Lex Anteinternet: Rediscovering the obvious: Diet and hunting, fishing and gardening
Lex Anteinternet: Fish on Fridays, the Environment, and somewhat missing the point.
Fish on Fridays, the Environment, and somewhat missing the point.
Here's an odd item that I found through a British newspaper:
Catholic Church can reduce carbon emissions by returning to meat-free Fridays, study suggests
Eh?
This found:
In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits—yet this has still saved over 55,000 tons of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.
FWIW, 10% of the British population remains or has returned to Catholicism (more Catholics go to services on Sunday than any other religion in Britain). England in particular was noted for its strong attachment to the Faith before King Henry VIII, and even after that, as it was not at first clear to people at the pew level that he'd severed ties with it. This gets into our recent discussion on the end of the Reformation.
Indeed, Great Britain's Catholic roots never really completed faded at any one time. Peasants rose up in 1549 over the Prayer Book, a good 30 years after Henry has severed from Rome. Catholic hold outs continued on, on the island, under various penalties of the law, some extremely severe. And the illogical position of the Church of England that it wasn't really Protestant, while not being able to rationally explain why then it wasn't that, or wasn't, if it wasn't that, schismatic, lead High Church Anglicans to continually flirt with returning to Rome. King Charles I was so High Church his position in regard to not joining the Church didn't make sense, something that his son, Charles II, ultimately did, in spite of his libertine lifestyle.The Oxford movement by Anglican churchmen in reaction to Catholic assertions that their Apostolic Succession was severed lead at least one famous Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, into the Catholic Church, where he ultimately became a Cardinal. In recent years, notable British figures have converted to the Church, along with many regular people.
Abstaining from meat on all the Fridays in the year, which in Catholic terms doesn't include fish, was a long held Latin Rite tradition that fell in the wake, in some places, but not all, following the reforms of Vatican II. It was not part of Vatican II, as some improperly assume, but something that occurred in the spirit of that age. It was a penitential act, not an environmental one.
For a variety of reasons, I'm pretty skeptical of the "blame it on cows" part of the climate change discussion. But as a localist and killetarian, I am game with grow or capture it on your own. That isn't really what this is about, but it's worth noting that anything you buy at the grocery store, or wherever, has had a fair amount of fossil fuels associated with it. The Carbon reduction here would be because fish don't burp much, if at all, or fart much, if at all. But for that matter, neither do deer or rabbits, ducks or geese, or for that matter grass fed cattle.
Go out there, in other words, and get your own if you really want to save on the carbon.
For that matter, I might note, for those who are vegan, production agriculture is the huge killer of animal life. I always laugh to myself when vegans think they're saving animals, they're slaughtering them in droves. Anyone who is familiar with the agricultural logistical chain or how production agriculture works knows that.
I'm for growing it yourself as well, of course, although I've now been a hypocrite on that for years. I need to get back to it.
Anyhow, the "this would be a good thing for the Catholic Church to do globally in the name of the environment" might be true, or might not be, but it misses the overall point.
Related threads:
The secular left's perpetual surprise at arriving at the Catholic past.
Secular suffering for nothing
Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season Ends, the 2023 Season Begins.
Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season Ends, the 2023 Season Begins.
Lex Anteinternet: The 2022 Season
The 2022 Season
The 2022 hunting season has ended.
In 2022, when I wrote about the 2021 season, I started off with this:
It wasn't a great one, for a variety of reasons.
And that statement was true once again for 2022, but for different reasons, a lot of which had nothing much to do with the hunting season itself.
That's because 2022 has been the year of the field of Medicine, or age, or perhaps lifestyle, or whatever, catching up with me.
In the Spring I wasn't feeling well, which after much delay and finally responding to a demand from Long Suffering Spouse, caused me to go into the doctor's office, which lead in turn to a prescription for some medicine. I'll spare you the details, but like most medicines and me, I didn't really respond terribly well to them physically. They did their job, but they also made me a bit ill, and made me ill just in time for Spring Turkey Season. I hunted turkeys, as I always do, and I did see some, but I never got up on them (I tend to stalk them, rather than lure them in). I did get a turkey call, which I'd never had before, but that failed to bring any in.
I also had the joy, and I won't detail it, of being pretty sick while hunting. Something I rarely have experienced.
It was fun anyhow, but not something for a subsistence hunter to write home about.
That takes us to fishing season, and here too, for one reason or another, I just didn't get out over the summer as much as usual. Indeed, "didn't get out as much as usual" was the theme of the year.
I fished the river several times, and one of the mountain streams I fish. I attempted to take my daughter and her boyfriend down a significant local canyon, where I'm sure there are big fish, but we failed at that. I hadn't scouted the route, and ours was pretty impassable.
I did try something I have not for several years, however, which was fishing from a kayak.
The doctor's visit mentioned earlier lead to a colonoscopy, which I wasn't too quick to get set up. That ended up getting scheduled for early Fall. And that lead to a major surgery in October.
Prior to that, I got out for blue grouse, but failed to see a single one. I never made it out sage chicken hunting. I didn't draw antelope, but my son did, and I went out with him. None of us drew limited deer, but my daughter and I went out opening morning and nearly got a couple of really good deer in a general deer area until some fool blasted right by us in a truck, scaring them off. We went back out a couple of weeks later and my son got a nice deer in a very distant area. So at least that was a partial success.
I went out for antelope with my son, and he was successful.
I drew an elk tag, but I only got out twice, once before surgery, and once after.
Surgery put me out of action in a major way for well over a month. When I got back on my feet, only waterfowl was open.
Lex Anteinternet: BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new st...
BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new stretch of North Platte near Casper
This major public access story hit the news here Thursday.
BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new stretch of North Platte near Casper
I'm quite familiar with this stretch of property. As a kid, before the recent owners who owned transferred it, I used to hunt part of it. I never asked for permission, even though I'm sure I should have. In those days, in the 70s, we asked for permission a lot less, and it was granted by fiat a lot more.
This is a real boon to sportsmen. It'll open up miles of river to fishing, and miles and miles to hunting. I've passed by deer and doves in this area a lot as I didn't have permission to go where they were. Now I'll be able to, although I hope the BLM makes as much of this roadless as possible.
I hope they also lease it out for grazing.
Indeed, I have some mixed feelings about this as I really hate to see a local ranch go out of production. The family that owned it had started off as sheepmen in Johnson County and moved down to Natrona County when their land was bought for coal production. Now they'll just be out of agriculture entirely, and I really hate to see that, even though I'm glad to see this didn't go to out of state interest. Indeed, what occurred is more in keeping with the purpose of the original Federal land programs, including the Homestead Act, than what often does occur with land sales now days.
I will note that, of course, in the age of the internet this of course resulted in moronic comments, including the blisteringly ignorant comment that its somehow unconstitutional for the Federal Government to own land. That comment is so dense that it should disqualify a person from going onto land in general until some education occurs.
Lex Anteinternet: The 2021 Season
The 2021 Season
It wasn't a great one, for a variety of reasons.
It was in the late waterfowl season that I had my second vehicular run in of the year, and it was similar to the first. I was duck and goose hunting on a stretch of the river. Up until the last few years, this stretch, which is 7,000 feet high, closes to fishermen because of the weather. Nobody wants to fly fish in 80 mph winds when it's 10F.
That's started to change, however.
For one thing, in spite of the high altitude, it hasn't been as cold up that high recently. It's still really windy, however. On the day I was out there, it was probably around 35F with 80 mph winds.
I'm a fisherman too, but when hunting starts, for me fishing stops. I'm more of a hunter than a fish hunter. My father was the other way around. Anyhow, I sort of figure that guys who have the run of the river from April until late August, can ease up a bit in September through December, and most in fact do. If you see a fisherman on any other stretch of the river from August on, they tend to be friendly as a rule and share the river. I try to avoid them.
On this stretch its different, however, and that's because most of the fishermen who tend to be in this stretch are from the big rectangular state to our south.
Now, I'm not the only waterfowler on this stretch of the river. A few other dedicated guys are dedicated blind hunters on the same stretch. It must be the case that they stake their claim and the fishermen avoid them. I generally avoid the fishermen.
On this day, however, I drove down to a stretch of the river in this area that I knew was empty. I got things, and the dog, out a couple of hundred yards away from the river and then, as the dog was milling about, a Rectangular State SUV came blasting down the two track and nearly hit my dog. Worse yet, they saw him.
What that was about was them getting to the river before me. They probably thought I was a fisherman too, or they knew I was a hunter and they wanted their stretch of river. I hunted it anyway. They knew they'd been assholes as they kept looking back as I walked the long stretch down and the long stretch back. On top of it, they put in on what amounts to a wind tunnel (I knew that) and had no luck.
There was no need for that.
I'm not one of those people who run around looking for challenges in life. Indeed, quite frankly, my life had plenty of challenges early on, and I don't need anymore. Frankly, for that matter, I tend to find people who claim to take up occupations because they're "challenging" to be full of bull.
Having said that, I'm completely different with outdoor endeavors. Maybe I do like a challenge, and perhaps that why I'm after chukars.
While not exactly on my seasons, my failures at chukars caused me to try to find out more about them and that lead me to this excellent blog:
It's a great read.
2021 Holiday Reflections. The Agricultural Edition.
This will be an unusual post for here, as I'm doing something unusual in general.
Anyhow, this blog, which used to simply be a catalog of agrarian themed entries on Lex Anteinternet, has grown into its own a bit and now has a little original content, although not much. Anyhow, we're going to run this post independently, even though another Resolutions thread will already be up on Lex Anteinternet.
Well, two, actually.
Anyhow, this past two years, if anything, have been ones that have shown how Chesteron, Leopold and Abbey were quite right, even though they remain voices crying in the wilderness. The voices we've heard instead, most often that of an ex President and his hard core acolytes, haven't been helpful. Maybe it's time to drag out the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Chesteron, and Wendell Berry and see what they have to say.
Indeed, that will be our first resolution for agrarians, farmers, would be farmers, and just folks in general.
1. Check out Berry, Abbey, Leopold, or Chesterton
The current pack of yappers is offering little in the way of deep content, and a lot of what they have to say about anything is outright destructive. Every now and then something of value is stated, but it's hard to hear it in the general mess of things.
Let's be honest. Almost all of the current "we need to go in this direction" is at least a little bit misinformed. If you aren't grounded in what's real, any wind can blow you over.
Doing a little reading of some grounded folks would be a really good start in things.
And things be Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold and G. K. Chesterton would be really good starts.
2. Cut out the citations to the "I’m a billionth generation farmer/rancher" in the wrong context, and don't support it when its made in the wrong context.
This is one of a couple of posts here that are really directed at a very narrow few, rather than the majority of ranchers.
Actually, it's not directed at ranchers at all, but rather at the rancher ex pats. Those who hail originally from the soil, but now no longer are working it. For those who descend from prior generations of ranchers and are still in it, the more power to you.
I've posted on this already, but it really doesn't matter if your great-great-grandfather broke the sod in Niobrara County in 1890 if that doesn't mean you are in agriculture today. And it doesn't make you royalty. And. . .
3. Knock off the "agriculture is a hard way to make a living" line
Now, I want to be careful here.
Agriculture is a hard way to make a living, because of economics.
What it isn't, however, is a hard way to live.
This has been on my mind, to the political year, anyhow, but it recally came into the forefront of my mind again recently listening to an episode of Wyoming: My 307. It was the one on ranching, which you can find here:
RANCHING IN WYOMING
In it, it had a long session pondering "why do we do this?" which arrived at a very interesting conclusion, that being "it's a vocation".
I think there's something to that.
But, we ought to be careful thinking that somehow because we're out in nature, and nature is a bit rough, that we're suffering. Far from it.
I've been a lawyer, a solider, worked on drilling rigs, a writer and a stockman in what now amounts to a whopping 45 years of working (I started working for pay at age 13). So I think I know a little about work and what hard work is, and isn't. And what work is like for most people.
Somewhere at some point in time somebody fed a line of crap to agriculturalist that their work is uniquely difficult in an existential sense. Perhaps in a physical sense, that's somewhat true, but there's plenty of other dangerous physical work that puts you out in all kids of weather.
And most modern work is, quite frankly, utterly meaningless. Most Americans don't like their jobs, as no rational scientient mammal would like most of the jobs that now exist.
What agriculture isn't is something that makes you work more hours per day than other people, particularly professional people, in horrible conditions. Not even close, quite often. And the working conditions and nature of agriculture are far better than that for most other people. If you think that your job is somehow worse than a computer engineer in a cubicle, you are fooling yourselves massively.
Indeed, this sort of whining, and that's what it is, really needs to stop. It's self deceptive.
Indeed, its harmful it two ways. It's self-delusion and makes us think that, if we believe it, we are really working a lot harder than other people, when in fact that's just not true, and it also causes us to force children off the land for a better "town job" that won't be better.
Almost everything about life in the towns and cities is worse. We ought to realize that.
If you doubt it, leave the ranch or farm and go into town. You can't come back, and you'll regret you left. Pleantly of people will line up to take your place.
4. Having land doesn't make you "landed" nobility.
This, I'll note, is also directed at a narrow few, not the broader majority, of those in agriculture.
Something really disturbing has developed in the US over the past century in which those lucky enough to be born in to agriculture sometimes sort of regard themselves as petty nobility in a way. It expresses itself in all sorts of odd ways.
Now, I don't want to suggest this is common.
Most farmers and ranchers aren't this way at all. But you'll see examples of it where people in agriculture will express a degree of contempt, on rare occasion, about average people. It feeds into the thing above, in a reverse fashion, in that there's a sort of "we work hard for a living" without realizing that a lot of other people do as well.
I'll be frank that the last two items are sort of in reaction to a current political campaign. I'm not going to get into the pluses and minuses of the merits of any candidate, but something about the videos of the campaign really strike me the wrong way for their strong rancher pull. I'm tired of people appearing on political ads in cowboy hats arguing that you need to vote for somebody because they came from an agricultural family that knows what real values are. It's insulting.
5. Support getting people into agriculture.
The worst enemy of ranchers in the west are ranchers and by extension this is true about agriculture in general. Agriculturalist decry those who regard their units as big public parks, which they should, but at the same time they don't do anything to try to help average people get into agriculture.
The reason for that, in no small part, is that it would mean a big personal sacrifice. We could support legislation that made agriculture and agricultural land tied to actually working the land as your real and sole occupation, but we don't as that would massively depress the value of the land. It's that value that operates against us in the first place, as it means the Warren Buffets of the world become the only one who can afford the land.
We could pull this up by the root and cut it off at the head. If we really think we're special and the real examples of the common men, we should.
6. Think local and organize.
My entire life I've heard complaints about the midstream in agriculture. The price of beef goes up, and cattle on the hoof do too, and the very few packers there are reap the rewards. It's hard on consumers, and it's hard on ranchers.
I'm sure the same is true in other fields of agriculture as well.
Well, enough of that. We know it's unfair, so what we have to do is to replace the middle men with processors of our own. We could do it.
Indeed, some agricultural enterprises, like sugar, do in fact do just this. But it should expand. Co-ops for this purpose, organized to process for the member's benefits and not their own, would be ideal, and could more than compete with the big packers.
7. Think Agrarian
Modern agriculture suffers heavily from the worship of materialism that intruded heavily into the 20th Century and, along with it, specialization of everything. We in agriculture often hear of "monocultures", but we almost all do just that.
Our predecessors did this much less. Up into the mid 20th Century it was really rare to find ranches that didn't also farm a little bit, for the table, and every rancher hunted (often illegally) as well. Farmers were the same way. A wheat farmer in Kansas was a wheat farmer, but he was probably also taking some game with a shotgun and probably kept a few pigs for the table,, and so on.
We have the resources and could lead the say on that, and indeed, some do. But the real banner carriers on this sort of thing shouldn't be people in the "homestead" movement, who are mostly chopping up big parcels of land to the ultimate detriment of everyone.
8. Know who is your friend and who isn't.
This doesn't apply to everyone either, but I'm sometimes surprised how some in agriculture can be hostile, intentionally and unintentionally, to those who aren't, but who want to enjoy something on the land.
"No Trespassing" signs and "No Hunting" signs are signs to locals that they aren't welcome. Signs stating "This Land Leased To Outfitter" are the same thing, except they show that the lack of welcome has been monetized.
Bills to privatize wildlife are the ultimate acts of hostility. Falling in second are bills to transfer public lands into private hands.
We should realize that there are people who are genuinely hostile to agriculture. The local newspaper publishes op ed articles by members of an organization that definitely is. There are a lot more people who aren't in agriculture than who are, and we tend to forget that, as for most of us most of our friends are in it.
Given this, at some point we really risk public hostility. Shut access off to the land, and next thing you know you'll be seeing "tax ag land like other land" and things of that nature, and you are out of business and out of cash.
It doesn't really take that much to be friendly to people.
Likewise, for some reason those in agriculture often support entities and operations that are land destroying. I've never understood that, indeed as we'll often complain about the same entities if they're on our places.
9. Think really local.
None of us are here forever. Try to keep that place, and keep the familiy in it.
People do a lot of things for a lot of reasons, but every time I encounter somebody, and I do fairly frequently, who ends up telling me "I grew up on a ranch", and I find them working as a lawyer, doctor, accountant, or whatever, I think it's a tragedy. That shouldn't have had to happen.
Blog Mirror: A bucket-list tour of Nebraska courthouses yields some elevator insights
A bucket-list tour of Nebraska courthouses yields some elevator insights Mar 2
-
I see Joe Salatin is at this event: Homesteaders of America Am I the only Agrarian in the world who isn't a Salatin fan? I can't eve...
-
Misinformation, hysteria dominate response to BLM’s plan for SW Wyomin g
-
Lex Anteinternet: Munson Last Boots, or how I became a hipster and d... : Munson Last Boots, or how I became a hipster and didn't e...