The Silence of the lambs.
I am fortunate to live out in the countryside, this affords me a quieter life than my city dwelling siblings. I love to see the new life all around me from the plants to animals. Spring is a time I love and hate with almost equal emotion. I get to see the trees and plants spring into life. I get to watch the frogs spawn hatch and see the little tadpoles grow in front of my eyes. My kids get to have the type of childhood I had. They can get lost for hours with their friends, build huts, head off to the playground and generally just be kids. This is lost on so many urban kids IMO, organized play-dates and everything is supervised and over analyzed. I want them to experience a childhood like I had, they have enough time to be grownups when they are grown up.
New life and death in equal measure.
Spring is the lambing season, I get to see so many of these beautiful little guys jumping around, never straying too far from their moms. I dont think there is anything more innocent in this world like the lambs as they frolic and play, it lifts my soul to see them. This joy is always short lived, only yesterday I was driving home from work when I saw the blacked out trailers pulling up to the fields where the lambs were grazing with their moms. Its kind of weird for me to write "moms", in Ireland we say mam not mom, nevertheless this is what the mammy sheep are to their kids. In fact when we were younger myself and my older brother would call my own mam like lambs, Maaaammmm, it used to drive her crazy. We did it in jest, anything to wind our mam up! It was only yesterday as I heard the little lambs bleating for their own mams that this memory came back to me.
Stolen babies
As the lambs were torn away from their mothers their bleating became more and more distressed, the ewe's advances toward the trailers were kicked or hit away. The level of violence against these peaceful creatures was quite disturbing. The lambs were tossed into the trailers like you would throw bags of coal, no thought for the welfare of the lambs. I wish this was an isolated incident but I have seen this a few times now and the same pattern follows. Year in year out. All so people can consume the flesh of babies. It is only when I stepped outside of this cycle of death that I could clearly see what I was a part of. I would relish the thought of a leg of lamb, I am an excellent cook and I could make that shit taste like butter. I would make an olive tapenade and tenderize the meat, pierce the flesh and poke rosemary and salt into it, never thinking about the life that was taken for my momentary taste and olfactory pleasure. We raise our babies to be kind to animals and in the same breath we feed them the flesh of babies that are stolen from their mothers. If we saw our own children cutting the throat of a cat, dog or lamb we would be horrified. Yet we pay other people to carry out these acts on our behalf.
Is it any wonder that we feel so confused? we do not live in line with our morals.
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