Wandering animals, and ethics vs feelings.

It's another rainy day with no great photos to share, and fortunately I've been thinking about ethics again. Before I get there though, we have a couple things going on around the homestead. First the turkey is missing this morning, and there's no exploded poof of feathers. I suspect she's going looking for a tom that will give her what she wants since I'm clearly not doing it for her. I hope she comes home soon, and we'll keep you updated. The second thing is, somehow in the weather changes the hutch with Dawn and her daughter ended up open. On the big up side, when I walked up and picked dawn's daughter up, she didn't run anywhere but back to the hutch and let me put her back in. The benefits of having well socialized rabbits. I guess being outside in the rain wasn't as much fun as she thought. Below the cut, let's get on to some thinking.

Visiting Wheel-View Farm

The Lady of the House and I went to Wheel-View Farm for their open house day, and wanted to share some photos and thoughts about their farm and overall operation. Their site has a lot of good information including about the environmental benefits of grass fed beef farming. They also have a lot of other photos, all of the ones we have up for this post are our own photos taken by the Lady of the House when we visited. I think if you just want a summary it is the idyllic pastoral farm that one imagines, but rarely actually existed if it ever did.

Discussion: Whole Foods rabbit care standards.

I could subtitle this, rabbit production done right on an institutional scale, but out of reach for small operations. Before I get to the rest of this post which is going to be a bit long probably, I want to note that I'm not a fan of a 40 degree morning mid August.

There has been a lot of uproar from some pet rabbit groups about the inclusion of rabbit meat for sale at Whole Foods Market in some places. Right now it is a non universal program based on the local availability of rabbit to those stores. http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/department/article/rabbit One of the things you can note in that link is a link to their animal welfare standards. If you haven't clicked through to read it here.

I read through it, and it isn't overly legalese in its presentation. It is in fact a clear document stating the requirements for keeping rabbits for sale to Whole Foods. I'm going to start with the ethical side of the keeping of the animals, and move on to the difficulties to the farm after I have covered the pure ethics and animal welfare side. I'm going to go through in some detail below the cut.