So true. Particularly when you don't grow up on a farm that butchers cattle/chickens/hogs etc - it's harder to get accustomed to this kind of thing because people have gotten so far removed from their food. People like me, who want to raise my own food, learn to deal with it in their own way. I'm finally to the point where I can pluck our birds and actually touch dead birds and hope to get to the point where I can actually slaughter them by myself without my husband's help. But it takes time for me to get things into my comfort zone when it come to killing an animal for food. And I know that not everyone is ever going to be comfortable with butchering an animal for food.
A big frustration of mine is the people that are all "ewww" and calling me a murderer for butchering our own chickens - but they eat meat. Really? If you are a vegan or even a lacto-ovo vegetarian - fine, it doesn't bother me as much when you think I am terrible that I eat my own chickens. But if you eat any kind of meat product - even chicken broth, it's not cool to be telling me how horrible you think I am when you are eating products from the store from animals that are kept in conditions nowhere near as nice as my chickens are.
I read a thought provoking article recently that discussed coming to grips with your food. It had an interesting section regarding even vegetarians/vegans who while they may not be eating "sentient beings", they are eating living things - plants. And even though they aren't eating meat, animals still die in the process of farming. They die when people clear land for farming by loss of habitat/food. clearing/farming. Animals die from coming into contact with machinery used to clear land and used to farm the land. They die from traps and poisons used to protect the growing crops. But of course people don't always think about those kinds of things.
People seem to get frustrated when this thread isn't always about specifically breeding the chicken, looking at chickens, etc. But you can only talk about those things so much. When there aren't people bringing up new questions or comments that elicit responses to a very specific topic, it's kinda hard to keep a thread alive with such a limited scope. And there really are aspects of "heritage" chickens that aren't always going to be just what they look like, which ones to get, or how to breed them. I think the thread is doing fine the way that the micro-topics flow.
