So today is butchering day for the roosters.  Last night I helped catch them while they were roosting and early this morning Tom drove them to the butcher.  They will come home wrapped in plastic.

This is an interesting transition for me.  I have been a vegetarian since I was a teenager and bit into a piece of chicken, chewed on a piece of cartilage and looked down and saw a vein.  That was the last meat I had.  I thought it was gross.  I am not sure I was aware of the cruelties of the feedlots and slaughterhouses or issues of antibiotic residuals, but I did read the books of the day like Laurel’s Kitchen and Diet for a Small Planet.  My family was not too surprised so I guess I had my leanings for a while.  My grandmother even got me a subscription to Vegetarian Times.

But now I am more mature (right?).  And it does not make a lot of sense for me to be eating factory produced fake meat products when we have healthfully and humanely raised meat from our farm.  So I have been gradually eating chicken and beef that we have raised.  (Not the pork or lamb yet though.)  It has been a process having not eaten meat in more than 30 years.  But I am getting there.  I wonder what the 16 year old me would have thought of the 47 year old me.

LAMBING UPDATE: Wink, Bambam 2, Dete and Lambikins are all doing well.  We are still waiting on Tanya who is showing some signs of early labor.  Hopefully this one goes better than the last one!