A goat was seized from a lady's car at the Winona Tires Plus in 2009. I wrote a letter that turned out to be wrong.

Although recently made illegal in Winona, the proper way to butcher a chicken involves first rendering it senseless by disabling the bird's nervous system and then quickly severing an artery so that the bird bleeds out quickly. Only a novice chops the head off to let the bird flop around to entertain (and terrify) the kids. Chickens without heads really do run around, but the meat gets terribly bruised and dirty in the process.

You can't relate a tip like this in mixed company anymore, as people will think you're weird, or worse. A hundred, or even 50, years ago knowledge of home butchering was as common as a Facebook account is today. The recent furor over Brett the Tires Plus goat is a ringing example of our culture's loss of useful knowledge in place of perceived "sophistication."

As the photo on the front of Wednesday's Winona Daily News clearly shows, the goat in question was a "wether" - a castrated male - that despite being a dairy breed, was clearly not intended for breeding or milking. While the trunk of a car isn't the normal or ideal place to transport an animal, Minnesota health boards prohibit the on-farm butchering of livestock for sale. A farmer can set up his or her own abattoir, but the licensing fees and commercial kitchen required are not cheap and rarely pay for themselves in a reasonable amount of time. Accordingly, a person buying an animal for meat either has to drive the animal to a butcher or rely on a friend for help, one of which sounds to have been the plan.

Yes, the trunk of a car doesn't seem humane, but it is a slippery and seemingly arbitrary slope. I've seen plenty of hog, turkey and beef semi-trailers roll through Winona, and the packing density doesn't seem drastically different. The unchangeable fact is that meat comes from living animals, and 99 percent of the hamburgers eaten in Winona last week came from confinement finishing operations that are hardly different from the trunk of a Buick. Read "The Jungle" or "Fast Food Nation," or look around on Google Maps for a Swift packing plant. Although there are exceptions, the story hasn't changed that much. If you want quality meat, either visit the farm you buy from or raise the animal yourself.

Let the vegetarians rant and rave, but everyone else, please stop the righteous indignation.