Category Archives: animals

Reprieve for Thanksgiving

I heard the bit on the radio yesterday about the president pardoning a turkey.   They do this every year, I’ve heard it many, many times over the years.   I heard it before I was a vegetarian (or pescatarian, as a friend corrects)  and every year for the seven or so since I stopped eating terrestrial meat.  Though the bit annoys me every year, it was not until I heard about Mr. Obama’s scripted bit of mischievous mercy at the White House the day before Thanksgiving that the obvious bludgeoned me.

The two pardoned turkeys, Abe and his understudy Honest, were presumably picked out of a group of condemned birds.  The rest of you butterball bitches, over to the slaughterhouse.  Have a nice ride, boys! The good news was announced on the radio, coast to coast, Abe and Honest would be spared from having their heads cut off and would live out the rest of their lives on a nature farm.  Children could smile at the heartwarming thought of these two lucky birds escaping the hatchet.  

Something I’d never thought of before, in my general disgust at this lightheartedly sadistic ritual of symbolic mercy: if these birds got a presidential pardon, what capital crime were they on Death Row for?   They’d been condemned at birth, true, but what was their actual crime?  Then it hit me.  They’d been found guilty of the crime of being meat.  Not one had been on trial for so much as a second, outside of Abe and Honest in 2015, they’d been condemned by the millions before they were born.

There was no denying their guilt, even if they could have been given due process of some kind.  There’s no defense, even if a genius turkey emerged and somehow made it through Harvard Law School. Guilty as charged:  when cooked skillfully we are delicious.   We can’t really do anything about it, my eloquence and accomplishments notwithstanding, we, as a species, are way too stupid.  Even pigs, who are much smarter than dogs and cats, can do nothing against their executioners.  No pig is ever pardoned, or if she is, we don’t hear about it on the radio between ads for great savings on Black Friday.

I’d heard a guy on the radio several years ago talking about how depressed pigs are when they are shoved into tiny pens too small for them to move around in and force fed.   They understand quickly that they are in Auschwitz, that any plans they might have had regarding their life are now over.  No more wallowing in mud, nuzzling the piglets, no farm kid’s affectionate hand on their bristly side.   Just a horrible life in an industrialized killing plant until they are fattened up enough and then a frightening and brutal death, carried out by underpaid workers who have one of the world’s most gruesome jobs.  

Nice that Abe and Honest got pardoned.  It was the right thing to do, Mr. President.  Kids need this kind of good news in a world where kids are slaughtered every minute of every hour.  On the other hand, sir, what the fuck?  I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

A guy like your predecessor, a likable idiot with some misguided and repugnant views about the world, well, he can get away with it.  I suppose I have to let you off the hook, as a matter of basic fairness.   I try not to ride a high horse just because my cat looked at me with great sensitivity as I was hearing about how depressed pigs get in their mechanized death camps.  

He looked at me like “this surprises you?   That humans are brutal, ruthless creatures who obtain their meat in the most despicable and highly profitable way?   You look surprised.  Pathetic.  How about a treat, you guilt-ridden prick?”  

Could not eat bacon after that, or cow, or even chicken or Abe or Honest’s relatives.   Gives me no right to pontificate about it, I just lost the ability to disconnect the soul of the animal raised for the slaughter from the delicious once-living tissue on my plate.

“Don’t even think about that moral high horse, man.  I got two words for you:  Adolf Hitler, motherfucker.”

Yeah, I know.  The psychopath who set the benchmark for evil was a vegetarian for the last twenty years or so of his hideous life.  A flatulent one, if the accounts of people who didn’t like him can be believed.  Supposedly did it in penance for the murder or suicide of the niece he was obsessed with, probably tried to have sex with.  Too bad his penance wasn’t a bullet through the temple.  Only tragedy about his death was that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier.

“OK, don’t change the subject.  What about the souls of the sentient sea creatures you have no hesitation to eat?  Less sentient than the ones who live on land?  Too alien as a life form to relate to, as you can in your sentimental attachment to cute mammals, anthropomorphized birds?”

Well, I’m just happy as hell that Abe and Honest will be living out their full, bird-brained lives at some game farm somewhere.  God bless this great nation, whose exceptionalness is more exceptional than the exceptionalness of any other people.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

Snapshots

These tiny images of frozen moments, the way we remember life.  I am often reminded how great my memory is, which makes me feel like a fraud.  In my mind, I remember almost nothing.  Less than a millionth, I’d suspect, of what I have lived, remains in my memory.  There are odd bits, sometimes, that I remember in great detail.  They are like snapshots.

I have a few new ones now.  An old friend, wrapped in his prayer shawl, praying in the remote Jordanian desert at dawn.  The radiant face of a young beauty in the ancient tourist shrine Petra, posing irresistibly near a desert weed I was photographing.  The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a magical mountain.  The fisherman’s expressive face as he held court in his little open fronted restaurant, a hundred meters from the sea.  There are other photos in there, those baby ibexes, no bigger than small dogs, looking for food from smiling humans under the “Do Not Feed The Ibexes” sign.  A small fox leaping across the road near the national park called Appolonia over the beach at Herzliya.  The skinny dog in Petra who accompanied us for miles, seemingly just for the companionship as he went about his rounds, looking for good garbage to eat.  

Some cannot be unseen.  The little Jordanians firing rocks at our dog escort, cursing him, as he yowled piteously and took off.  Thankfully Sekhnet missed that one.  She cried when I told her about it.  I did not need to tell her of the one we all saw the next day, the large pale ass of the man, squatting directly in front of his car (instead of on the side where he would have been out of sight) poised to take a shit on the shoulder of the road up from the Arava desert to Mitzpeh Ramon.  I was praying as we passed that I would not see the turd dropping from the grotesque vertical smile.  My prayer in that case was answered.

There was that great moment with the woman we were visiting, her head thrown back in a great laugh, I don’t remember over what, though I recall laughing too.  That one was caught by the ever ready Sekhnet, whose phone is a better camera than most cameras. 

These snapshots remain, along with some beautiful views.  I think they will be in there for a long time now, along with some of the actual photos we snapped.

Sekhnet’s last photo of Dobby

She called this shot 6 Eared Fur Ball, Dobby’s the one with the white face.  Taken on 9/11 it is the last portrait of the smallest of the kittens.  His fate and final whereabouts are unknown.  Feral cats have very short lives living outside, it is rare that they make it to two years old.  Makes it all the more urgent that I find homes for these other three friendly, playful young cats.6 eared fur ball 9-11-15

The short, adorable life of Dobby

Sekhnet delivered the news, heartbroken.  The cutest of the three kittens of the feral kitten in the garden, the only one we’d named, Dobby, last seen by me two nights ago, characteristically toddling off to hide, is no more.  Nature, knowing that death is only a matter of time for every living creature, gave the handsome, timid runt of this litter about five weeks of life.   Here is the rest of the family the other day: three cats 9-17-15

A painful death

Sekhnet is very protective of the little mother kitten in the back yard.  The little beauty is about nine months old, all alone, and raising three kittens she gave birth to a few weeks ago (you can see their recent baby pictures here).  A very good mother, by the looks of it.  Talk about babies having babies.   We’ve seen several generations of these feral cats, it is rare that any live more than a year or so. This one is a beautiful cat who lives in Sekhnet’s garden where she is now raising her offspring.  

We could easily get her adopted– except that as she was born wild and abandoned young, she does not let anyone touch her.  She seems to be a diminutive serval cat, more wild than most, closer to her wild ancestors than a cat that will jump into your lap, as affectionate Cathead, who lasted about a year in the wild, used to.  She eats from a spoon now, looks at us expectantly when we come outside, doesn’t object to me petting her kittens and will occasionally brush against you, but is not trusting enough that anyone would risk having the little beauty as a pet.  Hard to have a pet you can’t pet.  Nor could we catch her without somehow trapping her.  Plus there are the kittens she’s now caring for.

So it’s tricky not getting attached, and at the same time being protective.  Sekhnet is fiercely protective, and so, while I was in the back checking some brussel sprouts on the grill I heard Sekhnet yell in her most threatening growl.   Raccoons, the usual troop, were fighting in the yard next door.  Sekhnet, thinking they might have been threatening the kittens, yelled to chase them off.  As she ran to the front of the house she startled another raccoon that was in her driveway.   Then I heard a heart-rending scream from Sekhnet and dashed to where she was.  “It’s Skinny Tail!” she wailed in despair, her favorite raccoon, the underdog, undersized, an outcast.

Lying motionless in the service road was a raccoon, there were no cars at that moment.   Cars come flying down that stretch of service road at ridiculous speeds, assholes in a hurry.  There should be speed bumps on this section, and cameras to catch speeders, but there aren’t.  Sometimes cars come by at 50 miles an hour preferring horns to brakes.   “He’s still alive!” Sekhnet wailed, through her tears, and I saw the raccoon was indeed breathing.  I felt an instant of relief as I saw it shake its head.  This is going to have a happy ending, I felt myself think.  A second later he staggered to his feet, took two steps and then Sekhnet screamed.  A speeding car ran him over but somehow didn’t kill him.    

Completely fucked him up, though.  He fell on to his back in obvious agony, hands pulled up on his chest as though praying, but every part of him seized by paroxysms, like in a Russian novel, the soul struggling against the agony of the body.  His legs kicked as his head jerked on the pavement, drawn up hands twitching in agony.  It seemed to last an eternity.  It was incredibly painful to watch and impossible to look away.  Another car hit him finally and blood poured from his mouth.  He didn’t move any more.

Poor Sekhnet was wailing, as she went out into the road to prevent cars from pulverizing the dead raccoon.  I gave her my flashlight, which I’d been using to check the grill and then to spotlight the raccoon, and she kept it trained on the little corpse as she continued waving cars around the body and crying.  I called 911, then 311, told them the story, was told they’d eventually send somebody from animal control to collect the little cadaver, could be up to 48 hours.  Sekhnet later told me I should have said the animal was wounded, they’d have come sooner, because a wounded animal is dangerous.    

Meanwhile she couldn’t stop crying and waving at the cars to go around the body.   I noticed the dead raccoon’s thick, bushy tail.   “Sekhnet, it’s not Skinny Tail,” I called, then, after a moment trying to console her, went to get a shovel.  With multiple flashlights and Sekhnet directing traffic I managed to get the dead animal all the way over to the far side of the service road.  

He’s lying there now, white marked face facing toward the oncoming cars on the drivers’ side, by the far curb.  Lying on his side in a comfortable sleeping pose against the far curb he looks peaceful.  It would take a drunk asshole or sociopath to hit it again, though there are always those flying down the service road too.

Labor Day

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Sekhnet, who caught this great shot, calls this one “breakfast with paw”.  Note how the little white pawed kitten is getting purchase with the back foot as it pushes with front paw to get breakfast a little faster.