Here's the short rub: I'm a longtime vegetarian/vegan (~18/10 years, respectively) but, now bear with me here, I spent about 10 hours yesterday elbow-deep in a lamb carcass. I've also given that lamb stitches when she got caught on a piece of loose fencing after a storm, hand-fed her a handful of oats every night for the last 12 months, and slept out in the pasture with her to protect her for the night when she was too scared to go into her pen after her first shearing. My name is Andrew and I have CCDD (Chronic Cognitive Dissonance Disorder).

There's a particularly black-and-white quality to vegetarianism when your food comes from Safeway/Carrefour - did you buy the chicken breast or the tofu? The tri-tip or the pumpkin? Things get a bit more gray when your food comes from the field outside your window. How do you fertilize that soil to grow the soybeans that make your tofu? How do you manage pasture in fallow when pumpkins aren't in season?

Yes, I've read Will Bonsall and I know that veganic farming is a theoretical closed-loop system devoid of animal input. I also know what my personal capacity is and know that this is not currently within my reach. I also have a dog - and there's the rub. Dogs are not really omnivores and they are certainly not vegetarians. But the industrial animal economy is brutal and I refuse to participate. Thus a Sunday of butchering. Our dog will eat for close to a year (supplemented by house-grown/raised pumpkins and eggs) off of the work I did yesterday and thanks to the life given for him. We've also successfully avoided paying someone else to do work that I do not trust anyone else to do right - I've seen how animals are raised and treated for the most part, and I'm not going to play that game. In the meantime, we don't buy fertilizer and don't use a mower/trimmer for 5 acres. We also have very warm wool pillows, several pairs of leather gloves, and some mocassins.

So, now the question, for those of you who raise your own meat: what are the major considerations, putting aside taste (our boy is very happy with just about anything we've put in front of him, from wild turkey and quail to goat and sheep), for choosing animals to raise? An obvious huge one for us is Food Conversion Ratio (FCR) - how many calories of food do you feed your future food? Poultry is superior to four-legged beasts in general, but many more chickens/turkeys have to be butchered than sheep/cattle/goat/pig. On the other hand, poultry provides ready-to-use manure that does not need composting (most ruminants pass intact seeds, and therefore using their manure for fertilizer without composting is a sure-fire way to seed your land with whatever they're eating). On the other other hand, sheep provide wool and (eventually) leather, two byproducts not accompanying birds (yes, we've done goose but the amount of useable down/feather is negligible at small scale and with human practices). Ease of raising and ease of butchering are also big factors. Cattle are out of the question for many reasons (picky eaters, poor FCR), but the most significant of which is simply handling them. I can wrangle and/or tackle a 250# sheep when they need a vaccine or hoof trim, but I'm not trying to get stomped by an 800# steer. Actual feed cost is another factor - our current menagerie of animals is only fed at a supplemental level, mostly for training (i.e. a handful of grain brings the sheep to their pen for the night), so the input cost is close to nil. Other considerations? Breeding ease? Alternative byproducts? Nutritional value? I know there are both meat eaters and vegetarian pet owners here, so I'd love to hear some opinions.