The use of the animals is food as fine, getting them from the pet store (and/or telling the people you are serving this) for this use is just a touch bad form.
A Guinea pig and rabbit purchased from a Geauga County pet store ended up on plates at a Cleveland area high school.
Yeah, that poor bunny, dreaming of the happy home with the ribbon-bedecked moppet who would love him and hug him and call him George – what a horrible surprise it must have been for him! :rolleyes:
That is so not kosher, in many ways.
Sorry, I fail to see a problem. Rabbits for food are quite common here- I’ve eaten them many, many times. And yes, you can go to Hornbach (the regional Home Depot) and purchase the edible-raisable rabbits not more than 5 whole feet from hamsters, birds, rats, mice, etc.
You think it matters to the rabbit that it wasn’t sold on a farm to be eaten? Really, who is suffering from this?
Floppy-eared rabbits taste best, IMHO.
-Tcat
Guinea pigs aren’t normally found in the wild… but I can’t imagine they would make good eating.
I think the student should have skinned and cooked only an animal he had hunted on his own, if he’s such an avid hunter. That would have made more sense in the context of the ‘living lesson’.
That is just sad.
That’s a little tough to do out of season (I’ll admit that I don’t know when rabbit season is in Ohio).
People eat farm raised rabbit all the time. I put this in the “weird” category, but there isn’t anything cruel or sad going on.
Guinea pigs are a staple of Andean cuisine. The Incas ate them as do their ancestors all the way to today. Still, there must not be a lot of meat on them. Sort of an squeaking, ambulatory buffalo wing.
Yes, in the Andes but not in rural Ohio. Awful lotta work for a Buffalo wing.
I don’t know what you guys are talking about. Buffalo’s don’t have wings.
Oh what trouble we court when we cross the imaginary and often blurry line between pets and food animals.
Both my parents grew up on ranches and I spent my summers as a youth on one. I don’t stress over trying to reconcile the contradictions that come with being a carnivore. I cannot give undisputable logical reasons for which animals I will eat and which I will not. I understand that people will have problems with the choices I might so I might have been much more careful. You can call someone a hypocrite for complaining about eating a rabbit from a pet store if they are not also a vegan but that doesn’t help anything.
I used to take any encounter with a vegan as a challenge to a debate. Maturity has taught me that reasonable people will often make moral choices that are different from mine and that life is much easier if I respect them. That respect isn’t unlimited however as even a suicide bomber thinks he is making a morally correct choice. A vegan friend once put her position in the most elegant way I have heard, “I would prefer a world without slaughterhouses and I make my choices accordingly.”
I like rabbit. I haven’t been able to hunt rabbits in a long time but I had an excellent rabbit dish at the Pelican Club in New Orleans last week. When I was in the navy the mess hall at Memphis NAS served rabbit on a regular basis. Urban types who grew up thinking that meat choices stopped after beef, chicken and pork would actually get queasy when someone pointed out, “uh buddy, that’s not a chicken thigh.” I’ve eaten at streetcorner barbecue stands in the Philippines so I’ve crossed a few other boundaries but it’s not like I’m about to start a “primate, it’s what’s for dinner” campaign.
…really, dogs are easier to catch.
I really don’t get the reasoning behind the outrage.
Rabbit hunted in woods, killed and eaten = OK
Rabbit bought from farm, killed and eaten = OK
Rabbit bought from pet store, killed and eaten = cruelty :dubious:
I mean, do you really ask if your burger came from a cow raised as a pet? Is it the “store bought” part that bothers folks? Should we release all farm animals into the wild and only eat what we hunt, never what we buy?
Color me truely confused.
Course not! But I have heard that clams got legs…
I remember reading about the Hawaiian islanders’ confusion at Cook et al’s disgust at the fact the islanders ate pig and dog. “You keep both animals as well. Just because you let one into your house,” they reasoned, “means it is no longer fit for eating?”
Perhaps I’ve got the story all wrong, now, but it seems like the same point: if an individual animal becomes domesticated, does that mean the entire species is removed from our food-chain?
Also, I recently read an article about how a new breed of Super Guinea Pig is being raised. Mmmm… them pigs is goo-oo-ood eatin’!
A peruvian pig pickin’ might not be as filling as one might hope.
Still, people in the U.S. seem to like their food to remain abstract. The more they can recognize the animal, the less appetizing it appears.
My dad grew up on a farm and he told me that he would take care of the animals and give them names all the while knowing that the animal was going to be eaten later. He had no problem with it.
Not legs, beards. 
I would think this would come under the heading of insensitive or inconsiderate, rather than wrong. I don’t see any real difference between killing and eating an animal bought from a pet store and one bought from a farm. I can see, however, how some of the students who were served this dish might be upset about it. I think the boy just didn’t take that into consideration, and probably should have. I don’t think anything should be done about it, beyond reminding him that everybody doesn’t see things the way he does. He might want to adjust his public actions a bit from now on.
My daughter would be very upset by eating rabbit, or venison, even though she freely acknowledges the total lack of logic of that stance. She won’t touch lamb, either. And she knows that’s kind of silly, since she does eat meat, but I still would hate for her to be put into that position.
Again, I don’t think the kid did anything wrong, but I do think it might be good for him to take into account other people’s feelings a bit.
Live and learn
I have nothing to add here; I just want to say:
Guinea. Geauga. Beto Gage.
C’mon now! Everybody!
Guinea Geauga Beto Gage!
Guinea Geauga Beto Gage!
Guinea Guinea!
Geauga Geauga!
Guinea Geauga Beto Gage!
…What’samatter, you people uptiiight or something?