Fia wrote:
A couple of years ago I bought a piglet, reared to adulthood on the local free range farm it was born. I did it to introduce my enthusiastic carnivore youngest to the idea of 'meeting the meat'.
Bear with me -- I will get to a relevant point, I promise!
In my late 20s, some friends and I had a go at being a "self-sufficient commune", aided by John Seymour's book on the subject. I joined as a vegetarian but, once I realised that the options for (e.g.) chickens that had gone off lay was to release them to be fox-prey, keep feeding them although we couldn't afford to, kill and bury them, or kill and eat them, the sensible option became apparent (I still perform the same duty for a vegetarian friend who keeps chickens for eggs).
We had similar problems with the approx. 50% of male poultry, calves and goat-kids (we kept cows and goats for milk, butter, yoghurt & cheese). In order to spare the sensibilities of the commune children, one gander was named "Xmas dinner", and male goatlings had "culinary" names like "Kid Curry" and "Kebab". When it came to doing the deed (it was legal to DIY in those days, but the pigs and steers were done by a local butcher), it turned out that the children weren't at all squeamish. On the other hand, some of the city-bred adults....
she has always had an interest in the ethical eating of roadkill.
We get a fair bit of meat that way here. I frequently pick up rabbit and pheasant. Occasionally I get a deer. Some years ago when the kids were still at home, one of my sons brought home a new girlfriend for dinner. I'd cooked a spicy pheasant casserole. She was fine about it once she'd asked what the meat was, but my lad blanched when I added that I'd picked it off the road that morning. She was still fine with it, but the lad was mortified when, at school on the following Monday, it had spread like wildfire that his "dad serves roadkill to guests."