Yes, I tolerated a secret fault concerning blood. I have never told anyone about it until this day. Now I am telling you.
As I recall, sometime in the 80's (or maybe late 70's) we were told to check our pet's food for animal by-products. This was usually another way of saying animal blood. I remembered one circuit overseer made it his business to point it out in that New Things We Have Learned Recently talk that he always wasted our Saturday night on. He told us that if we were in question about the ingredients, then we should write to the company! WHAT? I seldom wrote to my own relatives and I was supposed to take the time to write to some company about this stupid rule?
So as my dog loved Alpo, I always "forgot" to read the ingredients, or the ingredients of any other dog food that my dog deemed tasty. Maybe I was becoming more rebellious, or just it was the plain German stubbornness that runs in my Mom's side of the family, but by golly, I had just about enough of the stupid endless rules they were coming out with to fill up each and every bloody magazine!
My reasoning was this. Jehovah God never said anything about animals not eating blood, even animals in our care. I lived on a farm. We had goats. We had cows. We had a pig and a sheep. We had chickens. And so, by the very nature of having a farm, we had other animals that tend to go along with a farm; mice, wild rabbits, and the occasional opossum. Our cat and our dog would occasionally catch and eat this game. It was just their nature. Heck! It's what's expected of farm pets. They go after vermin! That's just nature. And Jehovah invented nature. So while we thoroughly bled all of the animals we butchered, I didn't expect it of our dog or cat, and I wasn't about to do it for them. So why should I worry about the friggin' canned food we fed them?
So that was my secret fault. Just another of those little steps on the road to full apostasy!
Tammy