Redneck Sustainability: Eating Your Pets

from friend to food

Before you gag from the title of this blog, let me explain that my pets growing up included a pig, a few dozen rabbits, some ducks, a few hamsters, an occasional cat, a dog, a calf and a guinea pig. I’ll let your imagination tell you which ones I ate and witch ones I didn’t. But why should eating pets be such a bad thing?

If anything is out of whack, it’s that we’ve manipulated animal breeding, not that we eat them. What’s worse? Eating domesticated animals or breeding them to belch methane into old age and die a pointless life? There’s a chin scratcher.

Natives to North America, First Peoples if you will, knew that we should have a healthy connection with the food we eat, sometimes even asking the noble beasts permission to extinguish their souls. Now whacking a domesticated pet in the head as it stares up at you with trusting eyes might not be quite the same as hunting a noble beast, but none the less, it’s good to have an intimate connection with our food.

On that note, let’s take another lesson in sustainability from the redneck play book of life.

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Empty House Syndrome

hobo-block-partyWhat do you do when your house is worth less than nothing?  Zoned improperly for farm stock and wild animals won’t bed there?  Last week I made a review of a study done in the UK titled, “New Tricks with Old Bricks.”  I mused then that the most interesting question that the study brought up was how we can make good use of empty homes.  The census numbers on empty homes are a little misleading and not the most helpful for determining which ones have simply been abandoned.  But, the percentage for the first quarter of 2009, 2.9%, is the highest quarterly percentage since 1956.  For me that sufficiently says that there is a real problem out there with homes deemed worse than worthless by the market.

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Redneck Sustainability: A Lesson in Reuse

yard-junkUppity folk may call it offensive, but rednecks just call it home.

There are a lot of different names for it these days.  Some now call it reuse.  Polite, cute little title.  Some still call it salvage.  Some call it practical stewardship.  Some call it scavenging or hoarding.  I just call it pickens.  Whatever title you give it, rednecks have always known about the sustainable reuse of material goods.  The ranch I grew up on had an advanced system for it.

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