"Cow Villanelle" was written for a contest last fall. I've not heard any more of it since, so it must be time to post it here. I was nudged in that direction partly by a link Kim M. Russell shared to a British'zine called "Visual Verse." They post a picture and print whatever readable "poems" people can type into a form in one hour. Considering the circumstances of writing, several of the poems are remarkably good. If you scroll down through the poems that are and are not about pet pigs, you'll notice one spew of misguided rage that assumes that pet pigs are going to become factory-farm swine. Well, if the poet had had time to think it over I'm sure she would have written something better. Then you come to quite a clever poem, by Alun Roberts, celebrating "The Tamworth Two," a pair of factory-farm swine that escaped--like Chicken Ten Thousand--and did become pets. Delightful.
(This short link means the'zine may not stay up for very long. Click fast!)
COW VILLANELLE
One screams: “You mustn’t milk a
cow!
It’s exploitation! It’s not
right!”
The cow says: “Milk me, milk me
now.”
Before the grasslands saw a
plough
Wild cows turned grass roots up
to light.
(Did other calves help milk that
cow?)
Our First Nations did not know
how
To milk cows; slaughtered them
outright.
(Today’s cow bellows: “Milk me
now!”)
They thinned the herds because
(oh wow!)
Too many cows on land were
blight.
Cow-loving Hindus milked the
cow.
The taming of both cow and
plough
Spread east to west like morning
light.
The cows bawled: “Come and milk
me now.”
Not greed but kindness (I avow)
Sent farmers out to barn by
night,
Where pity urged them: “Milk the
cow.”
Now greedy farmers have learned
how
Computers press milk-robots
tight
Against the cows—“Yes, milk me
now!”
Barns lose that early morning
row.
Cows work milk-robots day and
night.
One screams: “You mustn’t milk a
cow!”
The cow lows: “Milk me, milk me
now.”
At this web site “Bad Poetry” refers to (1) the classic collection by Kathryn and Ross Petras,
or (2) the self-parodies bloggers post for Bad Poetry Day, or (3) verse written
by me. I don’t think all of my verse is all that
bad, but it’s whimsical. I’d rather play with forms and the way
ideas do or don’t fit into forms than argue that Free Verse is poetry, not
prose, for reasons other than having uneven right margins.
(I don’t think Free
Verse is bad, but I’ve never understood how it can be called poetry. I think form of some kind is
what makes a piece of writing poetry; I think most Free Verse “poems” could be
better classified as very good, thoughtful, short pieces of prose.)
However, I’m not completely
satisfied with this villanelle. It doesn’t tell the whole story. Maybe some day
I’ll think of a way to fit the whole story into the length and form of a
villanelle, or maybe I’d rather tell it in prose, thusly:
(1) I do share PETA’s belief
that other animals are sentient and deserve as much consideration, as much
respect for their “personhood,” as we
humans do. Not the respect that comes from believing someone else is my
superior or that, in a question of who deserves to survive, someone else
deserves to survive more than I do and I should automatically sacrifice my life
to theirs; I don’t believe that about
most humans, let alone other species. I believe altruism would be pathological
if it really existed, which it doesn’t, except in a few extraordinary situations.
But the respect that comes from believing that everyone else has as much right
and reason to live their own lives in their own way that I have, that most of
the time we can all coexist very well, and that often we can mutually benefit
from communicating and cooperating with one another.
(2) For that reason, I do not
share PETA’s belief that relationships between humans and other animals are
automatically exploitative of the other animals, that we should just
exterminate the species and varieties humans have been selectively breeding for
compatibility with us for thousands of years, and that the only way we can
properly relate to any non-human lifeform is to gaze admiringly on it from a
great distance. I think it’s probably true that cats tamed humans as much as
the other way round (having lived with a cat family who were rescued from an
alley when the biggest, boldest kitten started training a child to bring food
to the family). Observations of bison or even Brahma cattle do not suggest to
me that taming humans was their idea…but observation of Jersey and Holstein and
even Brahma cattle suggests that they benefit from having been domesticated.
(3) Much of prehistoric North
America did belong, basically, to bison, and their few predators, including
the boldest and toughest young men in several groups of humans, who kept them
from destroying their grassland habitat by tearing up the grass and wallowing
in the mud. Bison are wild cattle; they can crossbreed with domestic cows.
Cattle and cattlemen are part of the balance of nature on this continent. The
“cowboy” culture appeals to us because it fits into our ecology...provided that
men can curb their greed and herd cattle in sustainable ways. I do agree with
the PETA types that some developments in Modern Agriculture make one wonder how many men can do that.
(4) Cows, left to themselves,
are both pregnant and nursing at least one calf, more if possible, for most of
their lives. Humans don’t impose that lifestyle on them, although humans
benefit from it. They don’t have noticeable postmenopausal lives. They enjoy being milked; they complain loudly
if they have to walk around with full udders, mostly because full udders are
heavy and uncomfortable, also because full udders are vulnerable to painful,
sometimes fatal infections. They’re not very demonstrative of affection (which
is probably fortunate) but they do seem to bond with people who milk them,
following such people around a pasture, nonverbally saying “Any time!”
(5) So, on Old MacDonald’s
family farm where Old Mac and his family went out to the pasture to milk each
cow every twelve hours, where the cows roamed around eating grass and chewing
their cud in the shade all day, the cows’ ecological footprint was small (they
produced only manageable amounts of methane and polluted only manageable
amounts of soil and water). The whole scheme was sustainable…until MacDonald
Junior went off to agricultural college and picked up ideas about maximizing
production by slaughtering calves early, keeping cows indoors all the time and
confusing their hormones with artificial light, feeding them unnatural mixes
that contained more animal protein and continual doses of antibiotics, and so
on. The latest development was milk-robots that allow factory farmers to avoid
paying laborers even for attaching cows to milking machines every twelve hours.
(6) And the news item that
prompted this villanelle was…When milk-robots were installed on dairy farms,
the cows quickly learned to use them—and not only twice a day, either. Since
milk-robots don’t have other things to do and don’t have to lug half-filled
buckets about, cows can use them several times a day, and they do.
Do we, in the United States,
currently have more cattle than we really need, producing more milk than the
entire world can use, with undesirable side effects like surplus cheese being
pressed upon poor people in lieu of things that might be better for them, and
like the way cooks and restaurant owners are systematically trained to ruin
food by dumping cheese or cream into it? Absolutely. Do we have a dairy
industry trying to tell people that humans’ nutrient needs are exactly like
rats’ and that we can’t be healthy without choking down a gallon of dairy
products a day, even now that doctors know that humans’ nutrient needs are different from rats’ and that the
majority of human adults are losing more than they gain, nutritionally, by
ingesting too many dairy products? Indisputably. (Butter, cream, ice cream, and
cheese may taste good to many people—ice cream tastes good even to me—but our
bodies may use up more calcium digesting all that saturated fat than they
gain.) Do all these cows put out a lot of methane that could at least be
trapped and used as fuel? Certainly—people are currently working on harvesting
that methane! Do they take up a lot of grassland that might be used to house
more humans? Yes, though there’s some doubt that housing more humans would be
an improvement. Would we be healthier if all cooks were trained to send dairy
products to the table on the side of
food rather than dumping them all over the food? No reasonable doubt about that.
Does that mean that all use of
milk products, or of beef or of leather, is bad? I don’t think so. I think
there must be some reason why all the major religions on Earth teach that a
proper, moderate, sustainable “exploitation” of cattle’s natural behavior and
survival needs is good.
Left to themselves, bovines do
not form pair bonds between one male and one female, but form herds consisting
of one adult male, several females, and calves. Male and female bovines are
born in approximately equal numbers. Most of these males don’t reproduce, don’t
fit into herds, and don’t live long. Bulls fight and may kill each other; or,
in nature, a pacifist “Ferdinand” bull would just wander about alone until some
predator killed him. So, cattle naturally produce a surplus of males, whose
ecological position is food. When humans neuter them so that they’re not
motivated to kill each other, and turn them out in fenced pastures, male cattle
can live longer and healthier lives than most of them could hope for without
human help. Again, there’s some question about whether we need as many cattle
as we currently have, but it’s hard to support the argument that raising male
cattle for use as beef, and leather and gelatin, is altogether bad.
I believe the present state of
our dairy industry is sick with greed—but that it’s possible for dairy farming
to be healthy, sustainable, and a good thing for cows as well as humans. I
don’t believe that that argument can fit into a villanelle. Only the image of
the PETA activists screaming that we should stop milking cows, and the cows
bellowing back that we should milk them more
often than we tend to consider necessary, seemed to fit into a villanelle.
Can we do an Amazon link? Meh. This wretched laptop, the Piece of Garbage or POG, "updated" itself earlier this week and Amazon now says it can't do links any more. Anyway this post might deserve a serious study of factory farming, but we already linked to Old MacDonald's Factory Farm, back in 2015 I believe, and this post refers to a classic picture book called Chicken Ten Thousand. It's become rare, with copies starting about $40. In real life, middle-aged women used to tell GBP or me, "I'll never forget a book I read as a child, about a chicken who escaped from a factory farm. I don't remember the author or title but I remember that book." I remember the author and title. This is the book. Factory farms that produce meat raise chickens specially bred to be so stupid and so lazy that they seem equally boring with or without their heads cut off, nowadays, extremely unlikely to escape and become anybody's pets. But some battery hens kept to produce eggs are capable of becoming pets, if rescued.
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