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Cooking pots ready for a return to rabbit

They're cheap and have a low-carbon footprint - is rabbit the answer to guilt-free meat-eating?
Rabbit - Juvenile Eastern Cottontail
Is rabbit making a return to the cooking pot?

Meat is bad for the planet, but I must admit I can't quite give it up and my general search for a low-guilt, low-carbon solution carries on. So far I've cut down as much as possible, and concentrated on only ever buying meat from a nearby farm and a lovely butcher who gets everything locally. Still the guilt (I blame the nuns!) roars on.

This week however I came up with a new solution: rabbit. They sell them in my local butcher, hanging by their hind legs from a butcher's hook at the back, skin and bunny ears still on. Rabbits live wild, spend their days bouncing happily around the hills, eating grass, discussing who'll play Bigwig in Watership Down II, and generally living life to the full until the rabbiters come out. Their carbon footprint? Just the farting and the exhaust fumes of their killers, I should think.

I asked how they were selling: "like gold dust" apparently, the butcher had got 75 in on Friday, and today (Monday) had only the three left hanging there. In fact rabbit seems to be making a bit of a comeback, unsurprisingly really: it's not only green but it's reasonably cheap (my butcher was selling them for £3.50, but I've heard tales of them changing hands for a couple of quid) and in these credit crunch days that is no small thing.

But are you ready for the reality check? Look, I really wish that I was like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver and raised my own pigs and scratched their backs and chuckled at back episodes of Pigs In Space together before slitting their throats but the reality is that all the meat I've ever bought has been skinned and ready for the pot.

But not rabbit. This is how the buying bit unfolds: I ask for the rabbit, the butcher reaches it down and then grabs the cleaver to his right. Wham! Off comes the little bunny head. Wham! Wham! Off come the little bunny feet. Whuuzzt! Off comes - oh my god - the lovely soft bunny fur. Then chop, chop, chop, the whole bloody lot is swept into a bag and tied up and handed over the counter, the butcher still chatting away about how the rabbit market is moving as I try to keep a polite expression on my face.

You definitely cross a certain boundary when you start eating rabbit. Is it just because of the often-commented-on "cuddly-animal" paradigm, where attractive animals like otters, penguins, blue whales, get more attention and support than slugs (not endangered, I hasten to add, sadly) and slow worms (which are a protected species in Britain, in case you didn't know)?

I know at least one person who point blank refuses to contemplate eating rabbit, and we regularly act as if the French are a nation of murderers because of their fondness for horse, frog legs, snails, foie gras (okay, that last one is pretty psychopathic). But that is all going to have to change if we want to keep eating meat. We're going to have get a lot more accepting, and ickle-wickle bunny rabbits are just the beginning. It's that or tofu.

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