3 ms·

Raising your own meat is absolutely wonderful, if you have the space. Animals are good for maintaining your property (sheep, goats), for getting the pests out o

Raising your own meat is absolutely wonderful, if you have the space. Animals are good for maintaining your property (sheep, goats), for getting the pests out of your garden (ducks, chickens), and so forth-- The more complete your food web is at home, the less effort you'll have to spend maintaining it. The meat tastes really really good, and is much cheaper than buying it at the store-- For example, my ducks cost less than $4 each to raise, and the whole herd takes about 15 minutes of effort per day. I never thought of duck as 'poor person food' when I was a kid... Butchering is a huge pain in the ass, but it's fundamentally similar to taking apart computers/machines etc. and doing butchery is a good way to practice your surgical technique, if you have to do that kind of stuff for work or whatever. The downside is that you might start getting hungry whenever you have to cut up rats. I used to be into squirrels and rabbits-- Truly 'poor person food--' but have gotten increasingly paranoid about disease, as transmissible prion diseases have been 'tentatively reported' in squirrels [0] and tularemia is endemic in rabbits where I live [1]. [0] http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2805%2963333-8.pdf http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tularemia#Epidemiology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tularemia#Epidemiology

sfgc 12y ago
We raise ducks as well and the effort involved is definitely not huge if you have the space (although you a spending a lot less than us per duck). Just keeping them for eggs is very simple and has a lot of upside... best quality eggs available, nice yard art, fun for kids, life/death lessons for kids, etc. I have been thinking a lot about how much meat my family eats recently and nothing helped put that into sharper focus than starting to butcher some of our own animals. Whereas keeping poultry in order to gather a family's worth of eggs is pretty simple, the idea of producing all our own meat is really a tall order. We eat at least one full chicken a week, and those are pretty big. It would take at least two ducks to supplement that one fat chicken and even then we are eating a lot of other meat. We ended up buying half a cow from a friend and that goes a lot further. On butchering side of things, raising around 100 birds a year for slaughter would be crazy for us. Going from a full vegan lifestyle a few years back to slaughtering and butchering some of our own food has been an interesting change. I would recommend it if you have second guessed any of the weirdness with how food makes it to your plate. It definitely gives you something to think about. Killing really cute ducks that we raised by hand was definitely tough in the beginning. I had never hunted or killed any animal on purpose before. It's always a bummer but it does get a little easier in time. We've got a bunch of our eggs in our incubator now, hoping for more ducks in 24 days!
sfgc 12y ago
Are you plucking or skinning or breasting?
- xkcd-sucks 12y ago
  Plucking... not considered in the '15 minutes of effort per day.' But scalding at the right temperature and killing before the pinfeathers come in make it easier... and really, pinfeathers don't make a carcass unedible
userbinator 12y ago
it's fundamentally similar to taking apart computers/machines etc. The biggest difference is that you never have to put it back together again in a working state.

sfgc 12y ago

We raise ducks as well and the effort involved is definitely not huge if you have the space (although you a spending a lot less than us per duck). Just keeping them for eggs is very simple and has a lot of upside... best quality eggs available, nice yard art, fun for kids, life/death lessons for kids, etc. I have been thinking a lot about how much meat my family eats recently and nothing helped put that into sharper focus than starting to butcher some of our own animals. Whereas keeping poultry in order to gather a family's worth of eggs is pretty simple, the idea of producing all our own meat is really a tall order. We eat at least one full chicken a week, and those are pretty big. It would take at least two ducks to supplement that one fat chicken and even then we are eating a lot of other meat. We ended up buying half a cow from a friend and that goes a lot further. On butchering side of things, raising around 100 birds a year for slaughter would be crazy for us. Going from a full vegan lifestyle a few years back to slaughtering and butchering some of our own food has been an interesting change. I would recommend it if you have second guessed any of the weirdness with how food makes it to your plate. It definitely gives you something to think about. Killing really cute ducks that we raised by hand was definitely tough in the beginning. I had never hunted or killed any animal on purpose before. It's always a bummer but it does get a little easier in time. We've got a bunch of our eggs in our incubator now, hoping for more ducks in 24 days!

sfgc 12y ago

Are you plucking or skinning or breasting?

xkcd-sucks 12y ago
Plucking... not considered in the '15 minutes of effort per day.' But scalding at the right temperature and killing before the pinfeathers come in make it easier... and really, pinfeathers don't make a carcass unedible

userbinator 12y ago

it's fundamentally similar to taking apart computers/machines etc. The biggest difference is that you never have to put it back together again in a working state.