To the potential customers of the roadside stand, both the meat and the pets are available exclusively for purchase. 'Pets or meat' is an interesting way of framing the question, because the choice being presented is importantly not one between commodification and noncommodification, but between two fully commodified transactions. If a customer wants rabbits as meat, she will provide them slaughtered and dressed on the other hand, a customer who wants rabbits as pets, can buy them, think of them as bunnies, and take them home as pets. Moore spots a crudely hand-lettered sign offering, 'Rabbits or Bunnies, Pets or Meat for Sale.' The female entrepreneur who posted this sign takes Moore around back to cages full of live rabbits of various ages and makes clear the choice she's offering her customers: pets or meat, you decide. The title is taken from the scene in the Michael Moore film Roger and Me depicting the marketing of rabbits. The concern here is with the possibility and danger of leaching in the opposite direction, with what happens when affection is commingled with a transaction whose commodification is taken as a given. The notion that it is problematic to allow commodification to leach into certain realms thought of as properly the domain of affection, the notion that such realms simply should not be commodified, is a familiar one, central to policy debates on matters such as the legalization of prostitution, premarital agreements, and organ donation. The central question to be explored in this essay is whether and when commingling commodification with affection can be more problematic than naked commodification.

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