Sunday morning, June 6, 2010

We've had an unsettling few days: violent weather, news of illness on both sides of the family, bat activity all around the house (inside) making our pups freak out.

Here's what I've been thinking about, in addition to the above: Sometime during the upset of the week, I saw a video of dairy cattle being tortured by the people in charge of them. Clearly, there had been reports of it which led to secret filming. That has led to an arrest for a "misdemeanor".

This farm is trying to be an agri-business, and the results are horrifying. Family farms value their animals, give them names, earn their trust. But big farms can't name thousands of animals, much less care about them, and the effect is demoralizing to them and dehumanizing to workers.

I'm not generalizing about all big farms. Yet, it seems to me that conditions are ripe for abuse there.

Anyhow, I was at our recently opened food co-op in Wooster yesterday, and I began talking about the video. I was interested in whether the co-op would put out a petition from the Humane Society to get stricter animal care laws on the November ballot. Two people who'd been talking with me about other things objected strongly to the idea. One said she knew of the video and wouldn't watch it. She and her husband are hog farmers on a small scale. They don't abuse their animals and don't approve of it; but they don't want interference by outsiders. Reasonable, I thought, under normal conditions. But she needed to see the video. The man next to her ranted on about not being able to change people by passing some stupid law. I could see there was no use going further.

The man argued that there was a law about wearing seat belts while traveling in a car. He said people break that law all the time and that they had the right to decide for themselves whether to wear seat belts. I wondered how cattle could decide for themselves not to be abused...

But, let's get back to the bat for a moment. It has created in our spaniels a ceiling-watching, corner-sniffing kind of hysteria that threatens to become a habit. Our Lab follows their examples, but then she never was an alpha dog.

We hadn't been able to capture the bat over the last week, and we despaired of doing so. One night, he got into our shower, and all hell broke loose outside of its glass door. Somehow, even though we were keeping our doors to the bed/bath suite shut at night, the bat managed to return to the shower last night.

Jay found it this morning and thought it was dead. It was alive, but weak after days without food. Jay managed to get it into a container and put it out in the yard. But he didn't stop there. He put into the container a dish of water and a small spoonful of raw hamburger. So right now, as the next storm threatens our environs, there is a small and grateful animal out there, chewing or sucking on the hamburger. With luck, he'll get his strength up and get out of there before a barn cat finds him.

Some juxtaposition with animal abusers, don't you think? I truly love the man I married!