“Have you ever taken legs off a chicken? The back legs are a ball and socket, like on a chicken. Find where the thighs meet with the spine, and cut through the joint. With the forelegs, cut underneath the shoulder blade.”
Beard framing his face mask, Nick DeLauri stood outside Vermont Butcher Shop, his sustainable meatery in Londonderry, and explained how to break down the whole rabbit he had brought me curbside. “Now you have just the spine and loins. Take the sternum and neck off, chunk the rest out with a cleaver, and braise the whole thing.”
A little Dijon mustard, white wine, herbs, and cream, and the lapin à la moutarde
The Meat Industry’s Bestiality Problem
Big Agriculture’s artificial insemination is abusive. Most states have rewritten old laws to absolve it but some haven’t.
Illustration by Sally Deng
It isn’t spoken of much, but a significant chunk of the Kansas economy depends on pervasive violations of its anti-bestiality laws. In 2010, the Kansas legislature revised the state’s “criminal sodomy” statute historically vague laws criminalizing multiple forms of nonprocreative sex to delete language that criminalized consensual gay sex. But it preserved other itemized crimes in the law, including making “sodomy between a person and an animal” punishable by up to six months in prison, defining the crime to encompass “any penetration of the female sex organ by … any object.” Although it made allowances for “generally recognized health care practices,” it offered no exemption for everyday animal breeding. This makes Kansas an outlier. The overwhelming majority of state