosters I would. I don’t have a problem with other people eating meat, even animals that lots of Americans flip out about, like cats and dogs and horses, so long as they’re not endangered—and weren’t raised as someone’s pet.

Am I off-base or an asshole for feeling the way I do? Idk.

I'm sorry, I respect your feelings and I respect the hell out of people who keep chickens as pets.

But at some point, you probably have to come to terms with the reality that people do eat chickens, and most people who keep chickens do so for that reason.

If you sell someone an animal, they can do anything they legally want with it. That includes eating it. Most poeple don't care about chickens. Especially roosters.

"If you're forced to give up a pet, the animal shelter is allowed to kill them and you have no right to be sad"

That's you. That's what you're saying.
~ NAYRT

Uhhh, yes. Animal shelters kill pets (legally) all the time. Did you not know that???

and you have no right to be sad

and you have no right to be sad

and you have no right to be sad

and you have no right to be sad

....what? Where did I say that? Can you please show me? Or are you just ranting because you are OP and did not get the answer you liked?

Re: Eating animals/rant/idk

tabaqui - 2018-07-12 00:58 (UTC) - Expand

ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2018-07-12 01:06 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

tabaqui - 2018-07-12 01:08 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2018-07-12 01:09 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

tabaqui - 2018-07-12 01:10 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2018-07-12 05:23 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Eating animals/rant/idk

(Anonymous) - 2018-07-12 00:58 (UTC) - Expand

ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2018-07-12 01:04 (UTC) - Expand

Um, those are YOUR words.

You have a right to be sad, of course. But you don't really have a right to be surprised or expect something different to happen?

Re: Eating animals/rant/idk

(Anonymous) - 2018-07-12 01:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Eating animals/rant/idk

(Anonymous) - 2018-07-12 01:06 (UTC) - Expand

That's... not even close to what they said?

Jesus, what the hell. No one is talking about "legally". The issue is "ethically".

I understand your pain, but once you sell a farm animal to someone else they are free to do with it what they want. You can make a part of the sale the caveat that the rooster is only to be used as a pet and not eaten, but most people see farm animals such as roosters and chickens as food.

No, no you are not. Killing and eating animals that were raised as pets is messed up, and what that farm store did to you is disgusting.
I do think that you should tell everyone you possibly can exactly what they promised and what they did, because there's a non-zero chance that someone else will end up with a rooster instead of a hen, go "Oh look, these nice people will take this rooster off my hands and not eat him," and things will go the same way from there. If you don't feel up to that fight, though, fair enough.

This. Speaking as someone who's eaten chicken almost daily for years:

Keeping roosters as pets isn't even that strange in my experience. That "shelter" betrayed anon in a revolting way.

Yeah, if the shelter DELIBERATELY MISLED you, and lied about the rooster's fate, that is shitty as hell. I agree, you should slather them with scathing reviews, do whatever you have to do to get the word out about this.

On one hand, I do think once you surrender ownership of an animal, you can't really have a say in what happens to them. And killing any pet for any reason is a reality in many shelters. But it sounds like they lied to OP about slaughtering the animal and about their intentions. And while I don't think we should rank some animals as more valuable than others, an animal that has been socialized as a pet does feel wrong to just randomly choose for a slaughter demonstration.

For that store to do that was gross and horrifying, and I hope you do tell others about their lying bullshite.

However - chickens, roosters, and etc. are generally used for food, either eggs or meat, and if you don't want to sell your 'pet' to be eaten, then I say don't sell your pet, simple as that.

*cough* they didn't actually sell the rooster - they gave him up because it was illegal for them to keep him.

Still gross.

Did you ask why they killed him? He could have been sick. He could have been overly aggressive. There are many reasons to kill arooster other than for the luls.

OP—they said they hadn’t killed him, and I told them when I gave him up that if there were any issues I’d take him back, fines or no fines—which would’ve been $100/day up to $100k, aka “almost two day’s wages up to 6x what I make per year.”

But they regularly host a “how to kill and clean chickens” workshop—which I found out too late because they’d pulled all mentions off their website after 2014—and his feathers were everywhere, and not in a “look who’s molting” way. A family friend who used to raise and slaughter his own rabbits and chickens told me I should’ve known better, and that the same thing happened to other friends of his when they’d given this place their roosters. My rooster had been in a quarantine cage, of which they had several, for two months—which seemed excessive, but when I asked they said was normal—when they slaughtered him.

In this particular instance no, I don't think you're off-base in being mad. They straight up lied to you about finding him a new home, killed him instead then lied about killing him. And going by your subsequent post they've pulled this shit before

But the broader issue of "Is it moral to kill/eat animals that were raised as pets?"... I dunno. How would you define raising an animal as a "pet"? What's the difference between raising an animal deliberately as a pet that you plan to keep alive, and taking good care of an animal you plan to butcher?

Like I've known people who raised pigs in their backyards for slaughter, and they treated the pigs very well, to the point that others thought they were keeping them as pets. But when the time came they still butchered them.

IDK it's hard for me to put into words my thoughts. I don't think it's exactly evil, but I have trouble articulating why I don't think it is. I know that sounds bad but that's what I think.

I'm in the same boat as you, and I'm a vegetarian. In this case, the shelter was deceitful and lied about it - and OP would have worked to find other options if the shelter no longer wanted to keep him. OP's anger and sadness is completely justified.

I also though do feel a little uncomfortable saying some animals are okay to eat and others aren't. I'm vegetarian but not necessarily ethically opposed to eating meat, but I think we tend to be a little disconnected from the meat we eat. As you said, many livestock farmers love their animals and treat them extremely well, and still butcher them. Is that wrong? I don't think so. I'd rather a pig be treated like a pet and slaughtered, than raised in a factory farm and basically tortured and unloved all its life. As long as the animal is killed humanely, of course. Then again, it's also hard to deny that there's a horrible sense of betrayal in slaughtering an animal that has been raised to trust and befriend humans. On the other hand, not many would disagree that it's ethical to put a suffering cat or dog "to sleep", either.

It's a hard issue, I guess - that is, killing pets. But at any rate, OP's trust was clearly betrayed, and she lost an animal she really cared about as a result, so this is something different.

OP here—while I’m ethically opposed to killing animals, I’m not gonna try to make that call for other people, especially when, for example, the availability of cheap produce in the US is basically predicated on treating farmworkers like shit. And it’s way more practical and less wasteful to run animals on marginal land (especially in drought-prone areas) and slaughter those animals for food than it is to try and grow peaches or peas on it. And a ton of animals die so we can have tooth-mark free fruit. And so on.

I think it’s better for farmers to treat their livestock well than to confine them to battery cages and treat them like meat-machines, but I also think farmers should maybe avoid, say, naming each individual animal and teaching them to come when they call and letting them sleep in their beds—not that I would let chickens on the furniture (although somewhere I have a picture of my sixteen year old hen and twelve year old dog on the couch together) but in my mind, there’s a dividing line between treating animals well, and keeping them as pets. And I have a hard time distinguishing between species that are food and species that are pets, since people keep lots of species (cats, dogs, guinea pigs, rabbits, iguanas) as both.

My local shelter is no-kill, but the adoption fee for roosters is $5.00 becauss otherwise no one takes them and I was told they mostly go for food or cock-fighting. The only other farm sanctuary within a hundred miles never returned multiple calls and emails. I wish the city would just lift the rooster ban.

Why is the ban even in place? Is crowing that big of an issue?

My thing is, at what point does good treatment go into treating it like a pet territory? For instance, tending flocks of sheep or goats (or any herd animal) would, I imagine be near impossible unless you gave the animals some level of training to follow commands. And on smaller farms, where you’re talking someone whose only got a single cow/goat/chicken, I feel like that too would be impossible to treat like a pet. And what about cases where the animal is nearing the end of its natural lifespan anyway? If you have a cow that’s too old to give milk, do you just let it die and let the meat/leather go to waste. But I don’t know a ton about farming so I could be talking all out of my ass here.

Also I’m morbidly curious about the whole “don’t sell to PoC because they’ll just kill and eat the animal” because wow that is a flavor of racism I never figured at existing. Like is that kind of racism big in the indie farming community?

OP—Crowing was my issue because I have a code-compliance obsessed neighbor and we have a “no loud noise between 10pm and 7am” bylaw, but the rooster ban specifically is ostensibly in place to stop cockfighting.

My parents were farmers for a decade or so, of the back-to-the-land hippie type rather than the 100,000 actes of corn and soybeans or 10,000 head of cattle type. I was a toddler when they packed it in for the city because my premie medical bills topped $150,000.00 and they got $450,000 for their 90+ acres. But my dad still wanted to farm, hence chickens, which I inherited when my parents split.

So my farm info is mostly family stories with research and randomness thrown in. But no one is gonna have only one chicken for long, they need a flock and also if they’re for meat you need enough to breed, and one milch goat is barely subsistence level. Even then, that goat would still need to be bred every year to give milk, and even if you rent a stud goat, that means baby goats. Same for cattle. Most of the males will be castrated and raised for meat, but dairy cattle are scrawny by comparison to beef cattle and might just become veal.

Generally speaking, when an animal stops reliably producing eggs or milk, you’d slaughter and eat them and replace them with young ones. But chickens can live 16+ years and commercial laying hens are killed at 2 and maybe used for pet food, because they’re too sick and scrawny to eat by then. Male chicks of laying breeds typically go into a meat grinder or dumpster while still alive, as soon as they’re sexed, because they’re too scrawny to eat. Even small farms will slaughter unproductive laying hens, although they might live a bit longer and be in good enough shape for stew.

The difference between a pet and livestock is that the end goal of one is companionship and the end goal of the other is food (or possibly fiber.) If you can’t bear to make food out of an animal, congrats on your pet. (Also most livestock I’ve known with names were called things like Hamburger or Drumstick, with the exception of a stud bull called El Dorado.)

Re: Eating animals/rant/idk

meredith44 - 2018-07-12 06:44 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Eating animals/rant/idk

(Anonymous) - 2018-07-12 13:38 (UTC) - Expand

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