salmonella

[Stefan-A]

My older brother ate a spider when he was a kid- a daddy longlegs, i believe! My mother says she had to spend a good half hour picking the legs from between his teeth.............MMMMM!!!

But in many parts of the world, bugs are eaten quite regularly, and no one seems the worse for it, but I'm sure glad I live here!!

I'll eat anything from the animal kingdom. I might cook it first, but I'll eat it.

[Lori P]

she also loves those green waffle hamster treats

LOLOL.... Mikhaila, you poor dear, these are the things your mother will be telling your first date some day.... :-)!!!!!

[Lori P]

I'll eat anything from the animal kingdom. I might cook it first, but I'll eat it.

Sigh... me too. It's awful, really, because I love all animals dearly, and respect them greatly.... it's just that they taste so damn good.... LOL!!!!! Because I run a rescue, most people assume I'm a vegetarian. And I tried... I really did, I was a vegetarian for years after high school, all thru college and into about my third year of marriage. But I wasn't happy and I always, always craved meat.

So my compromise to the animal kingdom is, we now raise our own meat animals. This way I'm not eating factory farmed animals; our critters live lives free to graze, play, interact with their own kind, are fed well and plenty and treated with mucho kindness. Their lives end very quickly and humanely with our butcher only being 10 minutes up the road. It's not always easy, tho... like right now, it is past time to send our two pigs but I've been putting it off. They're so darn cute and happy. They roam free on the property and frequently sleep on the front porch!! Yeah-- I know, I know:

You might be a redneck if you have to step over your hogs on your way to the front yard....

[Lulu Bennett]

i couldn't do what you do. if i raised an animal, i couldn't kill it even if it was life and death. i get way to attached to animals lol i would perfer to eat an animal that has been killed before i meet it on my plate lol.

I do really respect what you do though!

[Lori P]

Well, it was a long process to get to this point. But after seeing the way meat animals are raised-- the factory farms, the feedlots, the slaughterhouse horrors, I decided there was no way I could eat animals that had suffered for their entire lives. I may be attached to the ones we raise, but that's my problem to deal with.. at least they live happy and free, if short, lives.

And omg, the taste is 1000% better than grocery store meat!!!!!!!!! I really think a large part of it, too, is that our animals never feel any fear.

[Lulu Bennett]

And omg, the taste is 1000% better than grocery store meat!!!!!!!!! I really think a large part of it, too, is that our animals never feel any fear.

well fear releases adrenaline and aload of other chemicals and this can taint the flavour but i am not suprised on the taste being better than store bought meat.

[drache]

I grew up in an environment where taking care of the animals you ate was considered important
even the hunters did not just go out and shoot
they sat and observed the animal they were going to shoot for about a month
this may sound weird to people who don't know that animals have habits and will (unless something interferes) go to the same places and follow their routines every day - even weekends
if you don't know the animal, you don't know what you're eating
perhaps one of the oddest phenomena I've encountered in the US is that the vast majority of people don't seem to care what they're eating

[Lori P]

Here in the southeast, hunters hunt with dog packs. It's absolutely disgusting. They all get in their 4 wheel drive trucks, load up 100 hounds, and drop them in the woods. Then they sit there and drink beer for hours while the dogs run the deer in a huge circle and eventually head them back for the trucks. And then they all start shooting, and oops, if you hit a dog by mistake, oh well, those hounds are a dime a dozen. And the deer you only wound, no biggie, you shot the sh$#@ out of a dozen others.

So the deer are run into the ground and petrified, the dogs are kept in small filthy pens and barely fed for most of the year 'cause they only use them for two months, and loads of dogs end up abandoned in the woods, hit on the roads, shot and wounded and left to die... the whole thing is a nightmare.

If you're a hunter in this area who hunts with dogs, I hope I haven't offended you, but I also sure hope you take better care of your hounds. Every year, and it's getting ready to start up again, I spend the winter picking up sick, starving, injured hounds and driving around the corpses of the ones on the roads. Deer die in my pastures of gunshot wounds inflicted after they ran for miles to get away from the dogs. Yeah, I'm pretty bitter about it.

[drache]

that's totally barbaric and uncivilized
I'd call those guys pigs if that wasn't an insult to sus scrofa
where I come from this kind of behavior is illegal (as it should be)

[Lori P]

Oh, I wish it could be stopped. And the thing is too, we don't allow hunting on our property, but of course the dogs run through and run all "our" deer back to the hunters too. There's no way to keep the dogs from going everywhere.

But it's the south, and there's that good ole' boy network still strong and in place, so there will never be laws against hunting with dogs. They never spay or neuter, and they turn out pregnant and nursing dogs to run, so sometimes you find a momma dog trying to carry her puppies across the road... it's just awful.