I shot a rabbit

With my new lens. The bunny allowed me get closer than I expected, especially since my dog was straining at the leash - not to reach the rabbit but to escape from the sound of gunfire across the valley. (It puts him in a complete panic.)
Yesterday we met a man with a gun slung over his arm, looking for rabbits, and very probably today's rough shooters were after them too. This one has been lucky so far.

The local butcher sells rabbits for about a fiver and every now and again I buy one. It's tasty lean meat, entirely natural and organic. So if I'd had a gun instead instead of a camera I would have been happy to kill this one.

I'm aware that increasing numbers of people find the idea of eating animals repugnant and I was reminded of this when I read a news item today about the traditional custom of killing and eating gannet chicks on the Isle of Lewis. The practice goes back hundred of years: each summer a group of young men from the island sail far out to the lonely rock isle of Sula Sgeir where the gannets, guga in Gaelic, breed in huge numbers. For two isolated weeks the Lewis men kill, pluck, singe, salt and store the young birds in stone towers called brochs. Finally they return home to Lewis with their haul. The preserved birds are said to have a unique flavour, and one that indelibly binds the people of Lewis to their native island. The tradition is seen as a coming of age ritual for the young men and strangers have rarely been allowed to witness it, let alone participate.

The Protection of Birds Act prohibits the killing of wild birds but a special dispensation was made in 1954 to allow the guga hunt to continue. The number of chicks culled is limited to 2000. and the rapid method of killing is reckoned to preclude suffering. The gannet population on the rock is not affected and has in fact been increasing. The RSPB and the RSPCA don't oppose the hunt but the Scottish Society for the Prvention of Cruelty to Animals want it banned, calling it barbaric and inhumane and pointing out that while these birds might once have formed an essential component of the survival diet of the remote islanders, nowadays that is not so and guga meat is attracting the attention of connoisseurs willing to pay high prices for it.

The guga hunt is not the only dietary tradition that causes controversy: whaling in the Faroes is another. No such cultural considerations come to bear in the case of rabbits but still their position is ambiguous.
In the first half of the 20th century Pembrokeshire was a major source and even supplied the London meat markets via a regular early morning train. But rabbit dropped off the menu as convenient supermarket meat packs became ubiquitous and now it's mainly the province of foodies in the know. We don't generally like our pets to be food as well and rabbits have a paw in both camps; they also feature strongly in children's literature (along with lambs and piglets).

When I was small I myself refused to eat rabbit which was quite a staple at the time. My father coined the term 'hedge chicken' to avert my suspicions. I was entirely content to have that but my childish inconsistency about which animals I ate parallels a global one.

[See [url=http://www.virtualheb.co.uk/guga-hunters-of-ness-isle-of-lewis-western-isles.html] here[/url] and here for the guga hunt.]