Living with animals

 

Virtually all our ancestors had a working relationship with animals of some kind, in any era and culture, until historically yesterday. Before we began using machines for everything, animals were the literal horsepower that carried us, the teeth that guarded us, the wings and legs that helped us hunt and fish, the oldest and most faithful of companions, lovingly nursed to life and to health. They were also, without contradiction, meat and milk and eggs and blood and life for oursleves and our children.

Many modern people treat cats and dogs as the babies they will never have, and I see first-time riders try to control horses as they do dead machines. Animals, though, are beings with their own personalities and goals, if not the words to express them.

“Animals will not be measured by us,” wrote Henry Beston in his memoir The  Outermost House. “They move through a world older and more complete than ours, as finished products, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or have never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren or underlings, they are other nations, caught with us in the net of life and time, fellow creations of God and bound to the exalted Earth.”

Farmers had to be midwives, to monitor when their lamb or calf was due, help deliver, coax milk from the mother and stay with her all night -- and until electricity came in, to do all this by touch in darkness. Boland remembers sitting with his pig all night helping it give birth – which he looked forward to, as he got to skip school. Farmers trusted a man who knew animals; when he was stringing electicity cables across Ireland, John Fitzpatrick got a farmer to agree to let them cross his land when Fitzpatrick rolled up his sleeves and helped deliver a calf.

Even in the middle of the city, people had their own farmyard animals. Christy Conville said that across Dublin many back gardens housed a pig, and many had cows and hens. “I wish to stress again the ‘farm’ atmosphere of our whole district,” wrote Paddy Crosbie. “The only unusual things about the farmyard which joined onto the house in which I was born are that it was in ... Dublin, and there was no farm to go with it,” wrote Patrick Boland. Cattle were driven to market in Dublin “by cowboys on bicycles, men with overcoats and hats, furiously pedalling this way and that, whacking the cattle with their sticks and shouting at them,” Gene Kerrigan said.

Backyard animals not only gave each household meat for the year and money for selling the extra meat, but also rid the community of rubbish; “float cars were a common sight in the streets as boys or young men went from house to house looking for slop for the pigs,” Crosbie said.

With food waste, we have two sane choices; to pile it up in a compost bin and let micro-organisms decompose it naturally into soil, which we can then use to grow new crops in a garden. The even better option is to feed it to animals that will eat it and convert it into meat and animal waste; Britons did this in World War II as a national duty, and we could do so again. 

There is also one insane choice: We could transform precious sources of fuel like coal and oil into plastic, wrap the food waste in plastic to cut off all oxygen, and throw it into a pit. The chemicals in the plastic will break down over thousands of years, gradually poisoning the groundwater, and the food waste cannot decompose in the normal way, by oxygen-breathing micro-organisms. Instead, it will gradually be eaten by micro-organisms called methanogens, which release methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases. You won’t be surprised to find that this is exactly what our modern culture does; again, we split an elegant cycle into multiple problems.

Modern suburbanites might be alarmed at the idea of having livestock in their yards, but that’s what yards were for originally, when people expected to provide for themselves. As Ireland modernised, Conville said, new laws forced urban families to get rid of their animals, citing public hygiene. Yet when they had animals, Conville said, “they were getting organic meat, and you were getting it fresh. You knew the pig and where it came from; it wasn’t from Argentina or anything like that, it was from your own neighbourhood.”