Redneck Sustainability: Eating your Pets

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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Extreme Home Makeover: Mud Edition

Earth Architecture, book by Ronald Rael
Earth Architecture, book by Ronald Rael

I have come up with yet another way for the humanity sucking institution of television to untether itself from its obligate parasitic ways and enhance our world at the same time it fogs our minds and contributes to hemorrhoids across the globe. (Even now I’m sitting on a donut. Oy vey!)

No, I’m not talking about having David Duchovny personally record his voice on thousands of voicemail boxes saying, “The truth is out there, so leave your name and number. I’ll call you back when I find it.” But I am of course talking about ABC’s Extreme Makeover Home Edition… gone native.

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Dukes for a Better Hazzard

poster for the Dukes of Hazzard
poster for the Dukes of Hazzard

Daisy Duke was as close as I came to a celebrity fetish as a boy. How can you resist the NASCAR driving temptress that fashioned a short-short revolution that looks good on less than 1% of the population? (of which I am proud to say I am still a part.)

But Daisy, Bo and Luke Duke were more than just hunky characters on the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard from 1979 through 1985, they were champions of community, social justice, civil liberties and simple living. I can still hear Waylon Jennings crooning about the good ole’ boys “fightin’ the system like a true, modern-day Robin Hood,” as the General Lee leaps a barn and flies off into the wild, blue yonder of freedom.

Sure, Bo and Luke ran moonshine in a Dodge Charger done up six ways to Dixie while Uncle Jesse supplied a tri-county area with white lightning, but who doesn’t jerk some hooch on the side these days? The times are hard, are they not?

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