My last breakdown (my 3rd) was considered a medical miracle. It kept a 5 or 6 man team working around the clock to try to figure out. My wife Deb was under tremendous pressure early on the third day to sign the papers and let them turn the machines off. They kept insisting that once you go to less than 5% brain stem function, there is no coming back. My only prognosis was as a vegetable... Then, once again, I came back after six days of being 'brain dead.' The lead doctor made the remark that, since they had no answers as to the beginning of the episode or the recovery, he was totally fine with the word miracle.
The years of beatings and physical and emotional abuse left me damaged, absolutely... Under periods of great stress I go into what they call a dissociative disorder and the change is so subtle that only a very few that know me are even aware of it.
You ask about animal cruelty. The general public is unaware that what is seen in the mainstream media is almost always in connection with 'factory farming.' Sometimes, religion is also partly to blame. A man who holds the conviction that we are to have dominion over all the animals of Creation isn't going to form emotional attachments to any of his livestock. By the same token, an employee at a factory farm holds no more value in a turkey/hog/cow/horse than a furniture factory employee does a center drawer or a modesty panel. It is the slow death of the family farm that is creating the kind of environment that leads to incidents like what you've seen in the news.
None of the cattle on our farm had any way of knowing it, but they all lived on a 'Cow Country Club' in comparison to most other farms. During warm weather they were cycled through three different pastures each with fresh water from a creek and plenty of shade. They could still come to the barn to take advantage of the salt block and mineral block as well as use the back scratcher apparatus that had a large hemp rope saturated with an oily insect repellent to deal with the spots bugs like to bite where a cow couldn't reach with their tail. There was also always some kind of hay in the mangers. For instance, to them, the stubble left after soybeans have been harvested was like a candy treat. Dad would bale it so during the summer they had variety in their diet that they also happened to love (unlike factory farm beef which has little room to move around and is only fed corn). Two other things they looked forward to were the ground corn cobs Dad would buy at the mill in bulk (& which I got to help shovel onto the truck) and, believe it or not, they loved to see that Deb and I were coming down to camp. After we'd packed up and gone home, Dad would let them into the woods for a day or two and every bit of ashes from our camp fire would be gone. There are some kind of minerals in the ashes that cows crave to the point of fighting over!
The news footage of factory farm abuse is much more upsetting when you have first hand knowledge of just how intelligent some livestock are. We had one heifer we named Curly because of her forehead and she was far too bright for her own good. Dad had one of the old electric fences that are illegal now. They called them 'weed-burners' for good reason. The hair on my arms is standing up as I type this just at the memory... If you pulled up something green that was long enough to drop over the wire and still have one end grounded, it would sit there and sizzle until it had burned all the way through your weed.
Dad sent Curly to market because she figured out that after a driving wind with rain she could walk the electric fence and put her ear down by the glass insulator on the metal post. If she heard buzzing, she knew the wire was still 'hot.' When she found one that was silent, she knew the fence had shorted out and would walk down a bit and then just walk through the fence knocking it to the ground. After one too many times of rounding up his cattle in a neighbor's crops during a summer storm, Curly lost a good home.
Just something to think about the next time you see a news item about livestock abuse. They are far more self-aware than a lot of people realize.
Farmers have to be a combination of veterinarian/accountant/lawyer/weatherman & have a working knowledge of a slew of other fields that don't come to mind at the moment, yet they're held in such low regard. A foreman I used to work under insisted that ALL farmers were much more wealthy than they'd ever let on. A direct quote... 'I've never heard a G*d D*mned farmer admit that he'd had a GOOD year!'
People would steal from farmers and think nothing of it. Anybody living in town would go nuts if a farmer parked out front and stripped an entire row of vegetables from their garden or carefully selected blooms from their landscaping to put together a bouquet for his wife's birthday or their anniversary, but each "corn on the cob season," 8 to 10 rows of corn would be stripped from the nothern edge of Dad's field. People from town would fill an entire car trunk with ears of corn and feel no guilt because Dad obviously 'had plenty.'
I've had a deep dislike for Bill Maher after the night (several years ago) when he quipped on CNN's Larry King Live, 'I've never understood why farmers should get special treatment just because they happen to live in the middle of a big garden.'
Guess he thinks all that happens by itself, just like magic. If he had to buy the building, furnishing, media equipment and all the other necessities in order to get paid to sit and smirk at the camera, I might have a little respect for him. As it is, I just figure he's not getting enough fiber in his diet...
We have a nationally known poultry processing plant just outside Huntingburg. Over the years I've heard some pretty gruesome stories from guys that have worked there (like sticking gross things inside the giblets package, spitting phlegm or tobacco juice into the body cavity). The worst, though, is something that the 'hangers' (the guys that take the birds out of the truck and hang them by the ankles on the brackets on the chain feeding them into the plant) know is impossible to get caught at unless someone in authority sees you do it. If a bird fights back and the hanger is mad at it he will grab it by the wings with it facing away from him and jerk back, breaking its spine and making it impossible to carve. If you get one of those turkeys all you can do is pull the meat off the bones with your fingers. The ribs will be splayed outward in some places and in at others.
I've never hunted and the only fishing I enjoy is catch and release. I have never been in a (physical) fight in my life. There have been shouting matches and times that I was pushed and threatened but I've always found a way to somehow either defuse the situation or vacate the area. One of the reasons all the present day violent talk gets to me so much is the idea of having to seriously hurt someone else in defense of myself or my family.
At graduation (1970), I enrolled at United Electronics Institute in Louisville, KY. You did the first six months by mail and only those who met the grade requirements got to finish out the last year and a half down there. My grades were near perfect, but Dad informed me that he not only didn't believe in college but didn't believe in going into debt to go, either. So I lost all of the money I'd saved up by picking up hay for other local farmers for 50 to 75 cents an hour. I would have been perfectly positioned for the coming tech revolution.... :(
I worked for Insight Systems. Part of the reason I was hired was because of all the modding I had done on my Atari computers. At a time when a new IBM compatible only came with 256K of memory and a monitor that let you display two colors (as long as one of them was black [Big Grin], I'd already heavily modified my Atari 400. I replaced the membrane keyboard with a third party, full-stroke keyboard and tripled the internal memory (16K to 48K). Once I proved to my boss that even the first little 16K Atari could put 256 colors on a TV by running a simple little ten line BASIC program, he offered me a job.
Other than about 4 years when I did IT support, I got trapped in the furniture industry much like those in Detroit fell into the black hole of the auto industry (without the benefits of anything like the UAW...). Now I just get by on SSD with too many physical problems to mention. It isn't as if I wasn't industrious or hungry, I've been a lead-man, a foreman and the Customer Service Manager of a local Value Added Reseller.
The years of beatings and physical and emotional abuse left me damaged, absolutely... Under periods of great stress I go into what they call a dissociative disorder and the change is so subtle that only a very few that know me are even aware of it.
You ask about animal cruelty. The general public is unaware that what is seen in the mainstream media is almost always in connection with 'factory farming.' Sometimes, religion is also partly to blame. A man who holds the conviction that we are to have dominion over all the animals of Creation isn't going to form emotional attachments to any of his livestock. By the same token, an employee at a factory farm holds no more value in a turkey/hog/cow/horse than a furniture factory employee does a center drawer or a modesty panel. It is the slow death of the family farm that is creating the kind of environment that leads to incidents like what you've seen in the news.
None of the cattle on our farm had any way of knowing it, but they all lived on a 'Cow Country Club' in comparison to most other farms. During warm weather they were cycled through three different pastures each with fresh water from a creek and plenty of shade. They could still come to the barn to take advantage of the salt block and mineral block as well as use the back scratcher apparatus that had a large hemp rope saturated with an oily insect repellent to deal with the spots bugs like to bite where a cow couldn't reach with their tail. There was also always some kind of hay in the mangers. For instance, to them, the stubble left after soybeans have been harvested was like a candy treat. Dad would bale it so during the summer they had variety in their diet that they also happened to love (unlike factory farm beef which has little room to move around and is only fed corn). Two other things they looked forward to were the ground corn cobs Dad would buy at the mill in bulk (& which I got to help shovel onto the truck) and, believe it or not, they loved to see that Deb and I were coming down to camp. After we'd packed up and gone home, Dad would let them into the woods for a day or two and every bit of ashes from our camp fire would be gone. There are some kind of minerals in the ashes that cows crave to the point of fighting over!
Dad sent Curly to market because she figured out that after a driving wind with rain she could walk the electric fence and put her ear down by the glass insulator on the metal post. If she heard buzzing, she knew the wire was still 'hot.' When she found one that was silent, she knew the fence had shorted out and would walk down a bit and then just walk through the fence knocking it to the ground. After one too many times of rounding up his cattle in a neighbor's crops during a summer storm, Curly lost a good home.
Just something to think about the next time you see a news item about livestock abuse. They are far more self-aware than a lot of people realize.
Farmers have to be a combination of veterinarian/accountant/lawyer/weatherman & have a working knowledge of a slew of other fields that don't come to mind at the moment, yet they're held in such low regard. A foreman I used to work under insisted that ALL farmers were much more wealthy than they'd ever let on. A direct quote... 'I've never heard a G*d D*mned farmer admit that he'd had a GOOD year!'
People would steal from farmers and think nothing of it. Anybody living in town would go nuts if a farmer parked out front and stripped an entire row of vegetables from their garden or carefully selected blooms from their landscaping to put together a bouquet for his wife's birthday or their anniversary, but each "corn on the cob season," 8 to 10 rows of corn would be stripped from the nothern edge of Dad's field. People from town would fill an entire car trunk with ears of corn and feel no guilt because Dad obviously 'had plenty.'
I've had a deep dislike for Bill Maher after the night (several years ago) when he quipped on CNN's Larry King Live, 'I've never understood why farmers should get special treatment just because they happen to live in the middle of a big garden.'
Guess he thinks all that happens by itself, just like magic. If he had to buy the building, furnishing, media equipment and all the other necessities in order to get paid to sit and smirk at the camera, I might have a little respect for him. As it is, I just figure he's not getting enough fiber in his diet...
We have a nationally known poultry processing plant just outside Huntingburg. Over the years I've heard some pretty gruesome stories from guys that have worked there (like sticking gross things inside the giblets package, spitting phlegm or tobacco juice into the body cavity). The worst, though, is something that the 'hangers' (the guys that take the birds out of the truck and hang them by the ankles on the brackets on the chain feeding them into the plant) know is impossible to get caught at unless someone in authority sees you do it. If a bird fights back and the hanger is mad at it he will grab it by the wings with it facing away from him and jerk back, breaking its spine and making it impossible to carve. If you get one of those turkeys all you can do is pull the meat off the bones with your fingers. The ribs will be splayed outward in some places and in at others.
I've never hunted and the only fishing I enjoy is catch and release. I have never been in a (physical) fight in my life. There have been shouting matches and times that I was pushed and threatened but I've always found a way to somehow either defuse the situation or vacate the area. One of the reasons all the present day violent talk gets to me so much is the idea of having to seriously hurt someone else in defense of myself or my family.
At graduation (1970), I enrolled at United Electronics Institute in Louisville, KY. You did the first six months by mail and only those who met the grade requirements got to finish out the last year and a half down there. My grades were near perfect, but Dad informed me that he not only didn't believe in college but didn't believe in going into debt to go, either. So I lost all of the money I'd saved up by picking up hay for other local farmers for 50 to 75 cents an hour. I would have been perfectly positioned for the coming tech revolution.... :(
I worked for Insight Systems. Part of the reason I was hired was because of all the modding I had done on my Atari computers. At a time when a new IBM compatible only came with 256K of memory and a monitor that let you display two colors (as long as one of them was black [Big Grin], I'd already heavily modified my Atari 400. I replaced the membrane keyboard with a third party, full-stroke keyboard and tripled the internal memory (16K to 48K). Once I proved to my boss that even the first little 16K Atari could put 256 colors on a TV by running a simple little ten line BASIC program, he offered me a job.
Other than about 4 years when I did IT support, I got trapped in the furniture industry much like those in Detroit fell into the black hole of the auto industry (without the benefits of anything like the UAW...). Now I just get by on SSD with too many physical problems to mention. It isn't as if I wasn't industrious or hungry, I've been a lead-man, a foreman and the Customer Service Manager of a local Value Added Reseller.
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