Just in case the above
might seem like a bit of overkill, I was out digging for
40 minutes while the above pictures were taken inside
following arrival so I did not get to spend that time
with him and so I just had to compensate this way, by
including them.
12
Adieu
Sundown and the cold closing
in
Blizzards usually come with
relatively mild air around here but during the 2-3 days in
their wake temperatures take a nosedive into the deep
minuses. I had expected this much and knew that breaking the
surface of the ground with the digging boom might be not so
easy, that a day later and until spring it certainly would
become impossible. And yes, I had asked myself if this had
influenced our decision. It had not. I did have
alternate plans.
Animals see the world around
them just like we do but do not necessarily draw
the same conclusions. This is illustrated in the
story of the puppy telling other dogs encountered
in the park that all he has to do is whine, maybe
lift a leg, and his master will run to him,
attach himself with a lanyard, after which master
can safely be taken for a walk while puppy
reads the morning paper sprayed on every bush or
fire-hydrant along the way. When I get on my
riding lawn-mower I mount some kind of animal,
Ozzie has to come along! When we get into a car or
tractor, then it is a strange looking/smelling
beast that eats us and takes us away. With time
they may accept that the beasts don't really eat
us, only carry us like 'roos do their young, while
during parked inactivity they just sleep there,
frozen motionless, with tires to piss on. Every
time I went working with my tractor, and this
included snow-clearing ops lasting several hours,
Ozzie had a nest made in the cabin for him. From
that perch behind glass he could supervise
extending strange arms and a constant growl of
sorts, he'd let a bark go when the gestures seemed
more aggressive than approved. Finally, with
the heater keeping us warm he'd usually just doze
off in the audio-lap of the deep diesel heartbeat.
|
The last two or so years he had gotten
progressively more tired just from old age although in his
case it was probably already a little more than just
old-age. Since he could never really jump into my pickup
truck cabin or into a tractor anyway I had begun to carry
him to such missions. He always wanted to
over-see things. When he got tired he'd just slumber off for
a snooze to the sound of that weird animal's deep diesel
heartbeat. Did this maybe a thousand times, every time we
went anywhere, sometimes even inside the house. I know
beyond any doubt that he just loved looking down on the
world from my shoulder, his neck always erect as he would
never stop looking around, almost like a fighter pilot.
As soon as we got home I went
at it and dug the grave, made his bed as it were with his
favorite things and then came the hardest part which, in
retrospect, I would just as soon have let pass because it's
one thing to witness a burial and quite another to lay a
body in the ground with your own hands, something
I'd done twice before in my life. On this day, when
everything was ready I went into the house and picked up his
body for the last yards to his final resting place. But that
body was limp now, totally limp, and still warm. As I kind
of threw him almost over my shoulder as can be seen the
earlier pictures, his completely relaxed neck fell into a
curve around mine. After a few steps I realized that he was
just telling me for a last time how much he loved me. I
slowed my pace not really knowing why, if it was to give
myself more time or to tell him that what had never stopped
between us now never will.
In his old lookout box
between his comfies
Animals see the world around them just
like we do but do not necessarily draw the same
conclusions. This is illustrated in the story of the
puppy telling other dogs encountered in the park that
all he has to do is whine, maybe lift a leg, and his
master will run to him, attach himself with a
lanyard, after which master can safely be taken
for a walk while puppy reads the morning paper sprayed
on every bush or fire-hydrant along the way. When I get
on my riding lawn-mower I mount some kind of animal,
Ozzie has to come along! When we get into a car or
tractor, then it is a strange looking/smelling beast
that eats us and takes us away. With time they may
accept that the beasts don't really eat us, only carry
us like 'roos do their young, while during parked
inactivity they just sleep there, frozen motionless,
with tires to piss on. Every time I went working with my
tractor, and this included snow-clearing ops lasting
several hours, Ozzie had a nest made in the cabin for
him. From that perch behind glass he could supervise
extending strange arms and a constant growl of sorts,
he'd let a bark go when the gestures seemed more
aggressive than approved. Finally, with the heater
keeping us warm he'd usually just doze off in the
audio-lap of the deep diesel heartbeat.
... and then still a little more
It somehow seems so natural to want to bury a loved one as
if the tomb would serve eternally, not really thinking of
where the entire galaxy will be in a fraction of what cannot
even be called a form of time.
I had planted about 220 pines
last summer with him overseeing operations most of the time.
The spot I chose for Ozzie is between four pines planted a
few years earlier, someday these pines will have grown tall,
may they stand guard over his rest (in the spring I had to
move him to the tree line just behind the young pine on the
right).
Another documentary
"Cowspiracy" addresses the environmental and
agricultural costs of meat eating. We are
raising animals to kill them but we are
destroying also both our own health and the
planet's capacity to feed us. Exceptionally in
THIS documentary (produced before
"Seaspiracy") human overpopulation IS
addressed and more than once but no solution
is offered. I could only notice how in later
documentaries the topic actually vanished.
|
I was barely
2-1/2 years old when the US conducted nuclear bomb tests on
Bikini atoll in the summer of 1946. Part of the experiments
were animals tied to assorted artifacts and just left there,
sometimes their agonizing deaths to be filmed for research.
It's probably acceptable or at least pardonable to kill and
eat animals for survival but I've ALWAYS found this kind of
barbarism rather depressing. We humans, made in the image of
some God, are capable of no more than this? Somehow I feel
ashamed of belonging to such a race. Other forms of animal
sacrifice begun in the early days of shithole abrahamism
multiplied after the war, we got to the point where we
sacrificed monkeys to see how much detergent in soap it
would take to go blind, to name just a milder form of
misconduct by samples of such divine ancestry as we presume
to be.
Dairy cows are repeatedly
impregnated by artificial insemination and have
their newborns taken away at birth. Female calves
are confined to individual pens and have their
horn buds destroyed when they are about eight
weeks old. The males are not so lucky. Soon after
birth, they are trucked off to veal farms or
cattle ranches where they end up as hamburger
meat.
The
typical dairy cow in the United States will
spend its entire life inside a concrete-floored
enclosure, and although they can live 20 years,
most are sent to slaughter after four or five
years when their milk production
wanes. New
York Times
|
March 6, 2023 today's news covered increases
in animal-abandon incidents in western Canada, mention being
made of up to 30% overcapacity conditions in shelters due to
people simply bringing in pets they say they had found
(animal shelters routinely euthanize all animals left
neither claimed nor adopted by a new owner). The suspicion
is that most of these people are the actual owners who are known thanks to
the chips they had forgotten about but few are prosecuted.
Many of the helpless little beings have been found, exactly
that way, after having been just abandoned in some remote
area.
I ask myself what kind of lowlife moron will bring a
pet that s/he has caused to become entirely and absolutely
dependent on himself or herself to a remote area in winter
there to just toss it out of the car to be left, unprepared
to survive, to suffer until dead?
May 18, 2023.
Authorities have moved against a Hungarian rancher with few
scruples who among other violations left dead animals in the
manure instead of proper disposal required by law.
Jun-12-2024
ALL wild animals are protected in Quebec except for hunting
some of them with a permit. There is no fox hunting at all.
Furthermore it is illegal to unsheathe a firearm within so
many feet of someone else's home but the distances vary.
Around 0900 EDT this morning my wife found a baby red fox
about half way on our 2200 foot long driveway/runway. She was
leaving for an appointment but phoned to tell me and I was
there probably before 1000 hrs. It had what looked like a 22
caliber entrance wound on the left side and a 1-2 inch exit
wound on the right. We could not determine where it got shot,
it may have been just walking along our driveway as they had a
habit of doing judging by historical feces observed or it may
have beet shot a short distance from there and it then bolted
to make it home' but collapsed crossing our driveway and bled
out. Rigor mortis (usually 3-4 hours after death in small
animals) had already set-in when I picked it up but later
around noon the body was relaxed again in Livor mortis
(usually occurs maybe 10-12 hours after death in small
animals). These numbers would suggest death possibly around
0100-0400 hrs.
The relative size of the wound would have made it impossible
for a tiny animal like this to run more than about a thousand
feet at most before collapsing, so even if it had been shot
somewhere else that place would most likely have been in area
3 shown on this sat image.
When I was 14 our king size German shepherd got shot in the
lungs by a
zika-category neighbor and drowned in his
own blood, dropping dead about 700 feet from where he got hit.
That dog and almost certainly this fox too was bee-lining in
panic to get home which for the fox was at the yellow 1 (we've
been following two or three generations of fox litters
beginning life in that area). The day when our dog Ozzie was
'dumped' on us, my son who had delivered him went over next
door to that same #1 visiting kin for a short spell. When I
next made the mistake of opening a door Ozzie was through it
like lightning and took off, at first right down the driveway
because it was FAST, and at the optimal point for minimum
total time it cut across also bee-lining to #1 from that point
in the tall hay jumping up every so often to keep the track
locked (blue line). All of this leads me to suspect that the
baby fox got hit in the kill-box at #3 extending from #2 where
he fell to about 1000 feet. Other neighbors within the 45
degree splay sector or even wider would have been too far but
cannot be discounted.
I phoned the cops mostly because I was concerned about anyone
having unsheathed a firearm within a short distance form our
home, we both go for almost daily walks along that driveway in
all kinds of weather at all kinds of hours! I called the
police (Surete Quebec jurisdiction here) who basically told me
to go fuck myself, but to call wildlife to report the shooting
if I want to. I did that too and fell on far more sympathetic
ears; their mandate alas was limited to wildlife protection.
Kalman Feher
