The Hunter and the Vegan

This week I got to cross one of the "difficult conversations topics" off my list of parental duties, and Toby MAY just declare himself a vegetarian one day as a result of it.  Without any preparation or forethought, I taught Toby about hunting.

We were driving to school yesterday, down beautiful, windy, natural, Pretty River Parkway, when a hoard of hunters emerged from the woods in full camouflage gear with rifles and dead carcasses on their shoulder.

Ok FINE, there were no dead carcasses (as far as I could tell) but by rifles I mean BIG REAL GUNS that scared the crap out of me AND Toby.

It took him a bit to digest what he’d seen and we were all the way to the 10^th concession before he quietly acknowledged them.

“Mom…” he asked tentatively, “Were those ARMY men?”

“No, “ I replied hastily without thinking, “those were just hunters, Toby.”

As soon as the words left my MOUTH I knew I had opened up a can of worms.  Why couldn’t I have just let them be army men? !?!

The inevitable question ensued, “What are hunters, Mommy?”

And I decided right then and there, without input from my spouse, the Huffington post OR premeditated contemplation, that it was time that Toby learned about the food chain and the circle of life.

It was a question and information filled drive to school that day, LET ME TELL YOU. I explained to him as casually and naturally as I could put it that eating animals was natural and a way of life and that MOST of the animals we eat are raised for that purpose.  (I left out the fact that I had gone on a vegetarian hunger strike in grade 10, volunteered for PETA and obsessively wore an oversized shirt with a picture of a cow on the front that read, “Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore.”)  I told him that despite it being natural, some people don’t like it and choose to be vegetarians and that’s their choice.

Toby listened attentively,with an eerie silence I know to be a warning sign of great questions to come.

The first few questions were easy, “Did we eat LIONS?” 

No

“Gazelles?”

No

“Wildebeest?”

(Can you tell we are reading a book about Africa right now?)

“Do Vegetarians ONLY eat vegetables?”

(Tempting as it was, I clarified that they also eat beans, rice and fruits as the 15-year-old version of myself CRINGED as I oversimplified and diminished her numerous rants from the past…)

And then came the DIFFICULT questions. Everything from “I wish we didn’t have to hurt animals…” to “How are they killed ‘NICELY’?  I thought it wasn’t nice to kill anything” to “But how do we MAKE them into FOOD?”

Finally our conversation came to an end as we arrived at school.  I THOUGHT I was off the hook until exactly 24 hours later; as we rounded the bend on Pretty River Parkways this morning, there was not a hunter to be seen but the memory of yesterday’s SHOCKING conversation clearly resurfaced and Toby grew, once again, very quiet and contemplative.

I gave him his space to think and finally a confused and bemoaned groan escaped his lips as he desperately asked me about his very favourite meal “Mommy….are FAJITAS an animal?”