UPDATED: Radio24syv wanted to start a debate about the treatment of animals in Denmark's agriculture sector so its hosts killed a baby rabbit with a bicycle pump and ate it. 
 
 In order to demonstrate the “widespread hypocrisy in our relationship to animals”, Danish radio station Radio24syv killed a baby rabbit on air. 
 
 The baby rabbit, Allan, was killed by repeated blows to the head with a bicycle pump and Asger Juhl, one of the radio station's hosts, later skinned it with his children and planned to eat it as rabbit stew with his family and fellow host Kristoffer Eriksen. 
 
 "I hit it hard over the neck twice so that the cervical vertebrae fractured," Juhl told broadcaster TV 2. "I was instructed by a zookeeper from Aalborg Zoo who hits several baby rabbits every week [to feed] the snakes," he added. 
 
 After a strong backlash and calls for a boycott, the radio station defended its rabbit-killing stunt by saying that it achieved its exact purpose, namely exposing the hypocrisy of those who claim to be animal lovers but eat meat. 
 
 “We killed an animal to eat it. Thus what the hosts did [Sunday] morning resembled what most of us do every day when we stand in front of the supermarket's refrigerated counter. We don't kill animals ourselves – but we buy and eat animals that have had a miserable life. And animals that were killed under the exact same controlled settings as the rabbit in the studio. Without it provoking strong reactions and boycotts,” Radio24syv wrote in a long Facebook post 
 
 The station said by killing and eating Allan, they wanted to shine a light on the conditions faced by animals in Denmark's agriculture sector. 
 
 “Danish consumers allow chicken farms to keep 13 chickens per square meter. And they accept lengthy and painful transport of animals to the slaughterhouse. In Danish pig farms, 25.000 piglets die every day, because agriculture has bred pigs that give birth to more piglets than the sow can feed. This is wasted life,” a subsequent English-language version of their Facebook post read. 
 
 The station killed the rabbit over the objections of reality star Linse Kessler , who was brought on the programme as an outspoken advocate for animal rights. Kessler tried to grab the animal and chased radio host Asger Juhl around the studio several times before being asked to leave. 
 
 "They wanted to see if they could kill him during the last show or if they had gotten too attached to him," she said in a video clip on her Facebook page. 
 
 Kessler said she thought she was capable of wresting the animal from Juhl but feared it would die a more painful death if she grabbed it. 
 
 In her video message, she said that she understood the point Radio24syv was trying to make but stressed that Allan should not have been killed on air. 
 
 “I could see that the message is actually for the best of animals but I think it is wrong,” she said. 
 
 R.I.P lille Allan Posted by Linse Kessler on Monday, May 25, 2015 
 
 Story continues below… 
 
 News of the radio stunt quickly made its way to the international media, where several outlets drew parallels with the Copenhagen Zoo's controversial killing of the giraffe Marius last year which led to intense media coverage the world over. ||||| He's the Danish radio host who killed a baby rabbit live on air, in a stunt he said was designed to ignite debate about our meat eating habits. 
 
 Asger Juhl, a presenter on 24/7, hit the nine-week-old bunny, called Alan, repeatedly with an iron bike pump after a segment on the hypocrisy of animal rights campaigners who eat supermarket meat. 
 
 He's been widely criticised for the act. Now, Asger has told Newsbeat his side of the story. 
 
 Warning - this story contains themes some readers may find disturbing. 
 
 The host said: "I did it to show the hypocrisy in the debate. Many people are outraged by what I did, at the same time many of these people will eat meat. And when they eat meat, an animal will die. 
 
 "You cannot say: 'It's terrible to kill an animal' and then eat meat. These things are connected. 
 
 "And then we did it because we wanted to eat it. We ate it yesterday night. We had it for dinner. It was nice." 
 
 "Can I ask you a question? Do you see the problem in killing an animal and then eating it?" Asger Juhl 
 
 He continued: "We are animals and we eat meat. That's the way it is, and we have to be confronted with the fact that animals die when we eat meat. This is just a fact of life." 
 
 One side effect of the stunt has been a slew of threats towards the host and his family, most of which are too graphic to be printed. 
 
 When asked whether he expected the backlash, Asger responded: "No, not in this way. I've had death threats from Russia - people from Russia wanting to kill my children, Danish listeners and people threatening to kill me. I was not prepared for that. 
 
 "I knew, however, that we would spark debate. We were provocative, on purpose. Of course there are some misunderstandings we need to deal with. People are saying we didn't do it in a humane way - we did." 
 
 He added that he was taking the death threats seriously. 
 
 One of the key criticisms of the Asger is that he bludgeoned the rabbit with a bicycle pump. 
 
 He responded: "It was made of iron. 
 
 "What I did, I called up a zoo in Denmark - a guy who kills rabbits, to feed them to the predators in the zoo. He uses an iron stick. I didn't have a stick but I did have a bicycle pump made out of iron. It's the exact same thing. 
 
 "We held it in the back of its body, and I hit it very hard. And I hit it two times more, just to be sure. But it broke the neck of the rabbit the first time. 
 
 "This is the most humane way to kill a rabbit." 
 
 On air, the presenter described the death of the rabbit in detail. 
 
 "We were also talking about how I'm feeling. I wasn't ready for a bad experience, but it was actually a bad experience in some ways. I wasn't breathing normally, I was tense," Asger said. 
 
 "It was not a comfortable minute." 
 
 When we asked if he had been expecting a difficult experience, he said: "Well, I've killed animals before. Chickens, ducks, a lot of fish." 
 
 So why was this different? 
 
 "I don't know. It's been a while since I killed a mammal. It has these nice… It had these big black eyes. It was cute. It had long fur. Maybe that's something." 
 
 Another problem many listeners had with the stunt was the lack of sensitivity they saw in killing a rabbit on air, in a light hearted, almost comic segment. 
 
 Did Asger think that cheapened his message? No: "You know, what happened just before I killed the rabbit is that one of the [guests] tried to take the rabbit from me. 
 
 "This was a woman, very well known in Denmark. She chased me around the table in the studio. 
 
 "I'd never tried anything like it. It was a very comic moment as well as a serious one." 
 
 He went on: "Are you not allowed to laugh when you go to the zoo and watch the lions eat meat? 
 
 "Are you not allowed to laugh when you go to the zoo and watch the sea lions eat live fish? 
 
 "We weren't laughing because the rabbit died." 
 
 Asger insists he ate the rabbit after the stunt and fully intended to: "It had plenty of meat. We ate it yesterday. It wasn't a full meal for two people, but almost." 
 
 "It wasn't a baby rabbit. It was a young rabbit." 
 
 He went on to talk about skinning it in the garden in front of his young children. "They felt sorry for the rabbit, especially my daughter. But at the same time she was very interested in the process of that rabbit becoming dinner." 
 
 The host told Newsbeat his bosses have been fully behind him, despite the backlash: "I have the full support of the station. I'm going on air this afternoon and we're going to speak to the angry listeners." 
 
 And what does he think they'll say to him? "That I'm an idiot." 
 
 "I don't think I am. You know what? I killed an animal and I ate it. Did you have meat yesterday? Are you going to eat meat today? In that process an animal will die." 
 
 Having said that, he isn't planning on repeating the stunt: "I have no plans to kill other animals within the next couple of days, I must tell you." 
 
 Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter, BBCNewsbeat on Instagram and Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube and you can now follow BBC_Newsbeat on Snapchat ||||| The United States is a massive country, one filled with a variety of regional cuisines and a wide array of potentially edible animals. Why, then, does such a small selection of animals show up in grocery stores? 
 
 Top image: WWII propaganda posters created by Frederick H. K. Henrion for the British War Office/Ministry of Food. 
 
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 Americans are big consumers of meat. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, persons in developed countries consumed 82.1 kg of meat per capita in 2005, while persons in the United States ate 126.6 kg of meat per capita that same year. However, when it comes to land animals, there are just a handful of staple American meats: beef, pork, chicken, and turkey (and, to a lesser extent, lamb and duck). Cows and pigs were brought to the Americas from Europe, but the North American continent already possessed a cornucopia of edible animals: bison, moose, deer, possum, squirrel, pigeon, pheasant, and rabbit. And while early European settlers still craved and farmed the meats they had enjoyed back home, Americans long took advantage of this bounty—including during the lean times of Great Depression and during the "Meatless Monday" era of World War II. One only need look as far back as earlier editions of Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking to see a mainstream cookbook that offered instructions on the proper preparations of squirrel. 
 
 
 
 But as the country became more industrialized, the meat side of the mainstream American diet gradually became less varied. Bison was hunted to near-extinction, but other game animals have faded from culinary popularity. Unless you're a hunter (or friends with one), it's unlikely that deer and squirrel show up on your American dinner table. Rabbits, once promoted as a patriotic wartime food in the United States and Britain, are now seen more as pets (or a source of angora) than food. Americans can find goat cheese in the local supermarket, but goat meat is a bit harder to come by. 
 
 
 
 The US has inherited certain food taboos—such as those against eating horses and dogs—from the English. But the reason some meats have become entrenched in American culture while others are hard sells is also closely linked to the history of these meats' industries. The rise of the beef and pork industry—followed by poultry—fed a demand for cheap meat and drove those foods into American supermarkets, and has made it harder for other meats to grab a hoof hold. 
 
 The Rise of Beef 
 
 
 
 Before the American Civil War, Americans actually ate very little in the way of beef. Before the country started pushing West, most of the cattle Americans kept were dairy cattle, the sort that earn their room and board before heading to the abattoir. And beef wasn't as easy to preserve as pork, which could be salted or smoked. But as Americans spread out across the continent, so too did cows and pigs, and the availability of land made beef ranching practical where it hadn't been on the East Coast. 
 
 
 
 The growth of cattle ranching coincided with two very important events. One was the growth of cities; New York, Boston, and Chicago saw a swell in populations, and those populations needed food. (According to the USDA, salt pork also became increasingly popular with these urban populations.) Another was an epidemic of rinderpest, a cow-killing viral plague, that broke out among cattle across Europe in the 19th century. There was still a strong demand for beef in Britain and other parts of Europe, and if these folks wanted to eat beef, they would have to turn to the American supply. At the same time, Maureen Ogle notes in In Meat We Trust, some Americans and Europeans in the late 19th century linked diet to national character, with beef becoming a symbol of vital power. 
 
 
 
 The cattle drive looms large in American mythology, but packing and shipping technology would eventually obviate the need for cattle drives and make beef available to the urban consumer. Railroad tracks would eventually criss-cross the country and the beef packing industry would become a powerful component in the national food chain. In 1875, Gustavus Swift introduced the Swift Refrigerator Line, which, using ice and salt, allowed for the temperature-controlled carriage of dressed beef and pork from the West to the rest of the country. This fledgling beef industry was not without its setbacks; ranchers allowed their cattle to overgraze the land and tens of thousands of cattle would die in the harsh winters of 1885-86 and 1886-87. But beef packers, serving as the middlemen between ranchers and consumers, helped to push cheap beef into the marketplace: They would buy up cattle in massive volumes and subsidize the low cost of meat with other beef products, including bones, blood, marrow, hides, and the fat for oleomargarine. (They would also face charges of collusion as anti-monopoly legislation was introduced.) Thus the groundwork for the modern American beef industry was laid. 
 
 
 
 Even as urban Americans became increasingly removed from their food supply at the turn of the century, beef became an integral part of the American diet. A brief "beef famine" in 1902 saw both beef prices and American outrage soar. Even in the wake of the lean years of the Great Depression and during the meat rationing of World War II, the national appetite for beef continued to grow by leaps and bounds, and as incomes rose in post-war America, beef became a symbol of the suburban middle class, associated with, for example, backyard barbecues. And the beef industry matched the growing demanding for convenience, offering canned beef perfect for chili and hash. Beef wasn't just popular, not just a legacy from European meat-eaters; beef was modern. 
 
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 Why You Don't Typically See Venison in the Supermarket 
 
 
 
 Now, there is a key aspect of the beef business that I have skipped over, a rather important event that happened in 1906: the publication of Upton Sinclair's seminal work The Jungle. The first law requiring the inspection of meat products actual predates The Jungle, having been signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890. That law required that the USDA, through the Bureau of Animal Industry, inspect salted pork and bacon (and later, al live cattle and beef) intended for exportation. But 1906 saw the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act, and today federal tax dollars pay for USDA inspections of standard livestock, such as cows, pigs, sheep, and goats. 
 
 
 
 But deer and elk, even when ranched, are a different matter. Deer ranching did not grow with the beef and pork industries, and deer inspections are not covered but the FMIA and are non-amenable species in the context of USDA inspection. If a rancher wants their deer inspected by a USDA agent, they have to pay an hourly rate for a voluntary inspection. Not surprisingly, many meat buyers want their meat to be USDA inspected, which adds an expense to venison as a meat product. For non-hunters (and folks who don't get their meat from hunters), deer and elk are specialty meats, more likely to be consumed in a restaurant than at home. However, the US does also import venison; in 1997, the US imported 1,000 pounds of venison from New Zealand, which has a large and well organized deer industry. 
 
 How Factory Farming and Supermarkets Made Chicken King 
 
 
 
 Up until the 1930s, chicken was both a greater luxury and a more seasonal food than it is today. Many Americans kept chickens, but for the eggs. Chickens didn't always survive the winter, and before refrigeration, the meat did not last long, so chicken meat was an occasional and incidental byproduct of egg farming. The same packing companies that were so successful with dressing beef attempted to do the same with chicken, but to little avail. The promise of members of the Republican Party that Herbert Hoover would put a chicken in every pot meant a lot when chicken was a pricy treat. 
 
 
 
 It was Jesse Jewell who turned chicken meat into a business. The University of Georgia had researched factory-style chicken production in the 1920s, hoping to diversify the region's agricultural economy. Jewell's own farm was failing, so he decided to try a business based on UGA's research, loaning chicks to farmers and then paying them after he sold the adult chickens. The growth of Jewell's burgeoning poultry business coincided with the advent of World War II, when much of the country's meat and pork was being shipped to soldiers oversees. The market was ripe for chicken, a familiar meat that wasn't yet ready for shipping to soldiers but was suddenly more plentiful than it had been before. 
 
 
 
 By the time Jewell came on the scene, supermarkets had already entered the industrial fray, selling food to urbanites and, as time went on, the growing population of suburbanites. In the post-war era, chickens were such a key shopping item that chain grocery stores would sell broilers below cost as a loss leader. Poultry price wars fueled a demand for more and cheaper chickens, which would eventually take the form of chicken soup, chicken nuggets, and all manner of chicken food things. The inspection of domestic fowl by the USDA would be required by the Poultry Products Inspection Act of 1957. 
 
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 Whatever Happened to Rabbit? 
 
 
 
 Why don't Americans eat more rabbit? This is a question that pops up every now and then in the media as folks point out that rabbits require few resources, provide lean meat, and are beloved by many a chef for their flavor. And during World War II, Americans and Brits were encouraged to farm rabbits much as they were encouraged to grow victory gardens. 
 
 
 
 Rabbits didn't enjoy the same industrial farming boom that chickens did in the US. While Jewell's chicken farming rose out of the scrambling farms of Georgia, the larger producers and processors of rabbit meat during the 1920s and 1930s were located in Southern California, especially in the Los Angeles area. As Southern California became more industrialized, rabbit production declined. Although some rabbit farmers did move to other parts of the country, rabbits never quite made the move from America's backyards to its supermarkets. Like deer and elk, rabbits are a non-amenable species under the USDA's meat and poultry inspection program. 
 
 
 
 Compared to most of the world, however, the US is a relatively large producer of rabbit, having produced 35,000 tons of rabbit carcass in 1990. (Though that pales in comparison to Italy's 300,000 tons and France's 150,000 tons.) But while rabbit isn't consumed on the level of cows, pigs, birds, and ovines, Americans consume far less rabbit meat per capita than do folks in many European and North African countries and in the former Soviet states. 
 
 How Immigration Can Change Our Eating Habits 
 
 
 
 In his book An Economist Gets Lunch, Tyler Cowen argues that anti-immigration policies during the 20th century helped American cuisine to stagnate in the wake of Prohibition. But in more recent decades, we've seen Americans embrace a wider array of cuisines. And that may have an impact on the meats Americans choose to eat. For example, the number of meat goats raised in the US has gone from 415,000 to 2.3m between 1987 and 2013, and an article in The Economist credits that growth with the influx of immigrants from cultures that eat more goat—and other Americans who are willing to branch out meat-wise. It hardly puts goat on the footing of other American meats, but it's a sign that the future of American cuisine could include a greater variety of meat. 
 
 
 
 Further Reading: 
 
 In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America by Maureen Ogle 
 
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 Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef by Betty Fussell 
 
 Beef by Andrew Rimas and Evan D.G. Fraser ||||| Animal rights activists circulated photos of the husband and wife team behind Cafe Gratitude and Gracias Madre eating a burger and keeping freezer full of beef 
 
 The California-based husband and wife founders of celebrity-endorsed vegan restaurant group Cafe Gratitude say they have received death threats after it was revealed last week that they are raising, slaughtering and eating animals on their farm north of San Francisco. 
 
 Matthew and Terces Engelhart, both in their sixties, who opened the first Cafe Gratitude in 2004 and whose celebrity followers have included Gwyneth Paltrow, Beyoncé and Sacha Baron Cohen, countered the firestorm of criticism with a defense of the “regenerative agriculture” methods they now use on their Be Love Farm in Vacaville, calling it a personal choice made in the privacy of their home. 
 
 You can't be 'a little bit vegan' Read more 
 
 “We started to observe nature and what we saw is that nature doesn’t exist without animals,” Matthew Engelhart told the Hollywood Reporter last week after animal rights activists dug up and circulated blog entries from spring 2015 from the farm’s website, including photos of a freezer full of pastured beef, jars of gravy and Matthew enjoying a hamburger, with posts on their “transition” into meat products after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism. 
 
 “People have taken up the mob mentality,” he opined, after protesters gathered outside their restaurants holding signs such as “no animal is grateful to die”, started a Facebook boycott page and frantically posted one-star Yelp reviews. 
 
 “Cows make an extreme sacrifice for humanity but that is their position in God’s plan as food for the predators,” Matthew Engelhart added in a statement about their decision. “We can be part of that sacrament.” 
 
 Terces Engelhart tends to the animals at Be Love Farm in this photograph from April 2011. The farm supplies produce to the Engelharts’ restaurants. Photograph: Adithya Sambamurthy for the Guardian 
 
 But purist vegans who patronized the several southern California branches of the cafe, despite or perhaps because of its irritatingly named “affirmation” dishes such the “accepting” sushi bowl and the “grateful” kale salad, will not be assuaged so easily. “Fxxxing HYPOCRITES!!!! Hope they will be FLAME BURNED and eaten by Meat Eaters,” screams one post on the Facebook boycott page. “They are duping vegans to support their animal killings,” says another. 
 
 The Engelharts spawned an entire industry with a carefully marketed message of peace, love and sharing, which includes a sister vegan Mexican restaurant, Gracias Madre, in San Francisco and Los Angeles. 
 
 The couple have written several books, including Sacred Commerce: Business as a Path of Awakening and Kindred Spirit: Fulfilling Love’s Promise. Their personal website is named Eternal Presence and references the board game they created in 2004, called The Abounding River Board Game, which was on every table in their San Francisco flagship; and which they said would train players to embrace “an unfamiliar view of Being Abundant” and develop a “spiritual foundation” for looking at money. 
 
 A Be Love Farm blogpost from February last year highlights the “big week” when they transitioned into meat products. 
 
 “That transition is happening deep within our beings, we know it is a necessary and important part of our growth as well as the sustainability of our farm ... as we open our hearts further to the presence of love ... ” The page features photos of their new beef products alongside a bucolic shot of their cows “sitting down chewing their cud in the warm Spring breeze”. 
 
 
 
 The couple are no strangers to controversy. 
 
 Eating too much red meat ‘can age the body’, researchers claim Read more 
 
 In 2011, they cited a series of “aggressive lawsuits” by disgruntled employees as the reason for having to close or sell their eight Cafe Gratitude restaurants in the Bay Area. The lawsuits challenged the restaurants’ tip-pooling practices and alleged unpaid overtime wages. At the time they wrote on their Facebook page that it would cost too much to defend themselves in court. 
 
 Another lawsuit was filed by an employee, alleging he was fired after refusing to attend the controversial San Francisco-based Landmark Forum self-improvement course and an offshoot of Werner Erhard’s self-realization program. 
 
 In the end, the Engelhart’s settled, selling or giving some of the restaurants to family members, including Terces’ son by a previous marriage, Matthew, who works at the LA restaurant. The couple reportedly met at a Landmark Forum seminar after Terces (which is “secret” spelled backwards) had fled a conventional life in Santa Cruz with her IBM manager husband and children, selling all their belongings and loading up an RV and hitting the road, reportedly heading for Durango, Colorado. 
 
 That was in 1992. Her daughter Mollie from that marriage now runs a vegan beer garden in LA, with business partner and actor Woody Harrelson, as well as KindKreme, a vegan ice cream parlour. 
 
 LA-based activist Mary Cummins, founder of Animal Advocates, claims that the Engelharts have been influenced by the controversial views of Allan Savory, the Zimbabwean ecologist and author of Holistic Management, which advocates using livestock on grasslands as the only way to reverse climate change and avoid widespread destruction of these lands. (The idea has its detractors – George Monbiot in the Guardian – and supporters – Hunter Lovins also in the Guardian.) 
 
 Meantime, none of this seems likely to mollify the outraged vegans and it is unclear how this will affect the Engelhart empire, which serves 28,000 meals a day and offers an array of events and packages for families and corporations alike on their Be Love farm. Whether parents will still want their kids to pet Carmella and Cinnamon, two of their cows, after learning about the freezer full of meat is unclear.
– A Danish radio DJ chose a controversial way of drawing attention to what he sees as the flawed debate over animal welfare: He hit a 9-week-old rabbit named Allan three times with an iron bicycle pump while on the air Monday, then wrung its neck. Later, Asger Juhl of Radio24syv ate it for dinner. Angry listeners have since called for a boycott of the station, and much worse for Juhl himself, reports the BBC. "I did it to show the hypocrisy in the debate," he says. "Many people are outraged by what I did, at the same time many of these people will eat meat. And when they eat meat, an animal will die." Juhl says he consulted with Aalborg Zoo on a humane way to kill rabbits and was told it used an "iron stick." The zookeeper "hits several baby rabbits every week [to feed] the snakes," Juhl explains, per the Local. His employer is unapologetic. The New York Times quotes station editor-in-chief Jorgen Ramskov as saying the rabbit "was taken good care of, it had a nice life, and it was killed in a decent way." Animals endure "horrific suffering on their way to our dinner tables … without it invoking any strong reactions or calls for boycott," a station rep tells Sky News. Perhaps fueling the outcry on social media, per the Times: The station posted two videos on its Facebook page: a 20-second clip showing Juhl cradling and petting a very-alive Allan, and a 10-second clip showing what the station described as pieces of Allan, cooking in a pan. Those two parts are important, argued the station in a Facebook post yesterday. "We knew that we would be accused of provocation. But it is not an empty provocation; the presenters of the program ate the animal after killing it." (It's not the first controversial animal killing in Denmark.)