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When Buns Cry:
Whole Foods Marketplace
-by Thumper S. Thompson, rabbit social critic
The Prince with a Thousand Enemies has a new enemy.
Surely you've read of the Whole Food Market's' recent announcement of a pilot program selling Iowa-raised rabbit meat in certain regional stores of theirs. Outcry from this country's people who own the third most popular pet here have been ignored by Whole Foods Market.
Kind of like how the FDA ignores the fact that rabbits are mammals and refuses to allow them the same protections other mammalian food animals receive under the Humane Slaughter Act. According to the FDA, rabbits are poultry and from there, the definition of reality dilutes further until reality for rabbits within the FDA universe is sadly akin to one of Stewie Griffin's multiverses with sentience not part of being a character's profile by any stroke of the pen.
But then, what is real? How do you define real? Is it ok for an economy or mainstream culture to have corporations controlling the food supply sector who force us to accept their corporate priority of the bottom line over what is SO OFFENSIVE to one third of pet owners here? Does the threat of a boycott mean nothing to them? Now the dollar used in this way isn't meaningful?
What's wrong with this picture is not so much that Whole Foods Market is not only selling rabbit meat as food for some heartless meat flesh foodies in spite of the vocal and valuable one third of pet owners who splurge on their pet bunny rabbits, it's that in doing so, Whole Foods Market is being complicit with the egregious oversight of the FDA of rabbits being mammals and requiring the same protections which other mammalian food animals have under the Humane Slaughter Act.
As well as this suspension of reality by the FDA which summarily dismisses the rabbit's right to even be scientifically categorized correctly as a mammal, and therefore as a rabbit, or lagomorph; Whole Foods Market then presents the utter conundrum of their selling 'cruelty free' cosmetics in those same stores as some sort of corporate acknowledgement of rabbits' need for mercy from human moral inadequacies. Can you almost see the inner departmental quabbles within Whole Foods Market's corporate culture? How bogus is any reply they could possibly make to the pet rabbit loving public about selling rabbit meat flesh with corporate morals as muddy as that?
And it doesn't stop there. At least in The Matrix, the little baby humans get to grow up in their incubation vats.
Baby Bunnies Ripped From Their Mothers and Culture
According to Whole Foods Market, it's ok to separate a little baby from its mother and litter mates long before Nature would ever have been exposed to them. In doing so, Whole Foods Market shows complete ignorance of the behavior of reproductive rabbits.
According to R. M. Lockley's Private Life of the Rabbit, which is the ONLY and therefore seminal published work on the European rabbit's wild behavior, rabbit's mate for life and live in large underground cities called warrens where they stay together in family tribes, so to speak, for generations. Socially, they are nearly unequaled for close ties and they stay together while rearing young for months. The flesh meat rabbit meat Whole Foods Market is selling are mere babes. Babes who have no protections as being the properly labeled as a mammalian species.
Sure there are lots of countries selling dog meat and cat meat. That is not the point. The point is that it is not mainstream in this country. Unless the rabbit loving public unites into a legion of marketplace consumers, soon rabbits will lose the ground they've gained in the cruelty-free cosmetics market and puppies and kitties are next. Make no mistake, puppy and kitten meat as well as their adult counterparts (dogs and cats), will become the future victims of this highly privileged foodie-crazed monster economy which Whole Foods Market seeks to cater to, zombies with no emotional intelligence who want foie gras and veal. What's to stop that? How will rabbits ever gain ground as a sentient being when a convoluted corporate morality such as is exercised by Whole Foods Market exists. The marketplace must respond to the power of the dollar.
So make like a hippie lionhead rabbit and BOYCOTT Whole Foods Market. Listen to Lagomorpheus and join the resistance, don't be a lettucehead, HAVE A HEART FOR BABY RABBITS! Also write the FDA and your Congresspeople and tell them to protect meat rabbits under the Humane Slaughter Act! Don't be a lame-o!
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