Don’t be so squeamish says author who killed a wild rabbit for her tea
NOVELIST Jeanette Winterson yesterday hit back at claims that she was ‘callous’ for posting photographs of a rabbit she had killed, skinned and cooked for raiding her vegetable patch.
She said too many meat-eaters were ‘squeamish’ and needed to face the reality that animals were slaughtered to put food on their plates, adding: ‘They are not made of fairy dust, they don’t drop out of the sky.’
Yesterday the author, best known for the bestseller Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, sparked a frenzy on Twitter after posting pictures of the unfortunate animal lying disembowelled on her chopping board with the caption: ‘Rabbit ate my parsley. I am eating the rabbit.’
Miss Winterson, 54, who lives in the village Upper Slaughter in the Cotswolds, went on to describe how she had cooked it in cider with rosemary and thyme for a meal with ‘no waste, no packaging, no processing and no food miles’.
But she managed to antagonise some of her 34,000 followers by pointing out that its head would make a ‘great glove puppet’ before feeding its entrails to her cat.
Yesterday animal rights campaigner Mimi Bekhechi, associate director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said the public were right to be ‘outraged’. She added: ‘ Jeanette Winterson makes a solid point about the horrors of modern farming, but that doesn’t diminish her own callousness.
‘Rabbits are sensitive, smart, social animals who form life-long bonds, and each has a personality in his or her own right.
‘Snuffing them out for a fleeting moment of taste is arrogant, ignorant and cruel, whether they are trapped, factory farmed or shot.’
However the author hit back at her critics, insisting unprecedented hordes of bunnies had been munching her flowers and vegetables.
‘The rabbit population is out of control this year – nobody knows why,’ she told BBC Radio 4’s World At One, adding: ‘You can’t simply leave them to breed.
‘It seems to me if you’re going to cull a rabbit, you might as well eat it – why waste it?’ She went on to say: ‘I have got a rabbit population which is decimating my vegetable garden and my flower garden.
‘Now, either I stand by and let that happen or I deal with it. I live in the country, I’ve lived here for 20 years, I’m going to deal with it.’
She told the programme she had not expected her photographs to go viral, describing some of her critics as trolls who ‘just love to go online, they are not interested in having an argument, they just want to fire abuse’.
But she welcomed the debate her posts had sparked, saying: ‘There ought to be a discussion, because I would like people to understand what it means to eat animals. They are not made of fairy dust, they don’t drop out of the sky.
‘If you eat meat, why are you squeamish about seeing someone gut a rabbit with her own hands and eat it?’
One follower had branded her ‘sick’ and said she would boycott her books – prompting Miss Winterson to suggest that a reading list confined to vegetarian authors would be extremely restrictive.
Rabbits are legally classified as pests and cause an estimated £100million of damage every year, wrecking crops as well as undermining riverbanks with their burrows, increasing the risk of floods.
Legislation dating back to the 1950s puts an ‘obligation’ on landowners to kill wild rabbits, but says that this has to be done in a humane manner.
Yesterday some reactions online were supportive, with Rachel Moon posting: ‘Funny how people who eat meat can be offended by this. What do you think you are eating in your Sunday roast?’
And Cotswolds pest controller Adam Eastwood, 28, backed Winterson, saying: ‘I’ve never known a year like it for rabbits – it’s down to the mild winter which gave them more time to breed.
‘People who’ve lived around here all their lives see trapping rabbits as an everyday thing that’s happened for years. If it controls the rabbits and puts a meal on your table, who can argue with that?’