Like I said, Arnold Harris says some of the damnedest things.

"By the way. Rabbit doesn’t taste bad, if it ever comes down to that."

That’s what my dad says, Social Security just ain’t cutting it for him and my mom .

Well, I’m one of the damnedest guys you will encounter around here. So I say some of the damnedest things to earn and keep that exalted status.

I never spout off about animal behavior. Mostly because I don’t really give a damn about what a cat may be thinking.  We keep and feed them mainly for amusement. The only behavior control we expect to exercize over our cat of moment to keep him from pissing on our leather-upholstered furniture. (Stefi buys these pump bottles of cat repellant and sprays it around like incense at a catholic church funeral service.)

That, and we don’t want the cat to try his fangs on the rabbit that we’ve also kept around here since our daughter in Milwaukee found out she is allergic to them.  (Like so many parents, we get stuck with our kids’ pets. Luckily  for them, they know better than to try bringing a dog around here. ) In any case, whenever we put the cat and rabbit together to romp around the kitchen, the rabbit tries humping the cat, who responds in turn with his canines.

By the way. Rabbit doesn’t taste bad, if it ever comes down to that.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

"On the other hand, I like cats. Always have. Always will. They don’t stink….”

I have couple of friends that say that my cats stink. But, then again, I think that those guys, my friends, stink.

By the way, Arnold, my dog suggests that I should boycott Dean’s World. All this interpretation of Animal Behavior is really bugging her.

I don’t bond with any other kinds of animals. And I have no taboos about eating their meat except as described above.

As for companionship, I have a good-looking and intelligent wife. All things considered, she’s a far better companion that any animal I could think of offhand.

As for hunting them, I wouldn’t shoot any animal unless I intended to skin, cook and eat it. Which is a hell of a lot of trouble to go through for a mooseburger. (I had grilled mooseburger one time back in the ’50s, from a tavern owner friend who brought some back from a hunt in Canada.) So my guns are reserved for gunrange sports marksmanship contests. And self-protection if it ever comes to that.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

I suspect that the "squick" factor long term will be what leads people to more and more move toward vat-grown meat. When you can use cloning and similar technology to just make meat without actually killing any animals to get it, people will (as generations go by) get less and less interested in actually killing any animals. Not to mention that it’ll probably eventually be cheaper.

"What is the logical premise of the suggestion that if you wouldn’t kill it, you shouldn’t eat it?"

It’s the chickenhawk smear applied to food.

Me, I’ll eat just about anything that don’t eat me first. I haven’t killed anything higher up the food chain than fish, but I expect that will change.

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