Blood on the Conscience

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 893, 14 September 1956, Page 22

Blood on the Conscience

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SUNDOWNER

| AUGUST 20

DON'T know whether it is commoner than it used to be to brood over our treatment of animals, but I can hardly think that it is. What is commoner is talking about it. We sentimentalise animals in print, in casual conversation, and on films, and so one uneasy

conscience communicates with another. But we don’t, and

we cant, give up mutilation and slaughter. We have to destroy animals en masse, or keep them alive and feed them until we are ready to eat them. It is in our flesh and in our bones; stamped in ourselves;xwritten into our marching orcers. "Let there be light" makes all living

things interdependent: men and mice; trees and worms; ants and elephants; alligators and oysters. The tiger is under the same compulsion to eat men as men to eat chickens and lambs. I can’t think-I have not been able to think for 50 years-how orthodoxy gets round that obstacle to belief in a benevolent, all-wise and all-powerful Creator; or under it or over it. But when I said this today to a Christian friend he was quite unruffled, Why worry, he asked. It is true that life is sustained on the earth by methods that no benevolent human being would have used, but it is in general sustained happily. The lamb does not know that it is going to the slaughter. It knows that the sun is warm and thé grass is sweet, Even man, the most savage and cruel, but the only kind and _self-sacri-ficing creature on earth, enjoys most of his life most of the time. The pleasures of living obliterate the fears and pains, or the race would disappear. "I can’t explain life. If I could I would be more than a man, and you, who are not more, would be incapable of understanding me. But I can eat a lamb chop with a clear conscience if it is fat and juicy. I know then that it,was produced in happiness. Why God made me dependent on that lamb I don’t know. My point is that if the lamb had not enjoyed getting ready for me I would have chosen another lamb that had." ok % %*

AUGUST 23

\/E have been trying for weeks to _ discover the cause of occasional taints in our milk and cream that make them almost unusable. Even Jim’s good

hay has been under suspicion, though it is the sweetest hay the cows have ever had, and reveals nothing that I recog-

nise as a_ possible taint- producer. But when Ann asked me

today if I had looked recently at the flax bush in the gully I knew that she had located our trouble. Until a few months ago the cows had shown no interest in flax, young or old. When I planted a row along a fence within browsing reach of both sheep and cows I expected the young shoots to be chewed, and took the precaution of adding a stand-off line of barbed wire; but the cows ‘were not interested in the flax even when I grazed them round the roots. During the autumn drought, however, they attacked this big clump in the gully, and in two days had all the leaves they could reach chewed to within two or three feet of the ground. Then, for some reason beyond my knowledge, the milk was not affected. Now, with only a fraction of the chewing, there are milkings that can hardly be used. It is a stronger taint than that produced in Otago in early summer by what we used to call Maori onion. Fortunately, milk is the only food product we have ever had tainted badly enough to be unpleasant, though the cows often strip branches of Pinus insig- nis, always clean up the clippings from hedges of lucerne tree, trim Muhlenbeckia, and occasionally snatch leaves of laurel. We have no Maori onions in Canterbury, no ragwort to speak about, and very little buttercup; but I have read that when wild garlic makes its spring appearance in some English counties. it taints everything that eats it, sheep, rabbits, birds, and even eggs. I have certainly tasted duck eggs with such a strong flavour of fish that they could be used only for baking. Hen eggs, too, when fowls run free, are (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) sometimes too strong to be pleasant when eaten boiled. But I know of nothing strong enough to make eggs unusable in Canterbury, and flesh taints, though they perhaps occur, must be very rare. But I remember the commotion caused once in Dunedin when a prominent prohibitionist discovered that a dairyman supplying the city with milk was feeding his cows on brewers’ grains.

AUGUST 25

* * * \ | AM not going to get rid of fitches by throwing a brick at them. Professor Arnold Wall, who knows more about words than I know about the hairs on my own head, has sent me this note: "Fitch" and "fitchew" mean the polecat or foumart. ‘‘Fitchew" is Middle English; "fitch" dates from 1502. The meaning "fur of a polecat" is the second or later meaning. "Fitchet," diminutive of "fitch," dates from 1535, and is used erroneously for the weasel since 1573. "Ferret" is Middle, English, and is described in the Shorter Oxford as "a half-tamed variety of the common polecat." The verb "to ferret’ dates from 1450. I have no doubt that here we have a population of hybrids between the polecat and its variety the ferret, and perhaps we have hybrids with the weasel or stoat.

I am not sure that this compels me to catch fitches when I set traps for

ferrets, but it does make me walk more warily in the pre-

sence of the Wild Life Division. If my ancestors have been "ferreting" since 1450-when York and Lancaster were getting ready for the Wars of the Roses and Joan of Arc’s ashes were not long cold; when the Turks were threatening Constantinople and the Irish were spitting on their hands before starting a fight that was to last nearly 500 years; when Jack Cade’s head was still on his shoulders and Scotland’s Flowers of the Forest had not yet been "wede away" at Flodden-if we have had ferrets as long as that, it will do no harm to keep them a little longer. In any case, if Professor Wall is right in thinking that what we have in New Zealand is "a population of hybrids"-and I am sure that he is-one name is as good as another for a mongrel. (To be continued)