The Black Rabbit - Part 1
The Case for Meat Rabbits
Do you know that your Führer is a vegetarian, and that he does not eat meat because of his general attitude toward life and his love for the world of animals? Do you know that your Führer is an exemplary friend of animals, and even as a chancellor, he is not separated from the animals he has kept for years?...The Führer is an ardent opponent of any torture of animals, in particular vivisection, and has declared to terminate those conditions...thus fulfilling his role as the savior of animals, from continuous and nameless torments and pain.
— Neugeist/Die Weisse Fahne (contemporaneous pro-Nazi children’s magazine)
I am now confronted with the depth of my own hypocrisy. Standing over a little rabbit I have come to love over many months, I am inches away from the devise that will dislocate his head from his cervical spine thereby robbing him of his life – instantly (I hope). I am shaking so hard I must put him back in his carrier and back outside with his friends. I can buy meat in the grocery store without a second thought, but I am reduced to a bundle of trembling nerves at my first attempt of trying to kill and butcher what I eat. Why?
Tell your friends that you are thinking about raising meat rabbits and you will soon have none. When I tell my mom that I have decided to keep meat rabbits she stops talking to me for two months. My mom had been away from church for well over 20 years and the suggestion of me raising my own sustainably harvested ethically raised meat was enough to drive her to the nearest church to pray for my soul. She only started talking to me again when she had convinced herself that I wouldn’t eat any of the rabbits and would only sell the babies as pets to help pay for rabbit pellet food. So now I just lie to her. My mom wears fur and she eats meat.
Glenn Close was a young, soon to be celebrity with no power, hired to perform a patriarchal script for a largely male audience. Perhaps Glenn Close is not the best role model for sustainable agriculture. Still, my earliest experience with someone cooking rabbit was in the movie Fatal Attraction. In that film, a psychotic woman boils a pet rabbit alive. The association in my mind became “only crazy people do this.”
The common theme in an environmentally aware narrative is vegetarianism, but all of the vegans I know have cats or dogs that eat meat. Shouldn’t they also be concerned about the animals being fed to their own animals? Hitler was vegetarian and that was no guard against extremes in human cruelty. I am trying to understand our collective cultural hypocrisy about eating meat and what sustainable regenerative food options are available to me on a small-scale urban homestead.
This essay is my manual for surviving the moral future; I believe this is a manual for right relationship in a violent world, a world where small acts might just build an ethical and sustainable future.
It’s 2015, one version of my world did end. My younger sister killed herself. It’s 2018 and winter and cold in BC and I am stunned by new green leaves that I have discovered on a strawberry plant that I abandoned on my patio last year. I am certain this plant has something to teach me about resilience. It’s still 2018 but now it is summer, and I am shocked that you really can grow all you can eat in three square feet. I find myself on my little balcony thinning carrot seedlings, and I am sobbing and I can’t explain why. Now it’s 2022 and I have a large permaculture garden and backyard chickens. It’s 2023 and I now have meat rabbits. Let me walk you through that arc.
Watership Down
I realized after my sister killed herself in 2015 that in Hollywood movies death is a failure that is usually reserved for the villain; life is the prize for the hero. Rarely is death depicted as the reward at the end of a life well lived. It is apparently radical, ancient, taboo, and quietly revolutionary to believe that death might be a reward.
The first initiation myth I encountered as a child of six was the famous book turned movie Watership Down. I was at a children’s birthday party and left traumatized. Watership Down terrified me as a child because it was too true. It is one of the few modern stories that treats animal death not as horror but as ritual, ecology, and inevitability. But as a child, all I could see was fear, shadows, danger, blood, and the Black Rabbit as doom. As an adult, I can see initiation, leadership, belonging, and the Black Rabbit as shamanic psychopomp — a guide, the great grandfather who has passed over and helps me to pass over (ideally).
Watership Down was never a children’s film. It was a myth about accepting mortality disguised as a story about rabbits. Instead of fleeing death, as an adult I would need to learn to walk beside it. Revisiting that film with adult eyes I saw what a relief and how beautiful the black rabbit really was. I would soon learn that farming is an initiation into my own version of death literacy. Having livestock will always mean having dead stock. In witnessing death on the farm (even just a small urban farm), I am better able to recognize the parts of me that die every day so that I can continue living. This is not metaphor. This is the literal process of:
· neural pruning
· emotional shedding
· releasing outdated identity
· allowing grief to compost old versions of myself
· surrendering childhood roles
· integrating trauma
· becoming vast enough to hold experience, and with any luck
· becoming porous to meaning
Once upon a time, not in Hollywood, this kind of death literacy was common to all agrarian, Indigenous, and ancestral cultures.
I now look at farming as my daily apprenticeship with mortality. Livestock requires me to witness birth, witness decline, witness sickness, witness necessity, witness mercy and witness transformation. In my garden I walk past a small burial site marked with only a stone for a loved little bird; her contributions to my life are still held with reverence. Farming is accepting that something dies so something else can live. This is not tragedy — this is ecology. I am beginning to learn that farming is the curriculum of life and death in right proportions, delivered slowly, cyclically, tenderly. Farming allows my psyche to practice, again and again, in small deaths, what my sister’s death forced on me all at once in the absence of any training. Once upon a time, still not in Hollywood, to ancestral traditions this was wisdom.
I personally witnessed in my own family that grief affects people in two ways, it either closes you or it sanctifies you. Sanctification requires embodied practice. Sanctification requires ritual. Farming gives me daily touch, soil, animals who depend on me, cycles that don’t stop for grief, babies that arrive whether I feel strong or not, the humility that I have no control over outcomes, and the sacred knowledge that not all dying is failure. Every time I bury a little bird, or watch an animal I care for age, or hold a sick animal, I am releasing, recognizing, and transforming. I am hopeful that this fluency in death will eventually give me fluency in life.
In Watership Down, the Black Rabbit isn’t death as annihilation. The Black Rabbit is death as invitation. A figure of dignity, calm acceptance, and quiet inevitability. The Black Rabbit exists in all our lives, in the absence of the ones who have passed before us, and in the parts of us that fall away every day. Death within the self is the engine of change. Every spiritual tradition names this:
· Buddhists call it annica (impermanence)
· Taoists call it returning
· Mystics call it union through dissolution
· Indigenous teachings call it shapeshifting
· Depth psychology calls it ego death
· The I Ching calls it breaking apart to become whole
Modern Western storytelling is rooted in triumph narratives, individualism, meritocracy, and invincibility fantasies. In cinema when the villain dies it is always deserved, the hero is rewarded with life, danger is conquered, and mortality is transcended. The trouble is that we all know this is childish theology disguised as entertainment. It reinforces the idea that death equals loss and only life equals success.
Jonathan Swift knew this. The “immortals” the Struldbruggs, were a race of immortal people in his famous satire Gulliver’s Travels. The immortals are granted eternal life but are cursed with perpetual aging, becoming miserable, decrepit, and forgetful. Unending life to Swift was not a blessing, it was a burden bordering on curse. In contrast to the Strudlbruggs, in nearly every older spiritual, philosophical, and mythic system death is a return, a homecoming, It is a form of release. Life is the trial. Death is the reward. A reward that never comes for the Strudlbruuggs on Gulliver’s travels.
When my sister died, I saw that suffering can make a body uninhabitable, exhaustion can make life unbearable, I realized that release can be mercy, grief can be praise and death is just as often a doorway, not a failure. Grief initiates you into a different truth: life is astonishing and precious precisely because it ends. Death is not the opposite of life — it is the completion of it. But those are not the stories we tell ourselves.
In the small Canadian town I call home I am surrounded by rapturist Christians who believe that the faithful are rewarded by escaping death, the unfaithful are punished by experiencing it, and death is disaster unless it’s replaced by the magical rescue of their Lord Jesus Christ. I think this is the equivalent of Hollywood theology with a Bible wrapper. Unlike Swift’s satire, rapturist Christians imagine immortality as the prize and mortality as the curse.
What if as a society we remembered that death is not an error? Death is all an integral part of the design. What if we believed that like grief, death is a teacher? Instead of stories about how “Death took something from me, and I must triumph and be resurrected,” we could instead write from a place where “Death changed me, and I must learn the pattern.” The typical hero’s journey is one individual against the world who always triumphs in the end. But when did we lose all our initiation myths? For that myth you have to read Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey which picks up where the hero’s journey ends. The heroine doesn’t just overcome the obstacles in her way (where the hero’s journey ends), at the end of her journey she has to see through the binaries, to interact with a complex world that includes the heroine but is also larger than her lifetime or culture. The heroine at the end of her journey discovers unity and balance - that is the real treasure.
Is it any wonder our modern day stories and movies feel so stunted and incomplete?
Veganism
I am confident that the suggestion of meat rabbits would deeply offend the younger version of myself; I was a vegan vegetarian for 11 years. All it took was one philosophy class on animal rights in second year university and I never touched animal products, including leather, until well after I had finished three university degrees (of course I still benefitted from medical interventions all previously tested on animals).
Vegan vegetarianism was not a diet for me, it was an identity. It was my religion. I had read all the required vegan vegetarian literature from Diet for a New America to The Sexual Politics of Meat. Through their eyes, I identified eating animals with the feminine experience of being dominated and exploited. I would brag that I ran the Honolulu Marathon as a vegan vegetarian (I would always leave out the part about being slow and taking lots of walk breaks). As the years progressed and despite the excellent plant-based proteins and supplements that I regularly consumed, my body wasted away and I developed persistent abdominal pain. Some bodies tolerate vegan vegetarianism well, mine did not. In my early 20s I strived to be a size zero and vegan vegetarianism helped me to get there.
But then my body started to fail, and I realized that there are people in all kinds of places all over the world who do not have the luxury of being vegan. And suddenly if it wasn’t possible for them, I realized it couldn’t be a true moral. The moral, like all of them, was more complicated. I watched a documentary about African indigenous culture and an elder was asked, “what is happiness?” He replied without hesitation, “happiness is meat, when there is no meat there is no happiness.”
As it turns out, morality is not purity. Morality is relationship. And relationship is complicated. This is the line that vegans, industrial meat-eaters, and my mother all avoid, though in different ways. Veganism for me was an ethical ideal, not an ecological reality. I was trying to live the cleanest possible life by not killing, causing no harm and not being complicit. But veganism as an absolute moral stance carries an unspoken assumption: “I can choose purity if I try hard enough.” But purity is rarely possible in ecological systems. All beings are interdependent. All lives require the death of something — plant, animal, microorganism, landscape.
I realized after 11 years of vegan-vegetarianism that not everyone in the world can be vegan, but more importantly I met the limits of universal morality. If a moral principle:
· only works in wealthy nations,
· only works with ideal soil, climate, and nutrition,
· only works if you have access to supplements,
· only works when suffering is outsourced to agriculture and monocrop systems
then it may be a choice, but it is not a universal moral truth.
Universal morals must apply across: climate, geography, subsistence patterns, biome, season, ability and tradition. The moral truth must be deeper than “don’t eat animals.” It must include: reciprocity, responsibility, stewardship, minimizing harm, not pretending harm doesn’t exist and the humility of living within limits. This is the world that Indigenous cultures have lived in for tens of thousands of years, and god damn it that is the world I am trying to get back.
Just to be clear, the elder who said “happiness is meat” was not talking about indulgence. He was talking about security, belonging, survival, and dignity. For many subsistence cultures:
· meat means winter survival
· meat means abundance after scarcity
· meat means community ritual
· meat means the successful return of the hunter
· meat means the animal has given itself
· meat means you are fed and strong
· meat means continuity of ancestors
“Happiness is meat” is not gluttony. It is gratitude in its purest form. It is the opposite of factory farming.
So the next problem to solve is, how do I learn to stay in relationship even when it hurts? This is the question that Eastern and Indigenous philosophies try to solve; “right relationship.” Veganism tries to solve the tension by removing the relationship. Industrial meat solves it by ignoring the relationship. I am learning through trial and error that the harder path is to stay in relationship even when it hurts. Traditional cultures have always been able to do:
· gratitude
· ritual
· care
· reciprocity
· responsibility
· limited taking
· honoring the animal
· accepting necessity
· witnessing death carefully
· not taking more than one needs
This is the lost human role of steward, not consumer. It’s harder. It’s more honest.
And it’s more spiritually grounded.
Every time we face the life cycle with courage by tending new birth, burying death, feeding our animals, facing necessity and refusing to turn away we integrate life and loss. I am practicing, with animals, what I could not practice with my sister’s sudden death:
· staying present through death
· without shame
· without denial
· without collapse
· without betrayal of the bond.
Perhaps I am asking too much of modern society…
Authorship:
This essay was originally written in 2024, before I began working with AI. At the time, I knew the subject mattered, but I couldn’t fully articulate why. The writing stalled not because the information was unclear, but because the cultural conversation around it was thin, avoidant, and fragmented.
The clarity about why this essay matters emerged later, through a series of conversations with ChatGPT in December 2025. Those conversations did not generate the essay itself. All of the prose is mine. All of the experiences are mine. All quotations are mine and referenced to their original sources. I revised and rewrote the text extensively.
What ChatGPT contributed were the bullet-pointed sections: not as authored content, but as synthesized reflections, pattern recognition, and framing that helped me think more clearly about the cultural gaps surrounding this topic. I’m naming that collaboration explicitly because the ethics of authorship matter to me — and because this essay sits at the intersection of lived experience, cultural silence, and meaning-making in dialogue.