poetry notebook

Today I heard a loud report next door. Could have been a couple of M-90s tied together, but it was a single shot from a deer rifle. Homer the wild hog, whom my neighbor has been caring for and feeding for the past few months, met his end at 10:28 a.m. PDT today. He died instantly at the hand of said neighbor. He had a good life for a hog. They really treated him well until they shot him.

The slaughter of animals is not something that pleases me. But, most people, and most people I know, eat animals. But most of the animals that are slaughtered for food don’t die instantly, the way Homer did. And most of them live in merciless circumstances from birth only to be killed in an even more cruel fashion.

I mourn the passing of Homer, whom I met when he first moved into his pen next door. He was a character, very playful, with obvious intelligence in his every move. But I must give kudos to my neighbors for treating him well while he was alive and for dispatching him quickly when the time came. Would that all animal husbandry were so humane.

At the moment they have him strung up on a backhoe and are hacking him up (butchering him). When I’m dead, you can hack my corpse up if you like. Hell, if you want to you can even eat it, I really don’t care. In fact, I prefer sky burial to even cremation. Alas, sky burial is illegal. Nevertheless, when I’m dead, please hack my corpse up and feed it to the vultures, crows, and ravens.

But I don’t eat animals, from land, air, or sea. Most people seem to be worried about what will happen to their corpse after they die. It’s particularly amusing when people seem to be more horrified by a killer chopping up a corpse than they are by the murder of the person who became the corpse. C’mon, folks, the murder is the heinous act, not the chopping up. But these same folks eat animal corpses.

Go figure. Check out farm sanctuary: http://www.farmsanctuary.org/