Progress, drowned cats and power tools
Sandra McCulloch
CanWest News Service
Sunday, June 18, 2006
It's tempting to sit back and feel smug about our progress as a civilization. Look at our electronics, our medical miracles and our ho-hum attitude to launching men and women into space. But what's progress, really? Is rights groups to speak up for those who can only oink or woof? Or have we progressed by embracing recycling programs that divert tonnes of garbage from the dump? So your daughter is a lawyer and your son a wedding planner what a change from the old days when men were men and women only worried about keeping them happy.
We've made great strides during the last 50 years but we've still got a long way to go. I remember as a kid hopping in a boat with my dad to go dump tin cans in the ocean. There was no shame and we certainly weren't the only ones doing it. Those were less enlightened times. But we were composting long before city dwellers -- vegetable scraps were tossed in the compost heap, meat scraps went to the dog while paper and cardboard were burned. What seemed unburnable just needed a hotter fire, fuelled by a big old tire and some diesel. We produced very little in the way of disposable garbage and stuff like chemicals and car batteries that we couldn't dispose of safely was kept forever.
I was in Mom's basement the other day and the old lead-based paint is still there, its faded labels taking me back to earlier, simpler times. Half the stuff in her basement is there because Mom doesn't know how to get rid of it. Now, at least, there are ways of safely disposing of all that stuff through regional recycling programs.
But a recycling program is only effective if we can get all the toxic crap sitting in our basements into the system. A riding friend was laughing the other day at memories of putting tiny piglets in sacks and dragging them behind horses as an amusement at her Pony Club gatherings. "Can you imagine what the animal rights people would say today?" she wondered.
But I still hear of Western horses being tied with their heads cranked up high all night so that when they're released for the next day's competition the poor beasts drop their heads low to the ground, thereby gaining the points for excellent form.
An editor here said feral cats are such a problem back on the family farm in Saskatchewan that the kittens are stuffed in a sack and tossed in a slough. How do you neuter the adults if you can't catch them? The drowning of kittens has a long history on farms, where barn cats had a job of keeping rodents under control. But these halfwild felines breed all the time, and even today there doesn't seem to be an easy answer for managing their numbers.
And killing is part of the culture on farms where livestock are raised so they can be slaughtered and packaged nicely for our supermarket shelves. We don't like to think of how chicken or steak got from the barnyard to our plates. Recycling and animal welfare aside, there are still dinosaurs among us who see clear and different roles for men and women. A small headline in last weekend's paper read "Tools for Dad," a reference to Father's Day being around the corner. But it got me thinking about the assumption that Dad would know one end of a hammer from the other. I believe there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who like to fix things and those who like to (or should) hire others to fix things. Men and women are pretty evenly split on these lines, I believe. So where do we get this persistent idea that men must like power tools? Frankly, I'd be seriously worried to see power tools in the hand of some men I know.
Weekend afternoons can be a horror show at the ER with handymen parading in with severed digits, wrenched backs and frozen peas on their heads.
There's a very good surgeon in town who repairs and reattaches fingers and thumbs frequently. I even heard he replaced somebody's lost thumb with their big toe. There are men who should just say no to power tools and not feel bad about it. We've evolved, haven't we? The notion that men should fix things is as stupid as the one that says women should clean and cook. Let's move on.