meatless monday musings

I know it is Tuesday… so the title should be Taco Tuesday…  but it’s not…

we started doing Meatless Monday’s about three years ago… the farmer was not happy… neither were any of my children… I told them the world is a better place if we all ate a little less meat…

so here we are… starving on a Monday… it also is kind of a weight loss thing… start the week off hungry… we all know you ate wings all Sunday while watching football so now Monday is the perfect chance to give the poor chickens a break…  unless it is the chicken’s that lay eggs… because I used up basically a dozen eggs for supper… but I hear those chicken’s get treated really well… I like to think I do my research…

  
weekends on the farm in October consist of farming (not always but some years), football, cheering for the Blue Jays (well this year and back in 1993) and hunting… oh and hockey… hockey in Canada is all year long basically…

I’ve tried sooooo hard to get into hunting…  just ask the farmer… so hard…  but I have slight issues with seeing animals get shot…

our first go at hunting was way back in our dating days… the farmer took me out to hunt Prairie Chickens and also Coyotes…  I cried over two Prairie Chickens deaths and insisted we eat them for supper…  it was similar to an episode of the Bear Grylls show…

then we moved on to the Coyotes… which in our area get over populated and they encourage people to hunt them…  to me they looked like a nice dog and as my farmer/hunter was lining one up to shoot it I started to wave my arms and scream for it to run away…  I would far rather it starve to death in the harsh winter than get shot is what I told him… makes perfect sense…

since then I have not really attempted to go hunting… even though my oldest son now has his hunter’s safety course and shot his first deer last fall… I am better being blissfully naive to the entire experience of hunting…

except for two years ago… it had been a long fall and I hadn’t seen the farmer very much… he was heading out hunting one evening late October and I decided to go with him… more for a date than anything… a date and you look at wildlife through binoculars…

well that evening I spotted a gorgeous, beautiful white tail buck… having his evening meal beside a coulee hill…  and apparently the farmer spotted the same buck… and shot it… and killed it…

that very day I had watched the documentary ‘Black Fish’ with the kids and we had decided to never go to an aquarium in our lives…  and then I see this… too much for one day…

oh the tears… and what I didn’t realize was that once you shoot a deer it is at least another hour of dragging the deer, gutting the deer and loading the deer…  which some other hunters helped him with while I bawled in the vehicle like my first born child had been killed…

I decided right then and there that if I could not be apart of an animal losing it’s life for us to eat meat, I could not eat meat…  this led the way to me being a vegetarian for 36 days…  probably not a great vegetarian… sneaking the odd piece of bacon here and there… but a good enough one that I started to get very weak and fragile and cold…

then a purse showed up in the mail… and my curly haired boy said ‘what’s that purse made out of mom?’ and I realized that not only did I eat meat… I covered my body and draped my arms with the skin of the animals as well…

so I have embraced the fact that the farmer will kill the animal and I will cook the animal… and we give thanks for the animal’s life and how it’s energy will give us energy…

the ‘tipping point’ for this 36 day vegetarian was a purse… and the thought of no more boots… or leather jackets and fur coats…

so we just do Monday’s without meat… perhaps we should drop the eggs as well on Monday’s…

 lastly… this is Lacy on her first birthday… which in dog years I believe is 72 years old but she is looking great for her age…  Brandon made her a sausage cake… from the deer sausage we had made up from the deer he shot… Lacy didn’t think it through… she didn’t think ‘should I… is this right… what are my moral standards’… nope… she just ate her sausage cake…  and if a 72 year old dog is wise enough to realize we need to eat meat… that’s good enough for me…