Monday, January 10, 2011

The Dreadful Dream




Note to readers: The content of this journal entry contains some disturbing descriptions. To keep us from dwelling on the dreadful element, I'm pasting in some of my favorite scenes (in no particular order), all of which depict elements here at Ravenseyrie, with the exception of the sculpture photos. All photos taken by me.


A few days ago, along the course of whatever research I was doing on the internet, I came upon a curious CNN poll that was testing the pulse of the American public regarding present day views on whether or not they would consider opening up their diets to the consumption of horse meat.

DaVinci's horse sculpture at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan


This poll was prompted by a gathering of organizations and individuals with a vested interest in making it legal to once again slaughter horses and process them into food in the United States. The four day convention was called The Summit of the Horse, and as you might have guessed sparked quite a polarization of opinions regarding perceptions of horses and how humans relate to them.


Kevin, deep in contemplation while leaning against the da Vinci horse sculpture



Ciente

At the time, I had my mind on finding an obscure reference to Equus ferus and so quickly moved on from what looked to be a very unpleasant media extravaganza. However, this was not to be the end of that particular chance encounter because during the night I ended up having a very dreadful dream...


In this dream,

I was down in the village and decided to find some type of hiking route up the side of the bluff to make my way home instead of using the open road. There were many paths and I became disoriented. Nevertheless, I continued to make my way upward using a path that felt the most direct. It soon lead me to the back yard of a large dwelling and the only way to continue was to walk through this strange building. I entered through the back door and found myself in what looked like a large restaurant kitchen, newly built and not quite completed. I kept trying to find my way through to a different room or a door that would take me back out to a path that would lead me home--but there seemed to be no way out.

Off to the side of this large restaurant kitchen I came upon a young woman working there. She told me that this building belonged to a very wealthy man in the U.S. who had businesses all over the world and would soon be opening this newly built restaurant on the island. She said I could only find my way back home by taking a trip on the wealthy man's boat.

As dreams go, the next scene found me on the prow of a fast moving ship, with the blue, blue waters of Lake Huron and the familiar shape of Manitoulin Island quickly giving way to foreign waters that became murky and narrow. The ship slowed to a trawling speed and followed a winding trail of a brackish canal. Both sides of the shore line were filled with rubbish heaps and smoldering discarded rubber tires. Strewn throughout this foul mess were the carcasses of cattle and pigs. There were, here and there, some of these animals that were still alive, with broken limbs, tortured eyes and moans.
I knew instantly that this boat was taking me to one of the wealthy man's many businesses--this one being a slaughter house. A dispassionate voice said, "This is the overflow area, where those animals that are too far gone to walk the line to the kill floor are discarded."

This "overflow" area just went on and on as the boat continued its slow passage, bringing us nearer to some monstrous building looming ahead, blocking out the acrid sky.
Off to the left, movement and loud slurred voices caught my attention. I heard the screams of horses. The smoke from the tires cleared and I could see a dozen or more horses being herded by nondescript tattered and filth covered men. "They have some of the mustangs!" I cried. The men cackled strange laughter as they began to put bridles and saddles upon those horses who were too weak to fight them. The same dispassionate voice spoke to me again, "It is the job of these men to bring the horses to the kill floor to be slaughtered. It is a difficult job, day in and day out, so we do not deny them having a little bit of fun with the horses first." I knew the mentality behind this type of "fun"...it was of the same kind that soldiers in war engage in when they rape women and beat old men after overtaking a village.

The eyes of the horses were crazed in some, completely resigned in others.
A group of other men were manipulating a contraption that held a horse on it's side while they quickly and clumsily put all manner of high end horse clothing on it: state of the art shipping boots, an insulated horse blanket, a colour-coordinated halter and lead, etc. Once this outfitting was accomplished, the men pulled a lever that forced the contraption upright so that the horse was now standing. They opened the grilled front and one man began taking photos with a fancy camera. "These photos are for an ad agency hired by a horse clothing catalogue to demonstrate that even wild mustangs can wear their latest products" said the dispassionate voice. It wasn't until then that some small part of my lucid self emerged and said, "This is not real...this is a dream."

And then I woke up.

Double rainbow over the East Bluff

And couldn't get back to sleep...

Through the Cedars


Boneset ( Eupatorium perfoliatum)

Typically, I do not devote energy to the media attention given to the harmful things humans engage themselves in. But when visited by a dream as dreadful as this, I felt a bit of study and a few words on the matter were called for.

The significance with which horses are regarded in human perception varies depending on cultural shaping. The same can be said of how humans perceive themselves in relation to plants, insects, fish, fowl, other mammals, fungi, bacteria, etc.

Red-capped Scaber Stalk (Leccinum aurantiacum)

Dryad's Saddle (Polyporus squamosus)


Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaraia var. formosa)



Shiitake (Lentinula edodes)


Wherever in the world humans have dwelt we have created particular folkways and mores to explain the natural phenomenon of our environment and developed a variety of acceptable and unacceptable patterns of behavior, rife with superstitions, taboos, laws, penalties and the like.

Sandhill Crane


That which is perfectly acceptable in one culture may be totally repulsive to a different society. In such situations, it seems better to refrain from terms such as "good" and "evil", and rather try to identify what is edifying and nurturing versus what is expedient and deleterious--and this done in a holistic view of cosmic proportions.


One of Winter's many art forms

Has humans' slaughter and consumption of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish proved to be edifying and nurturing to our species, or has it been at times expedient but overall deleterious?

Shelagh and Winter Sun


I think virtually any one of us who comes upon a scene such as what was shown to me in my dream would feel repulsed. Why is this?

Why do so few of us "harvest" our own creatures for food, but instead rely upon slaughter houses and meat processing plants to do this for us?

Ciente converses with the neighbor's bovines


There is an element of killing a creature for one's dinner, especially on a mass scale, that most humans find disturbing. One way of dealing with the conflict of nurturing life all the while embracing the learned gastric enjoyment of eating the flesh of slaughtered creatures is to disassociate oneself from the creature and its reluctance to place itself willingly in our stock pots. Another way is to delude ourselves that these creatures by their own choice "give" (or sacrifice) themselves to us or have been "given" to us by divine right for our survival.

Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea)

Have you ever heard of a Schmoo?

Comic strip artist, Al Capp did an even better job of solving the dilemma of wanting to eat creatures that must first be captured and killed against their will. In his cartoon serial Li'l Abner, Capp created creatures that lived on air and seemed to exist only to sacrifice themselves for the needs and desires of humans--which they did so with absolute delight, shape-shifting themselves into whatever type of food humans wanted to consume (joyfully jumping into the pot or fry pan itself) and making their body useful for a variety of other human necessities. You'll notice (if you followed the link) that there is even an image of a human riding a Schmoo with the caption, "Yowee!!--It goes anyplace!"

The grasses, "sine quo non"...


Curiously, there are scientists who are working on creating a different version of a Schmoo by growing meat in their laboratories.

And I thought I had woken up from a dreadful dream...

There is a complicated and chaotic imbalance on planet earth just now, this much is obvious. But all that I study tells me that it is the nature of nature to use chaos to creatively restore a new equilibrium.

Crab-apples

I refrain from marking the notion of slaughtering horses or any creature for food and economic gain as a "bad" thing, rather it is a "learned" thing that is accepted by some and rejected by others. However, I do find myself rather in agreement with a quote attributed to Albert Einstein:

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."


Kevin's Garlic
I don't know of any culture anywhere in the world that has a visceral repulsion for consuming plants as food, do you?

Kevin, Angus, Apples and Peppermint

12 comments:

Kris McCormack said...

I find the very idea of eating horseflesh revolting. Horses are my friends, my family, my companions, pleasant acquaintances -- depending on the circumstances. I would no more think of eating a horse than I would of dining on my next door human neighbors. But, there are societies in this world where cannibalism is practiced.

Perhaps one day we will view the practice of killing our fellow creatures for food and/or fur/skin as abhorrent -- the way most of us now view cannibalism, or lampshades made from human skin.

I confess, I heeded your warnings, skipped over your bad dream, and focused on the lovely images. Thank you for the mushroom photos.... I've encountered some here, but have never picked any since, until this year, I had no idea which are edible and which are not. This year, I finally learned to recognize one variety -- puffballs. A local restauranteur taught me about them. If they show up here next year, I will harvest a few puffballs and make a meal of them.

JEN-SKA said...

Here in Finland it is a bit different: There was a change in our laws that makes it very difficult to bury your horse, even in your own land. It is very expensive to cremate a horse (600 euros/horse). We also don't have too many slaughterhouses that excepts horses.

Because of these facts, someone invented great business in collecting unwanted horses in trucks and driving them all the way to Italy to be slaughtered. It is only about 500 km from western Finland to Northern Italy but it takes days because of all the ferrytrips and other vessels on the way. Imagine that.

Annemiek said...

Here in the Netherlands eating horse meat is quite accepted. There are butchers that specialize in slaughtering horses. In fact when you have to put a horse down (because medical reasons) you have a choice: the Vet or the butcher. There are a lot of people that find the butcher more merciful for the horse, because the horse dies much quicker this way, or so they say. When you have insured your horse and the Vet declares the horse “useless” for sport or recreation the Insurance company sends someone over to size up the horse and make an estimation what the meat price will be. That is what the insurance pays you for the horse. Than you can decide to buy the horse back from the insurance company and let the horse live, or the insurance comes and takes the horse to the butcher. Horrible isn’t it? Still it is very common here. My friend Debby bought her horse Solero back from the insurance company just a few months ago. Remember Lynne, the horse with the torn muscles in his neck?

I hope I will never be in a position to have to make such a choice, I just hope my horse will eventually die from old age after a long and happy life.

Although horse meat is eaten in the Netherlands there is not a large market for it. So horses are transported from the Netherlands to Italy too. There is a lot of discussion about this here, because those transports are a nightmare. This is one of the reasons I support a political party here in the Netherlands that fights very hard to stop these transports. Animal protectors have video’s on the internet (which are even worse than your dream, so don’t look) and they work very hard to put an end to these transports.

Your photo’s are wonderful Lynne, a much needed antidote for your dreadful dream.

Anonymous said...

to stick with the netherlands :
* a lot of horsemeat is eaten while the consumer is unaware of it : fried snacks. What goes to Italy often comes back in disguised forms of dried salted salami and other sausages...
* even the Konik-horses are promoted as wild-meat coming out of those small patches of natural reserves.....
rather than selling them to the public for riding or for use on own terrains as handsome lawnmowers, the excess of koniks is sent to slaughter and sold as packets of healthy nature-meat.
Other problem occuring with this is the selection of the excess of koniks : what fenotype is preferred by the governement officials to slaughter, I'm afraid it"s the lean even "scanty"( in the eyes of the beholder) original type of the sorraia......
peter_be

Lynne Gerard said...

Kris wrote:
"Thank you for the mushroom photos.... I've encountered some here, but have never picked any since, until this year, I had no idea which are edible and which are not. This year, I finally learned to recognize one variety -- puffballs."

Among the many books we have on mushrooms, I found the one by for to be most easy to use is Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America: A Field-To-Kitchen Guide by Fischer, Bessette and Brown.

With the exception of the Amanita Muscaria shown in this particular journal entry, all the others are choice edibles and are just a sampling of what grow here. Folks in British Columbia, Washington and those west coast areas get scads of choice edibles, making me wonder why we did move west instead of east!

Lynne Gerard said...

Jen-ska wrote:
"It is very expensive to cremate a horse (600 euros/horse). We also don't have too many slaughterhouses that excepts horses."

I think most countries (Canada included) have cumbersome restrictions on how to dispose of the remains of horses...some which seem to leave people no other option but to rely upon shipping off to slaughter houses.

This is pretty unfeeling on the part of governments.

Annemiek wrote:
"Here in the Netherlands eating horse meat is quite accepted. There are butchers that specialize in slaughtering horses."

In many ways this is much more congruent than those countries where slaughtering cows, pigs, etc. for food is completely embraced but there is outrage when horses, dogs, etc. are being considered for the same type of "processing". I think the business of slaughtering animals for human consumption is overall harmful to human health (both physical and mental) and the overall well being of the planet.

It will take a huge shift in perception to end our learned desire for flesh eating. I sure don't think that growing hunks of meat in laboratory vats is a solution for our perverted nutritional habits either. And I think there is a lot of smoke and mirrors on either side of these debates...so its difficult for sound judgment to emerge.

Miek wrote:
"When you have insured your horse and the Vet declares the horse “useless” for sport or recreation the Insurance company sends someone over to size up the horse and make an estimation what the meat price will be. That is what the insurance pays you for the horse. Than you can decide to buy the horse back from the insurance company and let the horse live, or the insurance comes and takes the horse to the butcher."

And what options are available to those who do not have insurance policies on their horses, Miek?

Lynne Gerard said...

Peter wrote:
"even the Konik-horses are promoted as wild-meat coming out of those small patches of natural reserves.....
rather than selling them to the public for riding or for use on own terrains as handsome lawnmowers, the excess of koniks is sent to slaughter and sold as packets of healthy nature-meat."


These type of horses historically have been considered choice meat, with loss of habitat and over-hunting being fingered for their extinction (tarpan, zebro). It's a shame that humans cannot create natural preserves that are allowed to experience the cycles of feast and famine among both flora and fauna without being manipulated in ways that humans feel are best suited to ecosystems.

One such ecosystem actually exists here in Canada on Sable Island. Here the wild (feral) horse population has been free from human manipulation of their numbers since 1960. Their numbers are self-maintained, fluctuating between roughly 150 to 450 depending on the year to year conditions and are by now an integral part of the island's entire eco-system. (And they have no predators either!)

Unfortunately this will likely change as the government has been under pressure to open up this formerly restricted island to tourism. Tourists will have difficulties with seeing starving horses or trampled sensitive plants and be blinded to what an amazing lesson in "ebb and flow" this type of self-sustaining, self-adjusting environment has demonstrated these past fifty years.

I wonder if those people involved in "re-wilding" projects around the globe will be attempting to micro-manage the environment with the same pitiful results as what the Bureau of Land Management exhibits in the U.S.

Am I deluding myself that if expansive natural habitats are allowed to find their own optimum (and fluctuating) balance of fauna a more realistic "harmony" will result and there will be no need for Konik horsemeat snacks?

Lynne Gerard said...

Peter wrote:
"Other problem occuring with this is the selection of the excess of koniks : what fenotype is preferred by the governement officials to slaughter, I'm afraid it"s the lean even "scanty"( in the eyes of the beholder) original type of the sorraia......"

One has to be amazed that though no Sorraias were used to reclaim the Tarpan genes among the native Polish horses their phenotype nevertheless emerges. Makes one speculate that perhaps the original tarpan looked much more like the Sorraia than the typical ponyesque Polish Konik. After all, those who are responsible for determining what the phenotype of the original tarpans was are going on limited, inconsistent descriptions and visual images of admitted crossbred remnants.

If the leaner "scanty" form of Sorraia type is emerging in Koniks where has it come from if not having been genetically present in the European wild horses of historic times? Another reason to take seriously those of us who believe the Sorraia to be a good repository of Tarpan genetics.

I wouldn't be surprised if these leaner Koniks have convex profiles as well...

Anonymous said...

Janet Says. . .

Nobody's discussing the presence of drugs and medicines administered to domestic horses. Are the domestic horses that are hauled to Italy going into petfood or human food?

Don't any of the veterinary medicines administered to your Netherlands domestic equids sent to slaughter appear in the food products after slaughter?

Anonymous said...

Janet says

I just spent a few minutes researching news articles on the internet regarding the Sable Island horses and apparently there has been at least one terrible incident in which half of them (about 150+) died off over a severe winter.

This is one event which apparently gained them the reputation for being self-sustaining, and unmanaged.

Anonymous said...

peter_be says

we have a european regulation by which you have to microchip your horse, when you choose at that moment that your horse may be proceeded in the human foodchain, than there has to be a followup by a vet on the horses passport ; when you reject de food-option your horse can after its death only be recycled as petfood or fertilizer, NOT anymore as feed for animals wich are destined for human consumption

Lynne Gerard said...

Janet wrote:
"I just spent a few minutes researching news articles on the internet regarding the Sable Island horses and apparently there has been at least one terrible incident in which half of them (about 150+) died off over a severe winter.

This is one event which apparently gained them the reputation for being self-sustaining, and unmanaged.


I may erroneously be sensing some unhappy sarcasm in your comment, Janet...if so my apologies for misinterpreting the "feel" of your last sentence. I know that for many people there is a great desire to step in manipulate situations in hopes of avoiding such seeming tragedies in wilderness habitats. I can appreciate the tug on the heart--but I feel many times intervention in the lives of wilderness creatures, while well meaning, is often non-holistic and short-sighted.


We humans are such a strange species! We mindlessly (and sometimes quite determinedly) extinguish life, both human and non-human--and yet we have paradoxically (perhaps moreso in modern times) assumed a protective "life at all costs" perspective. This has us performing all manner of medical treatments to prolong life in hopeless cases, often causing tremendous suffering in the process.

We also seem to have decided that we have been granted a mandate by "God" to be caretakers of the earth's resources and living entities, where once again our actions are curiously incongruent as we "humanely" slaughter to suit our needs yet imagine that Nature's means of care-taking are harsh and require our intervention!

As intelligent as we believe ourselves to be, we fall grievously short in understanding the intricate web and workings of the natural world.

Who is to say that a particularly harsh winter which naturally culled half the Sable Island horse herd was not precisely what was necessary to protect the overall balance of not just the horses but the unique environment in which they live?

Human intervention may have been worse in the long run in that particular instance, just as it has proven to be in other similar situations.