If pigs could talk.

October 5

For a change I was out driving this last Monday, a friends father had passed away and I was on my way to the funeral. So I turned on the local all news channel to hear the traffic updates as I had a ways to go, and what caught my attention was this traffic reporter doing a so called interview with a pig on the side of the highway, asking all kinds of silly questions like “does your mother knew you are out here ?” and others like that, which one could say would be funny except for the circumstances . Earlier that morning a tractor trailer had flipped over with 200 pigs onboard and some 50 of them had gotten out of the truck somehow. What bothered me was that this reporter had no care at all about what condition the pigs were in, if they were hurt or not , scared or not , no he only found a humorous side to it, somehow I would think that having 200 pigs hurling around the back of a tractor trailer as it flips would have caused some injuries at the very least, but I was left to wonder as he kept joking on about there presence on the road. Rather sad I think , a sad comment on our media and a sad comment on the listeners, as for sure if we were not to listen they would not be broadcasting ! ( they blame us saying this is what the public wants to hear and we blame them for putting out this garbage we listen to ) 

If that pig could have talked instead of grunting I’m sure that reported would have gotten an earful and I’m quite sure that none of it would have been funny !!!!

At the very least animals have some basic emotions like we do, ( this is a controversial subject) I’m not trying to say they share all the emotions we have but they do feel the pleasure of being alive just as we do. It’s not always there but when it is you know it, when you see a cat on its back rolling on the driveway in the heat of the sun, when you see geese doing aerobatics as they come in for a landing tilting left and right and even flying upside down,  when you see ducks bathing in a pond going wild with the flapping and deking and diving, when you see young calfs bucking and kicking with there tails up running around there elders in the morning sun , that is just sheer pleasure of being alive !! 

If we can share this feeling, this pleasure of being alive with them, we at least owe them some respect as we take there lives away from them. I won’t argue against the need to eat meat, we are not the only carnivores on the planet and I’m no vegetarian myself, but somehow this act of taking a life for substance needs to be acknowledged, some respect needs to be shown, we easily just ignore the whole thing , it’s just a package we buy off a supermarket counter , were it came from and how it got there , well we just don’t care , and we should ! 

So this Thanksgiving while we are sitting around the table about to enjoy our turkey, pig, lamb or beef , perhaps we should take a second or two and “Thank” them for “giving” there lives so that we can enjoy ours.

These guys were not involved in the accident , I came across them this summer quietly enjoying a snooze in the mid day heat on the side of the path as I cycled from Victoria to Vancouver