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deputychairman reblogged your photo and added:
I joked to my children that our rabbits were my children too, and the human kids are now telling people they have rabbit sisters and we sound like weird people.
oh man this gets an extra dimension when the child in question comes from a farm household that has both pets and livestock.
Farmbaby, very very young, came out once during a chicken processing day, and she toddled over (this was a couple years ago, nowadays she’d sprint or pirouette or something) to the chickens in the coops, waiting to get murdered, and pointed to them, and said, “to pet!” and petted one. Then she toddled over, past the buckets of viscera, and pointed at one of the cleaned carcasses, ready to go into the ice bath to chill for packaging. “To eat!” she said. Which was indeed very discerning of her, but. Unnerving. She clearly grokked that it was the same creature, in different states. We later had to explain that we don’t do that to, say, the cats. I genuinely feel like she both considers the cats her siblings and also would eat them if that was presented to her as an acceptable thing to do. (Sometimes I think she’d eat me. In her defense, she’s four and doesn’t understand consequence or permanence.) (And yes, she absolutely also does not understand jokes. She get it, sort of, but can’t really tell the difference between sarcasm and lying, for example. She loves puns but still isn’t sure why. It’s a bit Dada sometimes.)
She also loves petting the pigs, but is completely inured to the fact that the vast majority of the pigs on the farm get whacked at some point and become pork. She totally gets that they’re cute but delicious.
I don’t really know how I feel about it. I mean, it’s good that she’s so sanguine about it, right? It’s not like we’re going to have to deal with a tearful flounce to vegetarianism anytime soon. But… I mean. She doesn’t understand consequences or permanence and so when she figures that out, we might really be in for it, y’know?
Semi-relatedly there’s a requirement for organic certification of livestock that you put the names of the breeding stock down on the paperwork, and my sister was absolutely disgusted that her husband had written down “Little Boar” as the name of the intact baby male pig they’d recently acquired for new breeding stock. “I never let him name anything,” she said, shaking her head. I considered that a moment. “Did he name Farmbaby?” I asked. “Oh,” she said, “I gave him a list of acceptable names but I’d put hers up near the top. I knew he wouldn’t pick the first one, but I figured if I put it third he’d choose it, and I was right. So he thinks he named her, but really I did.”
(Your picture was not posted)
deputychairman reblogged your photo and added:
I joked to my children that our rabbits were my children too, and the human kids are now telling people they have rabbit sisters and we sound like weird people.
oh man this gets an extra dimension when the child in question comes from a farm household that has both pets and livestock.
Farmbaby, very very young, came out once during a chicken processing day, and she toddled over (this was a couple years ago, nowadays she’d sprint or pirouette or something) to the chickens in the coops, waiting to get murdered, and pointed to them, and said, “to pet!” and petted one. Then she toddled over, past the buckets of viscera, and pointed at one of the cleaned carcasses, ready to go into the ice bath to chill for packaging. “To eat!” she said. Which was indeed very discerning of her, but. Unnerving. She clearly grokked that it was the same creature, in different states. We later had to explain that we don’t do that to, say, the cats. I genuinely feel like she both considers the cats her siblings and also would eat them if that was presented to her as an acceptable thing to do. (Sometimes I think she’d eat me. In her defense, she’s four and doesn’t understand consequence or permanence.) (And yes, she absolutely also does not understand jokes. She get it, sort of, but can’t really tell the difference between sarcasm and lying, for example. She loves puns but still isn’t sure why. It’s a bit Dada sometimes.)
She also loves petting the pigs, but is completely inured to the fact that the vast majority of the pigs on the farm get whacked at some point and become pork. She totally gets that they’re cute but delicious.
I don’t really know how I feel about it. I mean, it’s good that she’s so sanguine about it, right? It’s not like we’re going to have to deal with a tearful flounce to vegetarianism anytime soon. But… I mean. She doesn’t understand consequences or permanence and so when she figures that out, we might really be in for it, y’know?
Semi-relatedly there’s a requirement for organic certification of livestock that you put the names of the breeding stock down on the paperwork, and my sister was absolutely disgusted that her husband had written down “Little Boar” as the name of the intact baby male pig they’d recently acquired for new breeding stock. “I never let him name anything,” she said, shaking her head. I considered that a moment. “Did he name Farmbaby?” I asked. “Oh,” she said, “I gave him a list of acceptable names but I’d put hers up near the top. I knew he wouldn’t pick the first one, but I figured if I put it third he’d choose it, and I was right. So he thinks he named her, but really I did.”
(Your picture was not posted)
