HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2010-11-04, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2010. PAGE 5.
I have no doubt that it is a part of the
destiny of the human race, in its gradual
improvement, to leave off eating animals,
as surely as the savage tribes have left off
eating each other when they came in contact
with the more civilized.
– HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden
For what it’s worth, the duck never knew
what hit him. A blue-winged teal beating his
way south along a chain of lakes and rivers in
Muskoka country. I was a 15-year-old kid
shivering behind a log on the river bank. I
picked up the whistle of his wings first,
thumbed the safety off my Remington, saw
him barrelling toward me, five feet off the
water. I drew a bead, aimed ahead of him by a
few feet as I’d been taught, and when he was
abreast of me, I pulled the trigger. The duck
cartwheeled in a puff of feathers and hit the
water like a kid doing a cannonball. My ears
ached. There was massive silence. The duck –
a carcass now – bobbed peacefully on the
surface of the water.
It was a momentary thrill soon overlapped
by a greater sadness. I felt like I’d farted in a
cathedral – disturbed and distorted a larger
narrative than mine. I had a good breakfast in
my belly and a hearty lunch awaited me back
at the cottage. I didn’t need duck meat.
But I retrieved the carcass, plucked and
cleaned it and that night I ate it, gingerly
spitting out pickles of buckshot from time to
time. It’s the only meat I ever ate that I killed
myself.
The experience did not turn me into a
vegetarian, rather a hypocritical carnivore. I
continued to eat meat; I just let others do the
actual dirty work.
And I knew better than most how dirty that
work was. My father was a livestock salesman.
He bought sheep and calves at the Ontario
Public Stock Yards and I worked beside him
for several summers. We were middlemen on
the commercial food chain. We bought live
animals trucked in by farmers and sold them in
job lots to buyers from Canada Packers, the
slaughterhouse across the street. Technically
we had no blood on our boots, but we were
enablers up to our eyeballs.
Well, all of this preamble to explain my
ongoing uneasy relationship with meat and the
way we get it to our plates. Have I tried
vegetarianism? Yes – for the best part of three
years, once. But a man can eat only so many
spinach casseroles. The truth is I still salivate
over sirloin, jockey for first dibs on a turkey
drumstick and believe the aroma of frying
bacon to be right up there with the smell from
a freshly opened tin of Erinmore Flake pipe
tobacco.
So, a hearty carnivore and un-proud of it.
Is there any salvation for this mindless sinner?
Maybe. It’s called IVM which stands for In-
Vitro Meat. It is, to be simplistic, meat that’s
grown in a test tube – no fat, no bone,
no organs or gristle – also no swine flu,
avian flu, mad cow or brucellosis. No
sentient life, in fact.
Is it unnatural? Hell, yes. IVM is eight kinds
of blasphemy, guaranteed to outrage
everybody from Glen Beck to Martha Stewart.
IVM will have cattle farmers, pork producers,
sheep ranchers and poultrymen (not to
mention all the fishermen at sea) looking for
new lines of work. Slaughterhouses will be
transformed into trendy condos; grazing lands
(70 per cent of the world’s arable land is
currently devoted to livestock) will be freed up
for other crops, real estate or – more
blasphemy – return to its natural state.
People will never eat lab meat you say?
Check the pedigree of the stuff that’s being
peddled down at the supermarket right now.
Some of those sanitized gobbets of pink flesh
in shrink-wrapped plastic film are so laced
with steroids, growth hormones and antibiotics
it’s a wonder they don’t glow in the dark.
So what about IVM – will it fly? Don’t ask
me, I’m a scribbler, not a soothsayer. But I do
believe if we all got to walk through a
slaughterhouse on a business day, 95 per cent
of us would exit the building as vegetarians.
I’ll say this too: if In-Vitro Meats do replace
slaughtered animals it will be as
transformative for humans as the invention of
the wheel or the discovery of steam.
I’ll say one other thing: “My will contains
directions for my funeral, which will be
followed not by mourning coaches, but by
oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small
travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing
white scarves in honour of the man who
perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.”
Actually, I didn’t say that. George Bernard
Shaw did.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Plainly because of the meat
Looking in the mirror last week it hit me.
I had committed to growing a mustache
for Movember to raise money for
Prostate Cancer Canada and now I was
actually going to have to do it.
Several people have already donated. I have
collected nearly $300 and have several
hundred more dollars committed from friends,
family members and co-workers, so because of
this early generosity, I knew there was no
going back now.
Strangely enough, to me anyway, one of the
most frequent questions I have received in the
lead-up to this endeavour was “what kind of a
mustache are you going to grow?”
To be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought.
Lucky for me, though, when I registered on the
Movember website, I was e-mailed a
Movember style guide, which included 10
different mustache styles.
The styles come with names such as the
Business Man, the Box Car, the Connoisseur,
the Rock Star, Undercover Brother, the Trucker
and Abrakadabra, to name just a few.
I’m no stranger to having a few whiskers on
my face, as my normal look is a full beard, so
after a rare full shave, it was hard not to look at
my face as an empty canvas.
I have received suggestions and I have
received incentives. I have two friends who
have been lobbying for a handlebar mustache
ever since I announced this undertaking and
now, they have put their money where their
mouths are, donating generously, but both
proposing to double the donation if I choose to
fashion a handlebar mustache.
Since the point of this project is to raise as
much money as I can for Prostate Cancer
Canada, it seems foolish to turn it down.
Watching television last weekend, I saw an
advertisement for Movember with former
Toronto Maple Leafs captain Wendel Clark
and Canadian hockey and mustache icon
Lanny McDonald, sporting a soup strainer any
man would be proud to call his own.
To get right into the spirit, when designing
my Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween this year, the
little guy ended up with a modest, but
commanding, handlebar mustache to greet
trick-or-treating young children on Sunday.
So now that Movember is finally upon us, I
hope that members of the community will take
the time to stop by the office and donate to an
extremely worthy cause. Whether it be a Box
Car or a Business Man mustache on my face,
for the last few days approaching the beginning
of November, I have been filled with a great
feeling of anticipation for this venture and the
good that I feel it might do.
As I said, I have received several donations
already and for those, I am truly grateful.
Many of the donations have come via the
internet, and have been accompanied by kind
thoughts from the donor, wishing me good
luck and some even eagerly awaiting a picture
of my clean-shaven face. Trust me, it’s a rarity.
So for those of you hoping to donate, again,
cash and cheque donations may be dropped off
at either the Blyth or Brussels office. I will
mail donations for you (tax receipts will be e-
mailed out for donations $20 and over).
The easiest way to donate, however, is online
at http://movember.com/mospace/572980/
which is my personal profile on the Movember
website. You will see your donation appear
immediately and you can leave comments
and/or words of encouragement as I embark on
this charitable mustachioed journey.
I hope to see some folks in the office this
week, you’ll be greeted with a warm smile, a
hearty handshake and a budding mustache.
An empty canvas
You know premiers are facing tough
times when they start trotting out their
families.
Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, who is
desperately low in polls and has to fight an
election next October, had his daughter
Carleen introduce him at a rally for his troops
and she recalled some heartwarming
moments.
She mentioned his devotion to his wife of 30
years, Terri, and his description of his 82-year-
old mother as his hero, and tried to make him
relevant to youth by describing how he
introduced her to current pop music – it was
almost as if the Liberal party wrote the script.
This gave McGuinty an opportunity to talk
of families, who will be a key target in the
election. Progressive Conservative leader Tim
Hudak never speaks without referring to them
and McGuinty responded saying that his father
taught him caring for family was his first
reponsibility.
This was not the first time McGuinty had
drawn on his family to help his image. He has
said his grandmother grew up poor as a single
mother with five children, and how, as the
oldest of 10 children, he had to take
responsibilty for helping raise them.
He once decided to abolish the longstanding
tradition of reading the Lord’s Prayer to start
each daily session of of the legislature, but
backed off after he said his mother, a Roman
Catholic, “gave me hell" and said “nothing
scares me except my mom.”
More recently, he appealed to pharmacists
pondering reducing services in a row with the
province, “when my mother, who is 82, needs
a prescription filled, it’s hard for her to get
around.”
It is not known how much this affected the
pharmacists’ decision to maintain services, but
it helped McGuinty get across an image he
sought as an average guy who shares others’
problems.
Far right Conservative premier Mike Harris
used his family when it suited him, parading
his wife, Janet, in election campaigns even
when she was pushed around by
demonstrators.
Harris once said scathingly to those
advocating same-sex marriage “marriage is
me, my wife and our two sons,” but soon after
he divorced and married a much younger
woman.
New Democrat Bob Rae, premier before
Harris, commonly was thought of as
personally cold and obsessed with programs,
which is not necessarily a bad thing, but
eventually started mentioning his family life,
although it was nowhere near enough to save
him.
Rae said voters should know he had a wife
and three children and a mortgage and car loan
and “live pretty frugally."
He said he worried a lot more when one of
his chldren had a cold than over some affair of
state, loved to go fishing with them and
trudged from store to store to buy them a
puppy, which many empathized with.
Liberal premier David Peterson, who
preceded Rae, attended every theatre first
night in Toronto so opponents charged he lived
a lifesyle of the rich and famous, liked to talk
about his actress wife, Shelley, and their three
children, whom he took to watch baseball, and
their dog named Blueberry Muffin, in keeping
with the yuppie atmosphere of the era.
Peterson also said when political life looked
bleak, he “could always go home for a hug
from [his] mom.”
Conservative William Davis, the longest
serving premier of recent decades, put all five
of his photogenic children on his election
literature and even their dog Thor.
The literature said they paid only $2.25 for
the dog, but would not part with him for a
million dollars, which would have brought
tears to some voters’ eyes.
But voters probably will be less influenced
by leaders’ families and pets in next year’s
election – they will be looking more at their
records.
Eric
Dowd
From
Queen’s Park
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Premier trots out family
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Final Thought
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