February Rant

The following started out in life as a rant sent to one of the email lists I belong to because of all the truly fuzzy thinking about things like "day of rest" and, "work".

After thinking about it for some time I came to the conculsion I really owed it to myself, if no one else to put it on my blog and then spend some time expanding on it in terms of what I see happening just in my community, much less other parts of the country.

My rant:
To bad so few know what animal husbandry means, even sadder that so few have even heard the term these days. The day of rest had to do with your beasts of burden. Those who pulled your plows, your carts and wagons. It had to do with the turnspit dog and the ox that walked the circle and ran the thrasher. It had to do with all the domestic animals that supplied the power to run the first labor saving devices. It never had to do with good husbandry. The milk givers still had to be milked twice a day. The flocks still had to be protected from predators.

I swear, I seem to have lost my sense of humor or something because for the life of me I can't tell when some of you are making a silly joke and when you are just showing ignorance of good animal husbandry practices and how work got done BEFORE we became so energy crazy.

So when animals were truly a part of our life and when our feet always touched Mother Earth and when we moved with the sun and the seasons, we cared for our charges 7 days a week, 365 days of the year. What the day of rest did is cut the work to the bare minimum. No fields were plowed. No wood chopped. No grain ground. No fiber spun or woven nor cloth cut. And sometimes to give the cook rest, the meal was prepared the night before, using slow cooking techniques. No animals were rounded up for branding,treatments, or sorting. For all to have a day of rest now would mean we would still have everything open and running all the time because they will take their day of rest on Friday and I will take mine on Saturday and you will take yours on Sunday. And to a certain extent that was the way it was done before, in the back of beyond.

Meanwhile, as the term animal husbandry falls further and further out of favor it was replaced with animal welfare. When animal welfare stopped being radical enough, it was replaced with animal rights. Now that term is falling out of favor and being replaced with animal protection. Those of us who actually know how to care for, nurture, train, sustain the animals that may come under our care need to go back to the animal husbandry term and way of looking at our interaction with animals before it is too late. Cause I'mthinking that what the welfare types weren't able to do the rights types moved along to new highs and the protection types will finish. When finished the MSN will have done its job and truly it was one generation and out, just like they said they would do. The horse industry is under heavy attack right now and they still haven't woken to the fact they may be in even more trouble than the dog/cat people. Sheep/cattle/chickens/turkeysare next in the line of fire. One more generation and most humans will be totally reduced to serfdom. Control the access to food and water and you control the entire population. It's not just about dogs and cats and it never was.

As for cats? Isn't most every day a day off?