Hunting Vegetarians

Is it hypocritical of me, as a vegetarian, to pretend to eat meat when my kids play "feast"?

How about playing "buffalo hunt" and helping them pretend to kill imaginary animals to make bison burgers like the Native Americans might have done?

See, we have their cool igloos (hee hee hee) set up in the living room, one for each at opposite ends, so that they can play Brother Bear without actually recreating the narrative of the movie. So, they ask me over and over again what it was like when the movie would have taken place (because I've gone to great lengths to explain that there are still Native Americans today and they don't live in wigwams and hunt bison any more than we drive covered wagons like our ancestors!) . They've drummed and danced to our collection of Native American songs; they've played "trade." But the thing that most fascinated them was that there weren't grocery stores hundreds of years ago, that people got food from gardens and from hunting, just like we saw at the Pequot Museum. So now we have to hunt bison. Bud uses a box for a trap and his pointy space rocket "spear" to kill the bison; Sis uses her "Handy Manny" tools to prepare the carcass like she saw in the diorama at the museum. They set up a fire, complete with pans and bowls for cooking--it's a community fire between the two igloos (let's not get into the historical confusion of igloos and wigwams and Pequots and Inuits; they are only 4). Sometimes, they even make clothes from the animal! We've talked about only killing one bison at a time, which is all we need, even for just pretend. They're fascinated and obsessed, so we play over and over again.

But, some days, as cute as it can be, it's just a bit much for me, and I long for a pretend veggie burger.