In the Saying Goodbye

Most of my work has been about images. Pictures with words. That’s where I seem to do my best, for some reason (I guess because I figure a picture says so much). Images. A man wielding a club over the head of an infant seal — that’s a powerful image. It needs no words. Maybe just a commentary by Walt Whitman: “Here is realization; here is a man tallied — he realizes here what he has in him: the past, the future, majesty. Love. If they are vacant of you ... you are vacant of them.”

And so I spend a lot of time watching. Studying. Deciphering images, trying to find ways to bring them forward for others to see — and be affected by. In the last thirty plus years, I’ve been able to do that rather well. There are incredible photographers out there. The truth has a way of finding the light.

But right now, at this time in my life, there are other images in my head. Images no photographer has grasped. There are sights and sounds, moods — and that proverbial “feel in the air.” There have been things happening in my life, because of my newly found hands-on work with slaughter-bound horses, that I just can’t lock into a photograph or describe — at least — in the English language. So much has gone through my head, so many negatives, confusions, puzzlements.

They are eating American horses in France and Japan and some of those horses are being trucked right here out of my own backyard from a “kill pen” just an hour from home. They’re killing horses one at a time, every two minutes. And more than ten billion cows, chickens and pigs are being trucked just the same, suffering as immeasurably, at a rate of at least 300 every second!

The horse kill pens smell just the same as the holding pens for pigs outside Farmer John’s “packing plant” — they smell of doom. Even the connection is there: pigs are brought into California from Texas via livestock trucks and dropped unceremoniously at Slaughterhouse Row in Vernon; in the leaving, the trucks pick up horses in Riverside County and take them back to Texas ... to a slaughterhouse there, where they are just as cruelly shoved through the kill chutes and banged on their heads. Pigs one way, horses the other.

The big killing machine, for which only humans can claim.

My mind wanders because of it: Forget what we’re doing to one another; that’s something only the future can explain. We’ve lost our place — or did we ever have it? Our behavior and arrogance have exploded out of control, for incredibly difficult reasons for me to understand: Humans are brutally sacrificing cows during primitive tribal celebrations in parts of Africa, they’re butchering pregnant llamas in South America and concealing the fetuses in the walls of newly built homes ... as a way of asking for fortune from the gods, and still, in Canada and other parts of the world, decades later, the clubbing to death of baby seals for toy trinkets and garment trim continues. The number of those we kill and torment is staggering. The suffering we inflict, and the ways we have devised to do it, is incalculable. And the solution to ending our war against ourselves and others seems ever distant. I have lost my faith in humanity. Or maybe I never had it.

Wait. Not so. It’s a chilly day and I sit, as predicted, in the automobile for a few minutes of warmth. Outside the car, a horse rescue volunteer is removing a 20-year-old, emaciated, sick horse from the kill pen and taking her for a walk. For a while, the mare is free of flies, bites from other horses, and her struggle for clean water and food. The woman grooms her while she munches hungrily in a bucket of sweet grain. Even from here, I can tell she’s talking to the horse. She doesn’t see me watching. And even if she could, I know it wouldn’t matter. Only the mare matters.

Another horse rescuer, a young man, befriended a dying appaloosa. A gallstone has lodged in the mare’s intestines. For hours, she lies in agony; the stone shifts and she rises for a while ... until it shifts again. If she just happens to be standing when the truck arrives, she’ll be shipped to slaughter. In France and Japan, you see, they are eating misery, too. The man is on the phone, trying to find a veterinarian to ease the animals’ agony, save her life; he himself wants to adopt her. There are instant bonds between rescuers and their prizes, bonds we have no control over. This young man had such a one with a dying appaloosa mare on her way to the slaughterhouse.

The kill buyer agrees to part with the horse; if we can save her, she’s ours for a price. If we can’t, we’ll both lose her. In the end, after valiantly trying, we do have to kill her. Humanely. So, in a manner of speaking, she, too, has been rescued.

The young man says goodbye. And cries.

Images. With words. Kathleen Dente’s words: “No fences or barriers to block / wild abandoned races. / No bits or bridles to cut / tender mouths and faces. / No calloused hands that hurt and shove / or calculating eyes devoid of love ... / A place of freedom and wildness / and soft summer nights. / Skies filled with stars and pale moonlights. / Joined by mothers and sisters / and children she had lost / babies taken from her side / at too great a cost. / With only clouds to race and birds to chase / pain is now a thing of the past / [she is] ... home at last.”

I hold onto some faith, remembering those who aid and mourn the passage of doomed and dying animals. You all know who you are. You are my salvation. And theirs.

Keep fighting the good fight.

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