by Mary Duncanson

Created on: April 28, 2008

I can't say that I have ever been truly nefarious in nature, I tend to be a pretty sweet person; however, I have been a party to the deaths of quite a few defenseless little animals. Not that chickens or rabbits are necessarily defenseless, but certainly they had no idea what was coming. When I was a much smaller girl, maybe three or four, my family lived on a little farm in Florida. While I do not remember much from those early years of my life, I do remember the rabbits. A lot of them. My father had decided that raising rabbits and selling their meat would be a good way to supplement our dwindling family income, and as a child I just saw a lot of potential pets. My brothers and I loved the rabbits. We would pet them, water and feed them, and generally take great care of them as a part of the family.

Each month, as the rabbits came to the right size, butchering day would arrive. My father seemed large, like a giant to me at the time, and we children would gather to watch him work. The rabbit cages would be brought to the place on the farm where the rabbit poles hung, and one by one their necks would be stretched. I don't remember the blood, though I am certain there must have been a lot, nor do I remember the carcasses that must have hung from those poles. I remember my father, the giant. He seemed so lean, and his skin so dark on those days. I remember the way his hair would hang in his face, or how he would talk to us kids while he did his job. It was not scary to watch the rabbits die; it was part of life and accepted as such.

A decade and several moves later, my family purchased a farm once again. This time in the Ozark Mountains, in Arkansas, and rather than rabbits we had chickens. I was a young teenager then, and butchering did not seem as commonplace any more. For years my father had taken the boys hunting with him, and I stayed home afraid of the guns...and the blood. I remember how the chicks looked and smelled when we first got them. They were tiny little lint balls that made noise and ran away from grabbing hands. Bright lights shone into their boxes to keep them warm until they were large enough to go into the chicken coop. Seventy-five in all, and these sweet little chicks soon turned into vicious pecking demons. One of my daily chores was to feed the chickens each morning, and gather their eggs. I hated those birds. They would fly at me, intent on pecking out an eye, or removing a finger. The coop smelled, the feed smelled, and the eggs were never

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