Wield the Knife or go Veggie?

Meet our ducks, Jemima and Egwene!

Meet the Girls

My wife and I now keep ducks! You can see them pictured here. The white one is named Jemima, after Jemima Puddleduck of Beatrix Potter fame, and the other is called Egwene, after Egwene al’Vere from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (read it. It’s awesome). The ducks have been with us two days so are still settling in. It’s great having them in the garden along with the hens. They are really expressive and comical.

Anyway…I’m facing a dilemma: Am I willing to kill an animal to eat it? Don’t get me wrong – we didn’t get the animals to kill them. We want them to be safe, happy and healthy, and like to eat their eggs. When thoughts come to (in time) the possibility of eating them, and even killing them to then eat them (when they stop laying), this gets hard for me. For some it wouldn’t be an issue, but I’m struggling with it.

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Vegetarianism?

I’m not a vegetarian. I know I could be – I was one for three years (a proper one too, not eating fish either). But I’m not a vegetarian now, and both hens and ducks are here. Though I like eating meat, I’ve never been faced with the conundrum of if I’d kill it myself or not. And I don’t think I would. But I do think I would eat it. Someone recently said to me that they think a person shouldn’t eat an animal if they aren’t prepared to kill it, hence this blog post.

Am I an awful human being? Or a hypocrite for eating what I don’t want to kill? Or are some (who choose to kill animals for food) better suited to killing them than others? Please respond…