You May Eat Rabbit

We’ve had six or seven rabbits, including dwarves and the enormous Belgian bruisers people eat, and I like them, but it would never occur to me to object to anyone eating them. Whole Foods is now selling rabbit and some people are very upset, and upset with that weird and disturbing intensity animal rights activists so often show. Rabbit, the article explains, is,

if you’re going to eat meat . . . one of the better options out there, nutritionally and environmentally speaking. Rabbits are easy to raise and butcher in your backyard, they’re light on the environment — producing six pounds of rabbit meat requires the same amount of food and water as it takes to produce one pound of cow meat — and their meat is lean and low in cholesterol. 

There’s no downside, which Whole Foods apparently recognized. One of the don’t eat rabbits activists insists “All we’re trying to do is change the social perception of rabbits so that more people see and understand what we see, which is that they’re smart and they’re funny and they’re — you have a rabbit, don’t you?” But actually, no, they’re not. Rabbits really don’t give a damn about you. Go to any animal shelter and talk to the workers about the number of rabbits they get because people buy them thinking they’re going to sweet and cuddly (though few people are quite so mistaken as to expect them to be smart and funny) and find out that they’re not. With the occasional exception, who is to rabbits what, oh, Lebron James is to basketball, they are dull. They are creatures of instinct, and their instinct is to do as little as possible. They are like cats, without the evil.

As the article explains the activists’ arguments, the don’t eat rabbits people’s argument is entirely sentimental. Rabbits are pets. One of the pictures shows a woman, wearing bunny ears, outside a Whole Foods store holding a poster which says “Whole Foods Market is now serving our pets.” Which really means: wabbits are fwuffy and cute and so so sweet. Unlike cows, which we can eat. Or pigs.

One wishes for an actual explanation of what gives the animal the kind of relation to man that prevents us from eating them. The argument can be made for dogs, as I noted in Don’t Eat Dogs, but for rabbits, no. The author raises the question, following the remark I quoted in the second paragraph:

[W]ith her self-interruption, DeMello [Margo DeMello, a professor of cultural anthropology at Canisius College] pinpointed why I find this debate so fascinating: Yes, I used to have a pet rabbit, but I also spent a season working on a farm that raised and butchered rabbits a few years ago. I even ate some of those rabbits, too, ending my stint as a vegan. I knew our animals were raised and slaughtered in a manner I deemed humane, and I decided there wasn’t anything wrong with eating meat if it comes from a respectable source. All that said, I would never eat a pet rabbit.

Why is it that when I think about eating a dog I immediately think of the dogs I grew up with, but when I think about eating a rabbit, my first thought isn’t my pet bunny?

Because the relation isn’t the same. Don’t eat dogs. But eat rabbits if you want.