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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2018-05-10, Page 5Other Views Nature's beautiful - and ugly, too e have a weekend ritual around our place where we start our morning eating breakfast at a table that's right beside a window, giving us the feeling of eating outdoors without the flies and mosquitoes. One recent spring morning a finch landed in a bush just a couple of feet on the other side of the glass. For as long as it perched there, its head was on a swivel, looking this way and that, making sure no predator was sneaking up on it. "What must it be like," we wondered, "to be in constant fear for your life?" If you live amid nature like we do, you see plenty of similar demonstrations of cautious self-preservation. Chipmunks literally high- tail it across the yard to get as quickly as possible from one shelter to another, hiding from hawks. To protect themselves from predators in the air and on the ground, squirrels leap from tree branch to tree branch, risking potentially deadly falls if they miscalculate. Deer come into our orchard in fall and winter to feed on wind -fallen apples but can hardly eat because they spend so much time nervously raising their heads to watch for danger. Most Canadians, comfortably inside our environmentally controlled homes, protected even from the discomfort of wind and rain, have long since forgotten about needing to constantly be on guard against imminent danger. Those living in cities are even more removed from harsh realities of nature, which is perhaps why so many people who live in the city, but have a passionate love of nature, aren't really realistic about what nature is actually like. Often people seem to be able to separate their admiration of certain species such as eagles or wolves, from the hard truth that these animals are killers. They must kill to survive. Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk In killing, they serve another purpose of keeping nature in balance. We usually think rabbits are cute, unless they're attacking our garden, but as people learned when they were introduced into Australia where they had no natural predators, too many rabbits can be as destructive as a wildfire. Unless they're crossing the road in front of our car, we generally have a moment of awe when we see a deer, yet these gentle creatures can destroy the environment if their population gets out of balance. Nature is very politically incorrect. The virtuous vegetarians and seed eaters are eaten by the carnivores. These meat eaters generally don't kill for the pleasure of it but to stay alive. (An exception might be the weasel which often seems to be the serial killer of the animal world.) Beyond the carnivores we have the scavengers, who do the necessary but disgusting (to humans) job of cleaning up rotting carcasses. It's a brutal place out there. But often we forget the big picture when we think of nature. Perhaps the blame began with decades of Walt Disney nature films which treated cute wild animals in a way that made viewers identify with them. Certainly we often see those parts of nature we want to see and avoid the rest. I recall a few years ago when there was a video on television advocating for the reintroduction of wolves into a famous U.S. national park. The TV THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MAY 10, 2018. PAGE 5. showed us a clip of a wolf closing in on a deer, but cut away before it caught and killed it. Reminding people that wolves are killers of defenseless deer might have undermined public support for the wolves. This willful blindness about the nature of animals confuses the issues surrounding animal agriculture, as well. Many animal rights advocates denounce the confinement of livestock, feeling it's an unnatural, stressful condition, yet those animals are saved from the stress of the daily fear if they'll survive the day. They're well fed. They know that no predator can get at them. They're living, then, like we humans do. Certainly livestock needs to be treated as humanely as possible. Too often in the past, economics, convenience or just plain laziness, have led livestock owners to take short-cuts that caused misery to farm animals. Wise modern farmers have learned it makes financial sense to treat animals well during their lives. But a significant number of people think that any use of animals — from hens laying eggs to cows giving milk, to pigs being killed and eaten — is exploitation of animals and should be banned. (Somehow this doesn't count their keeping of dogs and cats as pets, in very unnatural living conditions.) But Temple Grandin, the great animal rights advocate and designer of animal - friendly handling equipment, notes that sooner or later all animals are going to die. If she were an animal, she said, she'd prefer a quick humane death to being out in nature and being torn apart by wolves. The night before I wrote this, I heard a cry in the night. Perhaps some cute creature I saw yesterday isn't alive this morning. For me, this would be sad, but it's the world of nature. Looking back on a life well -lived Last week my grandfather, Retired Major Frank Golding of Seaforth, passed away in his home peacefully. The following are the words that I shared at his funeral and, given how many people I meet who knew him or have memories of him, I felt it made sense to share it. *** My name is Denny and I'm Frank's eldest grandson. Working so closely with my family means many people I meet for the first time already have connections to me. Typically, my response to someone saying they know a family member is for me to give a half -grin and jokingly say, "Don't hold that against me." I say typically because I've got a few relatives about whom people always say good things about. Grandpa Frank is one of those relatives. During the discussions our family had last week after he passed, I realized that in remembering him, there was only one thing I really needed to talk about: being a good man and being a great man. The two phrases aren't necessarily inclusive and in some cases could be exclusive. To me, being a good man means leaving the kind of legacy that my grandfather has. Whether it's a publisher telling me the story of when he and my grandfather first met and the important, memorable words he shared then or whether it's local business owners and volunteer organization members sharing their tales of interactions with my grandfather, people have good memories of him. He was kind, he was helpful, and he was also respectful and that is a good man. I didn't really know that about him when I was growing up. I knew he was a great man — Denny Scott Denny's Den he was a military commander, he was air force to the core in my mind. All I had to do to be reminded of that was to walk into his meticulously -arranged office. I felt like I'd never measure up to the greatness that he had achieved. Over the past several years though, I've come to realize how good of a man he was and how much more important that is than being a great man. Great men can be good or they can be terrible. All that's needed to be great is to do what needs to be done. To be good, you have to choose to do better and between the two of those, the latter is always more difficult. Doing what needs to be done, for good or for ill, isn't a choice, it's a necessity. Being good means dedicating yourself to that ideal and always doing what's right, not easy. Grandpa Frank, in my mind, always did what was needed, but, as I grew older, I saw that he always did what was right as well. I saw a whole new side of Grandpa Frank when he was asked to speak at the dedication service for Freedom Syrup near Walton several years ago. Looking back on his time as the commander of the base at Clinton, he shared stories about it closing. He told stories I had never heard and they were tales that demonstrated the difference between doing what was expected and doing what was right. A great man follows the road ahead of him, but a good man finds his own way to do what's right. He made sure that the materials at the base, when it was closed, got to people who needed them instead of sitting and collecting dust in a warehouse somewhere. Everything from church pews to beds found their way to the people that were in need. He told the tale with a smile on his face and in that moment I realized I only knew one small percentage of my grandfather's story. I could not have been more in awe of him in that moment than I was then. I had never considered him to be a person who would bend or break the rules, and I definitely never expected him to share such a story so openly. Things changed that day and I wish it would have happened sooner. He was a great man and a good man and while I may never rise to the former, every day I hope and try to reach the latter. *** That's what I said, or what I had hoped to say. I'm not going to lie and say that it won't be difficult to speak these words out loud. Like I've told many people when talking about Grandpa Frank, I was blessed. There are a lot of people who didn't have the same opportunity I did to know my grandfather so well. There are a lot of people whose grandparents go through very difficult periods at or near the end of their lives and, fortunately for me and my family, Grandpa Frank was himself until he was no longer with us. Thank you all for your warm wishes and kind words and if this is the first you're hearing of Grandpa Frank's passing, please know that he went peacefully. Shawn Loughlin AMAIN Shawn's Sense This is not a drill As I attended the Last Light Photo Show in Goderich on Saturday, a hot topic was hanging in the air. Had your power gone out the previous night? If so, what did you do during that time? It was a totally natural topic of conversation, but upon reflection about what we did at the house when the power went out, it really made me think about just how dependent we are on the power that flows through our wall outlets 24 hours a day. As anyone who knows reporter Denny Scott knows by now, his house was without power for about seven or eight hours on Friday night thanks to the brief, but fierce windstorm. Over on King Street, however, we skirted power outages during the storm until later that night when the power randomly went off for a few hours well after the storm had settled. With my mom, sister, brother-in-law and niece all up for a visit (although our 18 -month- old niece was long asleep at that time) we all looked at each other and wondered what we were going to do with ourselves. Lost and disoriented, we resorted to talking to one another. I tried to get the gang to play cards, but everyone except for me hated it. So, we broke out the board games and it was great. We had a few drinks, we interacted, we had fun and we really spent time with one another. For the next two days, we travelled the community. We went to the aforementioned photo show, we ate lovely fish thanks to the Londesborough Lions Club and the Brussels Legion, we had a house full of people on Saturday night and then we celebrated Dana's birthday at Cowbell Brewery. But we kept going back to Friday night and how fun it was. When power was taken away from us, we were forced to make concessions and had the most fun we'd have all weekend. And therein lies the question. If we can have this much fun by unplugging (or simply just turning off the screens for a few hours and connecting over something that doesn't need power) why don't we do it more often? Are we that connected to our devices that we literally need them pried from our cold, vegetative hand by way of a power outage to give them a rest? It seems as though the answer is likely yes. Before the power went out, the five of us were sitting on couches watching soccer and, if anyone asked, we'd say we were having a good time. But, we weren't really talking to one another, more than one of us were likely nodding off and you certainly wouldn't classify what we were doing as interacting. But, when the lights went out, we turned to one another and decided to actively spend time with one another and it was the best decision we made all weekend. So, while the power outages did result in some inconveniences (again, talk to Denny to hear his perspective of the aforementioned events), for us, it helped us turn to one another and say, "well, what do you want to do?" Earlier this year, former Publisher Keith Roulston wrote about the science behind our cell phones and tablets and how they're very literally changing the brains of our young people and how they function. On one hand it's hard to imagine that to be true, but on the other it's hard to imagine it to be false. How could they not be, right? So, maybe we need to take an emergency approach to this. Just like a fire drill when there is no fire, we need to pretend that the power's out every once in a while and read a book by candlelight or play a board game or maybe I'll finally teach Jess to play euchre.