She sits so still this time, as if she wants her picture taken. Even though this bunny has been in my yard often enough this season that I would like to consider us friends, I still can't really get very close. She's pretty shy I guess. But not this day. This day I talk softly, asking permission, telling her she's so pretty....and brave for letting me step nearer. I like bunnies. I try to keep this a bit of a secret from my gardening friends. They seem to express different sentiments about these backyard guests. Things I wouldn't want my bunny to hear. It would be too disturbing. Admittedly, this is one of the reasons I don't try to have a vegetable garden myself. But still. 
Last summer. There is a strange absence of chipmunks at the cottage. Not a one comes up on the deck to pay me a visit. No amount of peanuts for no length of time is adequate to call them from the forest, if they are there at all. Normally I can have as many as seven or eight vying for my treats. They are named because most of them have some defining feature, something that can be noticed when they are up close and personal like this, taking peanuts from my hand. But not last summer. Last summer I actually have to wait until I am home to make friends with the ones in the backyard.
Bunnies and chipmunks and geese and loons. Seagulls and ducks and beavers and foxes and otters. Raccoons, skunks, possums. Countless songbirds. Large turtles. Lizards and snakes and bullfrogs. There is in my life, both city and otherwise, an abundance of animal life to interact with in respectful, appropriate ways.
But I wouldn't think of eating any of them.
It doesn't even occur to me.
Until Suradet asks.
Two squirrels in the yard make a spectacle of their quarrel, chasing and being chased in the grass and around the trunk of a tree in a spiral of contempt. Suradet, visiting from Thailand for the first time, watches out my back kitchen window and asks me. "Aroi mia?" "Are these tasty?"
I've since seen squirrels, skinned and splayed on sticks, for sale at the market. To eat. Not here. There. There they raise crickets and beetles and meal worms. meant for human consumption and sold by the basket fulls, with large scoops and plastic bags, as if it were the bulk food section of the grocery store. I've since watched Eak, one of our boys, catch a mouse by hand and roast it over the fire for a bed time snack.
But standing by my window with Suradet those many years ago now, I didn't understand. Not the question. And not the paradigm.
Suradet would ask the same question about road kill. Why doesn't anyone come to get this for dinner? He seems actually perturbed that a good meal who be left to rot like that.
And I didn't understand. Not the question. And not the paradigm.
And then, I'm there, and we're sitting around the circle with the children, and he's telling the children about this strange thing he saw in Canada when he was here.
"In Canada", he explains, "there is so much food, that they let it run free in their backyards." "In Canada", he explains, "there is so much food that they let it lie on the side of the road to rot."
And the children's eyes are wide, trying to imagine a place where there's that much abundance.
I wish I was making this up.
There's a 'thing' for people who travel to various places, particularly under resourced places, called 'counter-culture shock'. It's the strangeness one experiences coming home to realize that a radically new perspective has been gained, and one's own culture can never be seen quite the same again.
I have this. And when I step carefully, gently, reassuringly closer to my bunny friend whom I will not eat, I think of it. I think of all the food I have, all my life. Every meal. Something to eat. And how there's so much food running loose in my backyard that I have the bizarre luxury of making friends with it.
This can't be guilt. I have had no control over my birthright, my being Canadian, or even the socio-economic class into which I was born. So the sense of it isn't an anguishing, crippling thing. Rather, I have learned to let it motivate me otherwise. Motivate me to gratitude. Motivate me to releasing all the abundance of my life to these priceless ones who'll eat anything.
Without pity.
With dignity.
Reciprocally giving and receiving. Cross-culture-shocked into realizing that somehow in all my bunny abundance, there more in this whole big world than I could ever possibly have the capacity to receive.
