Distancing yourself from your dinner
I've been reading a pre-release copy of Leigh Tate's Critter Tales
and really enjoying following along on her adventures. My favorite
part, though, is quite personal. Leigh's journey toward meat
independence has 
been quite similar to ours, and so her book helps me see how far we've come.
Not only do we kill a problematic rooster
without excessive angst nowadays, we also cook him up into soup to eat
that same night. This may not sound like such a big deal, but putting
your birds in the freezer for a few weeks before eating them is one way
to gain that emotional distance necessary to think of the meat as food.
Huckleberry and Lucy have no problem with this mental contortion, but
it's taken me a full nine years to get to this point.
What's the next step in
our meat-education journey? We're probably going to upgrade our goat
herd if Artemesia has a daughter, keeping the new doeling while deleting
Abigail. I'm having trouble thinking of our current milker as anything
other than a pet, though, so I haven't yet crossed over the bridge of
deciding whether it's better to take her to the butcher or try to sell
or give away an okay-but-not-top-notch goat. Clearly, we still have some
meat angst to work through before we'll be real homesteaders at heart.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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It's perfectly understandable to not want to eat your milker. You have spent allot of time with her and developed a bond. If she were mine she would move on to someone else that was interested in milk goats. She has value in the fact that she is already trained to milk and someone else may need a good starter milk goat.
Our livestock fall into two categories. Pets, this includes breed stock and milkers. Animals that are going to be here and usually have human names. Then there are the others, either for sale or butcher. If they get names at all it is just to keep some perspective. I have a hog named “Porkchop” and a young bull named “Porter” aka porterhouse. No misunderstanding their future destination.
That's got to be a really tough decision. Some days I feel an attachment to your goats just from the pictures, never mind being there and taking care of them every day.
I'm guessing that saying it out loud (or in this case writing it down) is the first step toward making it real.