Don't drink the Kool-Aid

Sometimes your age creeps up on you in an odd way.

This week marked the 37th Anniversary of the Jonestown massacre where 909 people died in the largest mass suicide in modern history.  I was a week away from my fifth birthday and the news coverage marks the first world event that I remember.

This was before the nightly newsman warned viewers that the images to follow may not be suitable for children.  Let's face it, life is not suitable for children and this is why it is important to help them grow up before they have to face it as legal adults.

This is also the week of the year when an annual event I attend takes me to a local Methodist church.  It is a nice country church filled with nice country kid Christians but there is a sign in the kitchen that I just can not bring myself to ignore.

Keep it in the sanctuary!

I can't stop looking at it from the corner of my eye.  The first time I saw it, I was dumbstruck.  Even now I can't believe it remains year after year.  I want to go around asking all the other adults about it and asking, "How can anyone be so deaf."  I cope by allowing my internal dialogue to access my dark humor but otherwise keeping silent.

Beyond the Jonestown event, it seems to reflect a cultural deafness.  Churches, religions, ideologies, they should pretty much just steer away from any reference to Kool Aid.

It is good to remember the victims.

It is important to remember the lesson: know when to break away from the tribe and go your own way.

Fundamentalism is not restricted to one religion, one ideology, or one part of the political spectrum.  It can show up among conservatives.  It can be manifest among leftists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or, well, you fill in the blank.

We each need to police our own.  We all need to be ready to reject the extremes with word and deed.  There is also a time when we reach the limits of tolerance.  When grown-ups must intervene, hopefully before mothers start using syringes to get their toddlers to drink the kool-aid.

It is all part of life in the Anthropocene.

Too young to know the story?  Watch the PBS documentary.  Suitable for helping fragile little snowflakes become a little more prepared for adulthood.

What if?

Road
side
fork horn
in velvet,
young, dumb, unsure, and
a trophy to the baser tastes.

Yet imagine if he survives another two years.

Diana's Day

The days are still warm but I can't help but notice they are getting shorter and I am starting to get an itch for hunting season.  

There must be something deep in the genome about this time of year.  Long before the DNR or even the concept of conservation fall was a time to remember the hunt and its goddess: Diana.

I live in a diverse household.  I am an atheist.  My wife follows an Anabaptist style of Christianity.  The dogs are into Zen and the cat is a straight up Nihilst.

None of us are pagans in any meaningful sense of the word.

I, however, like the vast majority of other human beings can appreciate a good rhythm to the seasons of the year and think it is meaningful, or at least enjoyable, to commemorate them.  So despite the furrowed brow of my wife, the dogs and I do a little something to mark the approach of the absolute best time of the year.

For the sake of household harmony there are no sacrifices or candles lit before idols and only the canines are allowed to dance naked before consuming some roadkill deer hoof that has been parked in the freezer.  

We clean out the hunting gear, oil up any firearms that need it, repack the plastic tote which carries all the tracking and hunting supplies I might need for the dogs.  I will set out my deer hunting clothes so the scent can naturalize before the September opener.

I have often thought of going vegetarian for the month between Diana's Day and the opening of the deer bow season.  I recall some old timers telling me once how this was their tradition believing that carnivorous humans and herbivorous humans smell differently to approaching deer.  Color me skeptical, either way, you smell like a human.  Still, the discipline would be welcome and it would add to the suspense of the approaching opener.

Still, I wish I were enough of a romantic to be able to wax lyrical about Diana, chaste and fair but really, I just want to go huntin'.

Some Friends actually are Food

Anthropology and psychology, like the other social sciences, can not help but be constrained by the culture and experiences of the observers.

By studying others we hope to learn about what it means to be human.  As often than not, however, what we end up doing is revealing our own provincialism.  In this recent article reviewing a study of cat consumption in certain of Madagascar, the provisionalism of this modern American life shines forth.

The researchers had hypothesized that because cat meat was not a preferred food, its consumption would be restricted to economic hard times. They were wrong. There was no evidence that people turned to eating cat only as a last resort when other forms of meat were unavailable. Rather, killing and eating cats seemed to be motivated more by sheer opportunity than necessity or a pronounced culinary preference. 

The researchers also wanted test the notion that food taboos are culturally transmitted. Thus they predicted that the towns would differ in the strength of prohibitions against eating feline flesh. This was technically true: for example, 10% of the residents in one town had a personal taboo against eating cat compared to none of the inhabitants of another town. On the whole, however, only 3% of all the individuals interviewed in the study were disgusted by the idea of eating cat meat. As the consumption of dog meat is widely tabooed on the island of Madagascar, the lack of prohibitions against eating cats is surprising.

It was once the case that the nation's cities were populated by the excess population of the countryside.  Farm mechanization created the extra labor which helped build our cities and populated the Chair's of academic departments from Veterinary Science to Shakespeare.  

Increasingly, however, those positions are filled by women and men whose closest connection to

2015: Some friends are food.

agricultural production is ever more likely to have been a grandparent or great-grandparent to whom they can not relate.  Consequently, they are spending research dollars on questions any farm kid of reasonable insight could answer.

What farm kids understand is that human relationships to the animals surround us do not fit into an easy trichotomy of the majestic wild, anonymous meat wrapped in cellophane, and pampered fur baby of a cat or dog but rather exist upon a spectrum from pest to companion. We care for our livestock and can be saddened at sending a favorite animal to market. 

Members of a single species of wild animal can be pest, food, a majestic animal to watch from the porch, depending upon the context.   Pets can be working members of the farm and contributers to the hunt who experience the real risk of harm in the process.  

They are not babies, they are members of a tribe or family, and membership comes with responsibilities as well as rights.

When I was seven it was time to butcher the goat that I had treated as a pet.  My mother was worried

1978: "Is it ready for the freezer yet?"

that I might be traumatized so a slightly older cousin was tasked to keep me away from the carcass until it looked a little less like my pet.  The cousin but my mother realized her concern was unfounded when i asked, "So, does it go in the freezer like this?"   At a young age I understood why we had cared for the goat. I understood sacrifice for the good of the pack. I understood that we had claims on the goat as well as an obligation to care for it. Over at the Huffington Post, these are foreign concepts.

To me, the biggest surprise of the research was related to how Madagascarans obtained their cat meat. Half of the time they simply ate the family pet. Cat meat was also commonly acquired in the form of gifts from friends. And sometimes cats were caught by hand or by trapping. In one of the towns, most of the cats were - gulp -- road kill. Hardly anyone had ever bought cat meat at a market.

They didn't buy their meat at the local Whole Foods! The inhumanity!


In hunting or farming, the writers over at Downton Abbey put the idea succinctly into the mouth of Lady Edith, “there is room for sentiment" in our relationship with animals "but not for sentimentality.”

If they had experience life with livestock, these anthropologists would be able to easily understand a culture where farm animals can be both objects of affection AND sources of protein. The culture of the Madagascar villagers is not the anomaly, but rather a culture where animals are either treated as unfeeling machines of production or surrogate children based merely upon their cultural-specific purpose.   When you live with living things, you learn to treat them all as living things. Where protein can not be taken for granted it is not left to rot along the side of the road.

I ate some roadkill last week. Is it more respectful to leave an animal to rot along side the road or consume it?

Color me cynical but I believe if we took away Frontline and the rabies vaccine and our own culture would very quickly shed the "fur baby" facade for a more practical approach to our cats and dogs. If I were worried about my children's nutrition, I'd be more than happy to expand the species of which I am willing to process roadkill into meat. I mean crock pot cat can't be much worse than baked opossum.