On Tue, 2 Apr 2002 10:45:36 +0900, Tom Bridgeland <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>...
>When making hay we would often find small animals scooped up by the
>machine, especially snakes. There is no way to avoid it unless you are
>willing to starve.

Did you think about fruit trees?
Including chestnut, hazel, walnut?
Or vegetable cultures, they give a very big harvest on small space.

In all the idealism favourizing the real nature life of a hunter, hunting
wild gazelles or deers, we shouldn't forget, that all the cows eaten have
before eaten a big amount of crops.
Predominantely grains like maize or wheat or harvested green grass.
Much more as would have been necessary when the crops would have been eaten
diretly, about 10 fold as much (actually for pigs it's about 7-fold and for
cattle its about 15-fold).

Humans are condemmned to kill what they eat, that's a fact.
Many will know the book "The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran. I like it very much.
I also like it's chapter about eating.
It reminds us that we are crunching the apple as well as we have been
killing the animal we were eating.
We should think that we will feed the earth with our own body as well as the
animal body feeds us, at the moment.
And that the apple will become our breath.

Both is a act of destruction.
It's only, somehow in the picture of the consequences
with the animal or the fruit, the fruit seems a little more appealing for
me.

regards

Amadeus
in a very nice eastern spring sunny atmosphere here