Farm News 10-22-06

Sunday morning, after chores


A Rainy Saturday

Saturday began with a light rain and low skies of tarnished silver. The Sumacs spill scarlet through the mist and fog. What a beautiful morning. Now, if a person planned to walk to town, or wanted to play golf, it might not be the best of days, but if you appreciate an excuse to stay inside and look out the windows, it was an excellent day.

Gray autumn days make the colors of the season leap out of the mist. The native grasses give us a grand palette of yellows, reds, and browns. The Sweet Gum in the front yard is a whirlwind of orange, tied to one spot with roots. And then there are mounds and mounds of mums and marigolds.

It is time to go to Quivira and Cheyenne Bottoms, both near Great Bend, a round-trip of about 500 miles from here, two months or so on horseback. There is some sort of inconsistency between leaving a 500 mile trail of hydrocarbon smoke and wanting to see a bunch of birds. I'm patriotic enough to have dispensation to ignore that inconsistency.

Every two weeks during the fall and winter the rangers at Quivira publish an estimate of bird population at http://www.fws.gov/quivira/Current%20Birds.htm. As of October 12, the day of the most recent survey, there were only a few hundred Sandhill Cranes. That number can jump very quickly to a few hundred thousand.


Readers Write:

White Swans and Horny Toads

You know how good conversations sometimes go after dinner. They flow around the table without script or thesis and you can't really remember all the meanderings. You just know that it was revealing of something. And it was good. Last Saturday night it all devolved to disparaging remarks about Oklahoma. Deserved or not, I can't say that I rushed to their aid. Now with a little distance from that group of uppity Kansans and those bottles of wine, I would like to paint Oklahoma in a different light.

I spent a long year in Oklahoma when I was about 8 years old. I used to get up early and go out before anyone else. I had a good perspective at that time of the flora and fauna of my backyard from a belly slithering point of view. The two things that stand out for me now about that back yard was horny toads and train tracks. Being a fairly sophisticated eight year old Kansas boy I had never seen anything like a horny toad. There were several in our yard. I looked them over real close. Wanting to inquire further I put one within a few inches of my mother's nose one morning.
Her normally perfect nurturing demeanor sputtered into that maternal militaristic command with something about, "Get that ... out of my house this instant!" Despite her stuccato reaction, I immersed myself in the prehistoric time warp of the horny toad. Hard and spiky on the back with soft and snaky bellies, horny toads move plenty slow enough for a kid to grab. I could spend entire Oklahoma afternoons eye to eye with Horny Toads. Therefore, I became an environmentalist.

Our back yard was a pretty barren place. The only aesthetic human gesture was that it got mowed but there was little actual grass. One fair morning my sister and I went adventuring across the tracks to foreign lands. As if on a quest for anything holy, we followed our blessed noses for miles and miles to a beautiful pond with cat tails and white swans and shade trees. Being completely unaccustomed to all three, we sat for a long time just looking and listening and smelling the place. We sat on its edge, not wanting to disrupt the constructed splendor. Therefore, I became a designer of places.

When you're eight you just never know what the day will bring. You just never know what lasting effect a day will have - how your personal history will unfold. I suspect if I were to chart the pivotal moments of the intervening forty years of my life they would be similarly unhurried, aimless and unambitious; profound in the context of the moment, but without importance at that moment. Writing of history requires the perspective of time. Today I cannot know what was important in my day today.

A Horse Lover

I'm a horse lover. I have no desire to ever eat horse meat. I fervently hope that the horses I have owned never make it to anyone's plate. That said, I don't oppose horse slaughter, even for human consumption. I just don't want the ones I love to be eaten.

There is a problem however, that has never been sufficiently addressed. Now, if you can tell me I'm wrong on this, I'd love to hear it. But slaughter houses and transport for slaughter are not set up to handle horses. First of all, horses cannot and should not be transported as cattle are. This is not because of some romantic vision of horses, it's because of the way they are made. If you cram a bunch of cattle together, they don't kick and bite and try to kill the other ones to make more room for themselves. Horses DO. This ends up with broken bones and trampled animals. So they shouldn't be transported in crammed double deck carriers as cattle are. Second, horses are very social. Horses that see other horses killed have been known to go into shock. So the kill floor needs to be handled differently in order to be humane.

I have no problem with humane slaughter. But it seems to be cost prohibitive to develop it that way.

And a Weirdo Who Always Centers His Text

Meat:

think about
India. Lots of
cows wandering around,
being treated like - what ? -
congressional representatives ?
While I was staying in India, I found a
western-style restaurant where I could
get a nice, well prepared - with ‘trimmings’ -
filet minion for about $1.50. I frequently had
two or three during the evening. A nearby community
has a rattlesnake round-up [held right next to the cemetery,
coincidently] every Fall, with a bar-b-que, and the snakes are one
of the featured menu items. I hear the opossum is a popular dish
hereabouts, also. I have seen alligator tail on restaurant menus
not far from here.