Personal relationships

So I told a friend of mine not too long ago that I thought people should have a more personal relationship with their food. I meant not just personal but I think there should be a spiritual element as well. Growing up we raised our own cattle for beef. Usually in the spring we would buy a calf and then the following fall we would butcher it ourselves. We always made sure our cows were as tame as possible, it just made life easier. It was easier if we had to treat them for something, or anything really if you could just walk right up to the cow and say hello. (People always ask me if making friends with the cow made it harder to eat later; have you ever *met* a cow, they are stupid and a pain in the ass! But I did like some of our cows.) So having friendly cows (sometimes we would come home to escaped cows on the front porch!) made slaughter time much easier. Just behind our barn we had a great big tree and in the tree we had a big chain pulley with a triangular shaped rack with two big hooks at the bottom two corners on it. It was for hoisting up a cow or deer or whatever by their back feet so you could skin it and gut it more easily. So we would call the cow up to the barn with a bucket of grain. We'd walk him over to the butchering tree and feed him grain and tell him (or sometimes her) what a good cow he is and how glad that he will be tasty and then we would shoot him in the head and then proceed with butchering. Now some people just think that this is a horrible thing to do. But I figure this, the cow had as good of a life as we could make it, lots of grass and water a big pasture to roam around in. And at the end he was surrounded by love and gratitude, sounds like a good way to go. This wasn't overtly spiritual but there was a sense of gratitude about the whole procedure and conveying some of that gratitude to the cow.