Boo!

Each year on Halloween we here in the Piggy household dine on the flesh of innocents, and this year is no different.

In past years, the kid(s) have feasted on a free range backyard human, conventionally raised store-bought human from the supermarket (2008 was a tight year for us financially) and last year it was backyard cats.

This year, I've been thinking a lot about the idea that if you couldn't kill an animal yourself, then you shouldn't eat animals. So I thought I'd better teach my kids to kill if we're going to keep going with this tradition. It's either that, or stop the tradition. And since you couldn't tear tradition from my cold, dead hands, I guess I have no choice but to teach the kiddos to kill.

So we cornered this bunny in the back yard. First, I set Liam loose, but all he wanted to do was pet the little guy.

Then I asked Anna to kill him for me (I'm squeamish, I'll admit). She didn't want to at first. She asked me how I knew he was a "him" and that's when I realized a mistake I've been making all this time.

"It," I said, "I meant 'it.' Now kill it please."

Reducing the bunny to a thing by using "it" instead of "he" or "she" seemed to put her at a bit more at ease. So she went after "it" with nothing but her bare hands. After an hour of abject failure, I decided to help her out by whittling a spear out of a fallen branch.

Anna looked on quietly as I shaved one end to a deadly point. She finally said, "Isn't that sort of like cheating, Daddy?"

"No, Anna. It's not cheating. It's natural. Our brains evolved the ability to make tools and weapons, which sort of makes it the opposite of cheating."

Then she said something about nuclear weapons and I told her to be quiet while daddy whittled.

Long story short, we had bunny for lunch. The kids weren't big fans of the bunny by himself, so I made some of him - I mean "it" - into a meat smoothie for Anna:

As you can see, she really got into it. These are the piercing eyes of a daughter whose father made her kill a bunny.

I pureed the other parts into a squash tomato bisque for Liam (you know how kids are with texture):

"My daddy wuvs me so much he made my big sister kill a bunny wabbit!"

Who knows what fleshly delights next Halloween will bring...

Happy Halloween!

For the record, Anna's drinking a banana, soy yogurt, hemp seed, flax oil, strawberry, blueberry, spinach smoothie (recipe here). And Liam's eating curried squash tomato bisque. I'll probably post the recipe for that during next month's VeganMoFo.