Horses

Horses

It does get to the point where you just don’t want to click to the news or open your email – all those horrors in the headlines and the inbox. This morning, no different. A campaign by Avaaz (a great online activism organization leading campaigns on so many different fronts around the world) popped up about trying to end the practice of bleeding pregnant horses. What, you say, could that possibly be about?

Well, with the demand for meat products high, factory farms producing the cows and pigs that become beef and pork (sealed in nice hygienic packages in the supermarket) speed up production by injecting their animals with the blood of pregnant horses … it helps trigger them to come into heat, thus meaning that breeding cows and sows can be impregnated more often. More cows. More pigs. More bacon. More hamburgers. The pregnant horses are kept hooked up to machines, bled to the point of anemia, and are repeatedly impregnated to keep the cycle going. Pharmaceutical companies sell the blood to farmers.

So much goes into the production of our food that we often fail to recognize. From the patented genetic modifications in our corn that kill monarch butterflies, to the diesel used to truck produce thousands of miles, to the chicken-offal fed to chickens, to the blood of horses.

I signed the petition, of course, and thought I’d post this poem about some horses in Taos, New Mexico where there is (still) a sage-brushy pasture area right next to the public parking lot, just behind downtown. Below the poem is a link to sign the Avaaz petition to EU lawmakers who have a chance to ban this horse-bleeding practice in Europe.

Horses – A Cairn

Three horses draw letters

into the thin crust of snow.

Ginger-color against blue sage, cinnamon

in the wash-green chamisa,

and a salt-flecked roan

near the byre.

Winter-coated, they are haloed

in silver light.

The horses circle --

three horses in a

decahedron night.

They lean into each other,

heads bent to the murmur of water

from the acequia.

When it begins to snow again

they nod, tossing fetlocks,

turn, nod again, beat a hoof-edge

to the ground.

The runes they’ve drawn across the snow

are gone before morning.

And the link. Please sign: https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/stop_horse_blood_farms_55/?fb