Sometime in the late 1940s I remember being at my grandparent’s farm at Toolibin in the W.A. wheatbelt. I must have been about 7 years of age and I clearly remember my grandfather and some other men readying a horse team for winter ploughing in preparation for seeding. They had a John Deere steel-wheeled tractor in a bush material shed and I guess it wasn’t used because of petrol shortages. Years later when I was about 14, I recall two men arriving at the farm to collect that tractor and load it on a big truck and take it away. Even after many years of it sitting idle in the shed, they managed to start it and drive it up a big ramp onto the truck.
I cannot remember seeing the horses working again after that first time. My grandparents bought a large diesel International Harvester tractor and the horses were put out to pasture.
Every holiday when I stayed at the farm I would go to the horse paddock fence and the huge draught horses would rush up to me at such a speed that I couldn’t imagine how they could stop in time and not crash through the fence and me.
One holiday I went to see the horses and they were not there. A bit later in a stand of gum trees I found their sunbleached bones. Practicality deemed them to be pig food. I was shocked. They were mammals like us!
Farming has a different outlook on such things. When a sheep was to be slaughtered for the ‘house’, it was trussed up in a wheelbarrow and its throat slit and left to bleed to death.
We sensitive carnivores should maybe take a tour of an abattoir
No comments:
Post a Comment