A Poems about Farms and Wildlife

 

They don’t have to be mutually exclusive…. an orchard with flowers underfoot.

 

But sometimes farmers feel that they have to plough every patch their tractors fit into, for fear those flowers take energy away from the apples and nuts.

 

Thoughts on seeing a recently-cleaned water pond on Saint Patrick’s Day

 

On a Sunday, the seventeenth, I went for a walk in the countryside about the village.

I walked along the hedges, trimmed now in March before the birds came come along and put a fly in a farmer’s plans.

I paused over an old walled water pond, for the vegetable plot, to perhaps look upon a frog, or salamander.

It was scrubbed clean. The concrete pale below the clear water reflecting the crystal blue.

Not a boatman stroked across the surface, ne’er a leaf lay upon the bottom to hide a frog or newt.

For what would a farmer do with silt? A streamlined machine these fields, these springs,

And cleanliness is next to godliness, of course. The wild world was sterilised of sprits in favour of clean sheets.

The dragons were already gone before Saint Patrick stepped upon a snake.

A day will come when none of us will see one, no matter where we seek.

 

Of course, the day seems to be coming faster than we feared, with the new  UN report about to come out today, Monday, declaring that a million species are about to go extinct if we don’t turn this shit, sorry ship, around toot sweet, as they say.

Which is terribly hard to tell your kids when they ask at the age of eight.

I didn’t take a photo of the empty pond, but I did help this lad across the road a few days later after some long-awaited rain.

 

 

It’s time to put warning labels on meat.

I just signed this pledge, to reduce the amount of meat I eat.

https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/meatless_day_loc/

The organisers seem to be mostly concerned about the slaughter of so many animals to feed us gluttons.

It’s true, that 56 billion animals are treated fairly shittily every year. But that’s not quite my main motivation…

I want to reduce global climate change impacts.

I watched this video from the satirical character, Jonathon Pie, the other day, about how people are upset that the British Govt don’t think animals are sentient, when of course everyone loves their dogs so much they dress them up in shiny winter jackets nowadays. He was taking the piss because most of the same people don’t give a toss about the environment or wildlife.

 

And he’s right.

But hey, if people stop eating meat because they can’t stomach the idea of a cute little piggy getting stuck with a knife and hearing that death squeal, well, that’s all to the good.

At this stage of the game, motivation does not matter. Only the end result.

Just like making petrol very expensive in Europe makes the emissions here not quite so fucking outlandish as in America.

So in order to save the planet’s bacon, as it were, we need to reduce meat consumption, and we can either make it expensive – like cigarettes- and/or make it unpalatable – also like cigarettes.

So how do we do the latter?

We put labels on meat that explicitly say, “Did you know that this pig (photo of cute pig) went through this (photo of bloody gutted corpse) to make this tasty ham?”

Perhaps followed by the sentence – “If you are okway with this, then go right ahead and enjoy the tasty meat…”

This will put off quite a few people.

Myself excluded, of course. I always have the actual animal in mind when I’m eating them. I’ve seen dead animals, seen animals die, had a hand in that death myself. That doesn’t make me a bad person, it just makes me a realist. It’s the folk who haven’t seen, and worse, don’t want to see, or even think about, the death that went before the packaging and purchase, who are the problem here.

It is not often their fault, though – the supermarkets and food companies have purposefully separated the nastiness from the tastiness. Who sees the butcher at work in their supermarket?

In Spain, you can still see dead rabbits, fur on, in the butcher’s counter, along with pig heads, baby pigs, chickens hanging with heads and legs on. That’s the way it should be.

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t fed a pile of shite at the same time.

This advert is running on Spanish TV at the moment. Watch it. It’s 20 seconds.

I have eaten this ham. It’s nice enough. But eff me, what the hell is that ad all about?

There’s not even a shot of the farm, never mind the pig.

Associating a cooked ham with strawberries, or mother’s milk is far from fucking natural, folks, let’s just make that clear.

Natural is seeing the animal on the farm. Natural is seeing it being butchered.

If you don’t want to see the latter, then no problem – just stay away from meat.

And we’ll all be happy – except the food companies.