Fiona’s Blog

Poor Shambo and how sad to see such a beautiful, healthy creature carted off to be ’slaughtered’. Who could not fail to feel moved when this animal, who had never known harm – had only received care and love – was loaded into a trailer and carted off to his death? That final look over the top of the trailer as it drove away was heart-breaking. And how typical that Shambo, as ‘just a bullock’, is treated in this way, in a world where cattle are bred on an industrial scale and have no intrinsic value. A bullock is simply meat-to-be, a commodity. But how wonderful that the monks and nuns of Skanda Vale did what they could to save him, stood up for the sanctity of his life. And how interesting, the media interest. I, like many others on Thursday 26th July 2007, felt very connected to the events taking place over there in West Wales, in the Community of the Many Names of God, Skanda Vale, Carmarthen.

I have no wish to propound the idea of there being, in any simplistic sense, ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in this sorry and complex episode. What is clear though is that this is a clash of world views. On the one hand, we have the state siding with its farming industry, where animals are reared with a price on their (dead) heads. They are fed and cared for purely for instrumental reasons. The state, in protecting the livelihoods of its farmers, has no thought for the intrinsic value of the animals involved in the industry. These animals are nameless, background numbers, worth x amount, destined for ‘the table’ and this is taken by the state and its farmers as an unquestioned ‘given’.

On the other hand, we have, as exemplified by the monks and nuns of Skanda Vale, an attitude and orientation towards the general sanctity of life, where a cow, along with all other life forms, has intrinsic value as a sentient being. Each animal is seen as an individual. Though the cow is an especially sacred symbol in the Hindu tradition, all life is considered sacred to them. This is an important point. As Marian Hussenbux of Quaker Concern for Animals writes, ‘We have campaigned to defend Shambo and the rights of the temple to keep him and remain undesecrated, but Shambo is a powerful symbol of what happens to a myriad animals every day world wide – they die unnoticed, in most cases, unmourned, defenceless victims slaughtered on the altar of human greed’.

What I have also discovered over this week is MP for Newport West Paul Flynn’s blog, which I would heartily recommend for its lucid, witty and compassionate voice. Paul’s messages about Shambo and the Skanda Vale community have been incredibly refreshing, offering a sense of vision in the face of a heavy-booted pragmatism that seems unable to imagine other possibilities, other ways to live. One thing I do know is that we could do with more MPs like Paul Flynn – they are few and far between. With any luck, Shambo and the monks and nuns at Skanda Vale have opened up the whole area and shone a bright light into an area of great darkness. The Skanda Vale community have exemplified the kind of dignity and non-violence espoused by Mahatma Gandhi. This is not a passive stance in the world but an active one that takes great courage and heart.

Hindu theologian and teacher Akhandadhi Das said on a recent BBC Radio 4 Thought for the Day, ‘We don’t cull infected humans to protect other people, we treat them. Same with zoo animals. So, can there not be an option within DEFRA’s law on TB for those who want to cure rather than kill? Mahatma Gandhi said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.” So, it seems odd that we should require anyone, whether farmer or religious community, to destroy life rather than follow their commitment to nurture it’.

My dad had an amazing memory for poems and one snippet has kept coming back to me recently: ‘goodness only knowses/The Noselessness of Man’. Googling it, I find that it belongs to a poem by G.K.Chesterton, some of which I have quoted below. Written from the perspective of a dog called Quoodle, the poem’s amusing and light-hearted approach actually packs a profound punch. Maybe this is a really famous poem that everyone knows, but it’s new to me and a discovery. It sets those two familiar lines in context, deepening them.

Google has served as Dad’s ‘hand from beyond’. Finding the poem feels like finding a bit of his voice.

The Song of Quoodle

They haven’t got no noses,
The fallen sons of Eve;
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes;
But more than mind discloses
And more than men believe.

[...]

The brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder,
The old bones buried under,
Are things in which they blunder
And err, if left alone.

The wind from winter forests,
The scent of scentless flowers,
The breath of brides’ adorning,
The smell of snare and warning,
The smell of Sunday morning,
God gave to us for ours

* * *

And Quoodle here discloses
All things that Quoodle can,
They haven’t got no noses,
They haven’t got no noses,
And goodness only knowses
The Noselessness of Man.

I became properly vegetarian in the early 1980s, after an earlier attempt which aborted largely because my dad, bless him, persuaded me of the ‘unnaturalness’ of not eating meat. I remember I had a cold at the time and my dad sat at my bedside and, with patient and loving gentleness, explained that my cold was clearly due to my new (only days old) diet.

Much later in his life – with all three of his children grown up and confirmed vegetarians – he too ate less meat, especially with all the modern emphasis on ‘five portions of fruit and veg a day’ and concerns about obesity, heart disease and so on. He never gave up meat – liked it too much – but did come to see the ‘spin’ involved in the ‘because it’s natural’ argument.

Back in the eighties, it was still rare and odd to be a vegetarian – and hard to eat out (‘Oh, it’s not meat. It’s just ham/fish’). Now, of course, it is becoming normal – at least in certain zones. And Quorn has been invented as a tasty ‘meat substitute’, and it is getting tastier and more inventive as time goes by. What sometimes makes me uneasy, though, is the way our dogs and our cat – when he was alive – love it, as if ‘the real thing’. I refused to eat Quorn for ages on the grounds that I didn’t want a ‘meat substitute’, which simply feeds into the ‘idea’ of meat. There is, after all, so much to eat anyway. But nowadays, Quorn is part of our diets, though our diets are not Quorn-centric by any means. As I say, there is so much else to eat. And right now, we are feasting on veg and fruit that Gorwel is growing in our garden. He keeps a Welsh language garden blog here: http://llysiau.wordpress.com/

You will see there photographs too of some of the food that he and the garden are growing. For instance, you can see some of our beans above. Such simple and delicious pleasures.