Mostly green

I've been hunted many times. One man tracked me for three winters. After a while it was easy to stay just out of his range without really thinking about it. But one time, for fun, I walked into his camp while he was sleeping, shat in one of his boots, and took the other one away and tossed it in a pond.

You do silly things when you're young. You take risks without fully realising the odds. When you're older, maybe you get too careful, maybe you think too much. But the hunter who finally killed me was clever. He was slow and patient, took time to get to know me. I watched him once touch a twig I'd scratched my nose on and put it to his nose. I saw him pick bits of my fur from thorns and keep them in his pocket. He could track other animals just as easily, and had no problem surviving outside of those human zones, with their hard scentless tracks, their noise and blazing light.

I wondered if he could be one of the elder people my mother told us about, who lived alongside us, before I was born. They were like us, she said, we shared land and food. But this one wanted me dead, I knew it. I kept moving. At one point I almost ran headlong out into nowhere.

My last Winter came. The cold isn't a problem for wolves, it's just the lack of food.

But what am I saying? Ideas of wrong or right never occurred to me when I was a live wolf. Abstractions of any kind, in fact. Only the particular was important. In fact my attention to detail kept me alive.

I lost two of my siblings to traps. One of them indirectly, because he would not leave his sister. I took the more cowardly option. Previously I saw my mother shot and badly hurt, and stayed with her, and was shot at in turn. So I ran away.
My sole remaining brother was poisoned, or so I believe. My mother knew the ways of men, and warned us not to eat dead meat unless we were sure it was not killed by them. Only eat your own kills. My brother was greedy and there was something rank on his breath just before he died, like old cheese.
I am a wary creature, or was. Ever since then any hint of that smell, any hint of man, I hide. I've had moments of boldness. Once I dug up three balls of offal, which smelled good. They didn't smell human, but nor did they smell of any other predator who might have buried them. And anyway, I hadn't killed them. They were spaced about 100 yards apart. I gathered them together in a pile and shat on them.
Traps are easy. Usually you can see the earth's been disturbed, and smell the metal, so long as you're not going too fast. And if you have to go fast, don't use the usual tracks. I know, easier said than done. But always best to hide. I've only had two face to face encounters with humans. And I'm dead because of the second one. Anyway I used to like digging up those metal traps and setting them off. That, and shitting on their poisoned bait, was as near as I got to a conversation with death with a human. Ironic that now I'm dead I'm talking to humans.

Now I know that look my mother gave me conveyed her awareness of her mortality, and of the mortality of our prey. She said we're none of us around forever, and we all depend on each other. Caribou, wolf, fox, hare, all need to live and die together. When you want to kill someone, you look them in the eye. They look back, and you know if they're ready to die or not, or how much of a fight you're going to have. It's the conversation of death. It's conveyed in an instant. And its conveyed very clumsily by these human words.

And maybe that's because humans don't understand the conversation of death. I've seen only fear in their eyes. Or sometimes their eyes are blank, unreadable. That's the time I hide, as quickly as I can. The eyes of their domestic animals convey only fear. How can I describe it. It's like they're not animals. They have no spirit. They're not worth killing.

Yet I've killed many of them, I admit, and more than I needed to eat. And tame meat, incidentally, has no taste, it tells you nothing. I suppose, looking back, I could say I was angry, resentful, I hated the men and their herds. But actually I didn't. That's the human fingers distorting my voice. The truth is nearer to I just don't understand humans at all, they don't fit into the world. Maybe my world is wrong.

This is an attempt at a story, mainly inspired by Of Wolves and Men by Barry Holstun Lopez. Feedback welcome. To be continued.

As far as I can tell I am the last of my kind. My mother told me she lived with a pack, with wolves from other families. The only wolves I have known are my mother and brothers and sisters, all of whom were killed by men. Most of what I know I learned from my mother, most of the rest from men.

Men are like wolves. They are clever hunters, and have family and friends like we do. But they differ from us, and from other wild animals, in their strange ignorance of death. I know, you're thinking it's surely the other way round, it's wild animals who aren't aware of their mortality. Perhaps you're also thinking I'm an unusually literate wolf. The latter I can explain more easily. I am a wolf spirit, using human fingers to type my story. The former idea, about perceptions of death, is perhaps impossible to explain. But I'll try.

When I was young I was stupid, and would kill without thought. Anything that moved I would chase, it was fun. If it got away it didn't matter, mother would feed us. But as I grew bigger, I learned the ways of bigger prey. I learned stealth and patience, to watch from a distance as deer went to drink, at the same place every day. Mother and I would hide in our places, then I would run out and frighten the deer towards her. When she caught one, I would help her kill it. There were other tricks, this was one of the first I learned. A couple of times my mother clearly let deer escape which she could have caught. Being young and ignorant I was disappointed in her, and foolishly conveyed this, in my yip yappy juvenile way. She gave me a look which quietened me, and which made me feel sad, so I would whimper and cuddle up to her. Looking back, I think I didn't want to understand that look.

We have a guinea pig and a rabbit where I work. Bumble and Patch. They're confined, but have a nice hutch within an enclosure about eight feet square. They're healthy and well fed, and seem to get on well. The rabbit was found in an allotment, the guinea pig bought from some farm locally where he was boxed up with other guinea pigs who were bullying him, I suspect because of his haircut, he has naturally punk hair, several crowns all over his body.
We have 12 residents and 13 staff. The residents I can excuse because of their mental health problems. Out of the staff eight will feed Bumble and Patch, at least occasionally. Four are willing to clean them out, including me.
So that's roughly 75% of staff keeping them alive, 33% ensuring basic hygiene. Which means 25% of the staff don't care if Bumble or Patch starve to death, whilst living in filth.
I find this difficult to understand. I've asked the uncaring few what they think about this, even asking "you don't care do you?"
The people I respect most have replied directly with a negative (one). Others lie, or promise, or won't talk.
I dare say I'm coming across as a really awkward miserable sod in these blogs, but in reality I get on well with people, I'm a fairly genial miserable sod, I'm just increasingly baffled and angered by our species ignorance and cruelty towards others.

I am annoying the people I work with lately. To be fair, they annoy me too. And in my defence, I'm not voicing my opinions unless there's a context. For example I recently had the misfortune to come across the carcass of an Asda Smartprice chicken. (I work in mental health care by the way, and we help our service users to prepare meals etc.) This sad specimen had been cooked for four, one of whom wasn't interested in getting out of bed, while the remaing three ate their customary child's portion, leaving well over half the chicken intact. This would probably have been binned a year or so ago, but I like to think people have stopped waste like this at least partly because of my views on it.

I tasted the meat. It had a texture not far removed from plasticene. The taste was not far removed either, I imagine. (I have been an aspiring vegetarian for years, but am more strict of late.) I removed the meat and boiled the carcass for stock. As you may know, chicken stock, when cooled, should be a brown jelly with a layer of yellow fat on top. This smartprice stock was a grey sludge.

Anyway I conveyed this information, as part of the handover, to the next shift, given that it was shopping day. I was concise, saying something like "Don't buy cheap meat, it's shit and most of it gets wasted, buy a smaller better quality bird or joint", and directed this at one person in particular who buys cheap meat. He ended up flicking a v-sign inches from my face, saying "just because you've got a bee in your bonnet about battery hens - "
" - and broiler chickens", I interrupted, so as to annoy him, I admit. I doubt he knows what a broiler chicken is. He stormed out at that point. The people remaining agreed we should not buy cheap meat, but can't afford to go as far as free range.

I don't preach vegetarianism, and only talk about it if people ask. I have attempted to persuade people not to buy Procter and Gamble products, however. Unsuccessfully.

To be fair, the v-sign flicker is an extreme, and I at least appreciate his directness. A more usual response is "oh Bernard man", meaning, I think, "I've heard all this before but its of secondary importance, I'm here to do a specific job." Also, "I know, you're right, I really feel sorry for the £1.99 chicken. But I've got a family to feed."

I will persevere. I won't start about the pet rabbit and guinea pig, I'll save that for later.

Lately I am rapidly evolving into a dangerous extremist, i.e. an animal rights supporter. I blame this on two books I have read recently, Animals Like Us by Mark Rowlands, and Rage and Reason by Michael Tobias. I know, I chose to read them. Or did some drive or compulsion beyond my conscious control compel me to do so?

Anyway, for those still reading (and I hope that's not just animal rights nutcases like me), Rowlands book is an excellent presentation of the ethical case for animal rights. Its hard (for me at least) to dispute his argument that equal consideration of interests should apply to all sentient beings. And I defy anyone to read his chapters on factory farming and vivisection and then go on to knowingly fund these practices.

I read Rage and Reason in a day, I was so gripped by it. Its the story of a super fit ex forces vegetarian psycho who takes revenge on scientists, chefs, furriers etc., in various imaginative and grisly ways. Its fiction by the way.

So, in my defence, I believe I have been propagandized. Read my next post to see how this has disrupted some of my interpersonal relationships.

Aren't pigs funny? Or so Jamie Oliver strongly implied recently, as he saved our bacon. Our bacon. Our country. Our pigs. We own them, we can do what we like to them, but we should at least be nice to them before we kill and eat them, if only for the pleasure of the palette. Better animal welfare means yummier meat.

I think I see what Jamie was trying to do. In showing pigs ejaculating, being born, castrated, horribly confined, and killed, he was showing us the reality of the meat we eat. Think about where it comes from, how it's produced. Don't buy the cheap stuff.

But the whole programme was fundamentally demeaning to pigs. Pigs should be large, hairy, scary beasts which live in forests. Instead they've become pink, bald, fat, live indoors all their lives, eat shit, are treated like shit, have no autonomy, and are cut off from nature so completely they would just die out there. Where's the feeding trough?

Just like us. Where's the Asda? Watching the pigs wasn't dissimilar to watching Big Brother really.