Children's books and cows and things

There's a page in a children's book that bothers me. Well, several of them, really, but this one says: "This is a cow. Cows give us milk." Never mind that the picture on the page could be imaged to represent a cow only under the most Daliesque of paradigms, the notion that cows give us milk offends. In what reality could this be so? Do frogs give us legs? Do beavers give us pelts?

In the world I know, cows do not give, we take, and do some considerable violence to the animal in the taking. Sad cog in a huge factory, subjected to a forced mating in the middle of the previous lactation, a cow suffers the ripping away her offspring shortly after birth, a huge dose of antibiotics good for neither man nor beast, and a breeding program that in the fullness of time has produced creature that is a mere caricature of a competent animal. See this link for a radical view of the situation. There are lots of others, equally rabid, and a few with a more reasoned approach. It's not the point I'm working on just now.

What I'm thinking about is the view of the world we are presenting to our children, the pastel coloured one where the sun always shines, everyone is smiling, and happy cows give away the stuff that is meant to nourish their young. One might even imagine, as the Muppets did, legions of frogs on crutches, proud of their sacrifice to the betterment of mankind. Do kids not wonder why sometimes the world they see is a bit grey, that sometimes they don't feel much like smiling, that occasionally mother sounds cross, and some animals won't give up their treasures without a fight? Do they wonder what's wrong? Do they wonder about the dead frogs?

I feel there is some real danger in bringing up children who don't distinguish between teddy bears and grizzly bears, between giving and taking. Life is a struggle always, for all things, and I'm not sure we do our kids a service by pretending it's a picnic. You do not become deserving by being pure of heart. You are not owed. Contrary to what some would have us believe, the world was not put here for our benefit. We must work for our place in it, just like everything else.

I'm not about to suggest that we expose little children to the brutalities of the milk industry. I don't think we need to traumatize kids. All we need to do is be a little more honest. We get milk from cows. That's good enough to start with. We can talk about nature red in tooth and claw a little later.

Water

Given the floods in the American midwest this spring, one might reasonably suppose there was too much water in the world. But the BBC has said "the world's supply of water is running out. Already one person in five has no access to safe drinking water."

In this part of the world, we don't pay to much attention to what's going on in distant places, but when Los Angeles starts to worry that continued development in the city might be impossible because of insufficient water to support an expanding population, we start to listen.


There have been any number of suggestions about how to fix the problem, including recycling sewage. Not a bad idea at first blush. After all, all the water we use is recycled from somewhere.

But there are some disturbing indications that this might not be the best way to go and one of them involves the drugs we take. Legal pharmaceuticals, but a lot of them. People don't metabolise all the drugs they take, and of those parts that are metabolised, some of the metabolites are biologically active. Sewage treatments do not clean up all of these drug residues, and drug residues have been found in significant quantities all over North America, and in Europe. Drug residues in water, including estrogens, antidepressants and analgesics, have been implicated in a number of wildlife issues--poor health, a blurring of gender in individuals, reduced sperm counts, and general reproductive failure of fish and birds, and smaller, less noticeable but fundamentally more important creatures, like hydra.

The amounts of residues are very small--parts per billion--but they seem to be significant.

So let's suppose we do start using sewage, running it through improved treatment plants that make it nominally potable, and then adding it to a city's water supply. Round and round it goes, collecting a little more drug residue each time through the system. How may cycles before people start showing the effects? Will people who habitually soak in swimming pools and hot tubs be the first to go?

Waiting for Spring

The picture is my garden, under about eight feet of snow. Well, six feet anyway. It's hard to imagine there will ever be plants growing there. There are some, waiting, living on my windowsills for now, reaching for the light, dreaming as I do, of warmth and sunshine. It's been a long winter. I think it snowed every day for most of it and has been miserably cold. Of course, everyone says this is very unusual. I've never been anywhere where people said, "Oh, yeah, this is what the weather is usually like this time of year."

The arrival of the seed catalogues in January is always hopeful. One can imagine, once they come, that there will be spring, someday. The pictures are bright, the plants perfect in every way, not a broken leaf, not a bug, no sign of stress or disease. The promise is plain--big, round, red tomatoes, perfect pansies, lilacs from the dead land. The garden in real life never quite lives up to the advance publicity, but what ever does. We live on dreams a lot.

They're promising warmer weather tomorrow. "They", the weather guys on TV, have to be right sometimes, don't they?