Wednesday, May 7

SHOCKED, SHOCKED!

Family shocked by horse's slaying blares the headline, and well they might be. '"She was a gorgeous mare, jet black, with a beautiful mane and tail," Marcia Mickelson said as her husband and kids loaded two Hereford cattle into a trailer...'
No, the cattle weren't on their way to be slaughtered... yet, though of course they will be ultimately. It's a mystery to me how people can miss the 10,000-decibel irony in this story, even without dragging in the fact that the horse was bred as part of an institutionally corrupt industry or that Texas still routinely turns horses into meat. '"The hardest thing to think of is what trauma she went through, and she's my daughter's pet," Mickelson said, her voice tinged with sorrow and quiet anger.' That's all true, and tragic, but howcum a horse goes through trauma in being killed but not a cow? A horse goes through trauma being hunted down, but not a deer? What is the freakin' difference? Do grown adults honestly believe that an animal is soulless unless and until we bestow our love on it, and then its life magically acquires value, it becomes "real" like a velveteen rabbit? That seems to be the prevailing sentiment, and frankly, it boggles my mind.

UPDATE 5/8: $13,700 reward for tips on truck driver who mowed down mare. "We're going to go ahead and exhaust the fund" in hopes of catching the assailant, said the humane society director. Meanwhile, the line between acceptable and unacceptable animal abuse gets thinner and thinner as a farmer is found guilty of animal cruelty, neglect in deaths of cows ...but only because they starved to death.

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