In 1991 I imported 5 Saxon Merino rams and semen from 11 other merino rams  from Australia. The import costs (quarantine, transportation, semen collection) exceeded $3000 per ram and that figure did not include the purchase price of the ram.

Since 1986 the government of Australia has permited the export of Merino rams, but it continues to forbid the export of Merino ewes.

Catskill Merino Saxon Merino Rams: From $2000.00

Catskill Merino Saxon Merino Ewes: from $2500.00

See the my discussion of the Saxon Merino for information on the history of the sheep and on my breeding of them.

Death caused by Clostridium perfringins types C is rapid (within 24 hrs) but painful; when the symptoms are observable, treatments are usually in vain.

To vaccinate a sheep is to say, "Not yet Death, this sheep is not ready to die, we can live for a day, a month, a year, a lifetime even." We are Max von Sydow who plays a 15th century knight who plays chess with Death attempting to avoid life's inevitable and unavoidable checkmate, in Ingmar Bergman's film the Seventh Seal which was taken from the Book of Revelation. 

And when the Lamb (having seven horns and seven eyes) had opened the Seventh Seal, there was silence in heaven for half an hour. Revelation 8:1

What differentiates farming from other occupations, is that farmers determine when a living thing dies, be it a lamb that I take to the slaughterhouse or a carrot that a vegetable farmer pulls from the ground. Vegetables die anonymously; they fit well into the industrialized food machinery that Mark Bittman describes in The Human Cost of Animal Suffering, New York Times March 13, 2012.  

I like Mark Bittman for his column in the Times, The Minimalist which ran for 13 years; his recipe for a butterflied leg of lamb with pesto was memorable for the invention, the idea, the simplicity and of course the taste; he has given of us many good recipes including those which have meat as a component. Mark Bittman is a champion of animal welfare, a critic of the factory farm and of corporate agriculture in general that produces adulterated food as it generates cash flow. I applaud him for his work against industrial methods of food production; those applied to vegetables are bad and those applied to animals are worse.

But where I question him is his statement that killing animals is "maltreatment," I would agree with him when it comes to animals slaughtered in a conveyor belt factory of death for fast food chains and supermarkets which is the way most livestock meet their end.  But here is what he says in the Times:

None of which justifies egregious maltreatment. (Yes, vegan friends, I get that killing animals, period, is maltreatment. This ambivalence, or hypocrisy if you prefer, is for every ambivalent or hypocritical omnivore or flexitarian a puzzle, and scale is an issue.)  That maltreatment must first be acknowledged in order for us to alleviate it.

He is absolute: "killing animals, period, is maltreatment." He goes on to describe a middle ground that permits the killing of animals "that allows our children to make more humane decisions." Does he mean that, if our children are to continue as carnivores (which he supposes), this middle ground will allow humane ways of maltreatment?  

Is there a way to kill that is not maltreatment, how, how does one handle this killing, what does one do? It is this so called middle ground that has our answers. To change a person's eating habits is probably more difficult than changing his religious faith. If you want to eat more meat, go ahead, as I am not sure more or less meat, within reason, is worse or better for you or for the planet for that matter; the studies that prove this to be true or disprove it are flawed by their minuscule or prejudicial sampling.  Almost everybody in America has a car or two and many have lawn mowers but few people have cows; to blame global warming on livestock is ludicrous for that anecdotal statement alone.

The uncontrolled population growth, abetted by the large corporation needing more consumers for their products, has not been successfully addressed. All food and environmental problems stem from this. There are too many people in the world now and there will be even more of them in the future.  Who addresses this problem; it's back burnered for sure

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Saint Augustine said that we can not justify our existence by the experience of it  alone—something is missing—what he describes here is a void, a spiritual necessity in man that is filled by God. Or I might add, filled by feelings of guilt.

On Saint Patrick's Day Mark Bittman published a recipe for beef stew and did not specify how the cow was killed for it's meat.  The recipe was delicious reading and I wonder how many of his readers, those who followed the recipe, bought beef from cows that had been killed in an industrial processing plant, one that, according to what he's written, he abhors for the maltreatment inherent in the way they handle livestock and kill them. 

Maybe I'm wrong but I sensed feelings of culpability (and those feeling are as good as they are real; they are a beginning) from reading the March 13th column and the one that followed it in the New York Times on March 16th, No Surprise: Meat Is Bad for You.  

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I really wouldn't bring up my beliefs if it were not relevant to the topic at hand.  I am a bad Buddhist for reasons different from the many good Buddhists who believe me a bad one. 

Several years ago, Carol, a Tibetan Buddhist and a local sangha member, whom I'd invited over to the farm for two reasons (I was tempted to join a Buddhist sangha and I wanted her to let me touch her breasts), after smelling the complex living fragrances of a sheep barn, turned up her nose as if to say, it stinks of death here, and this fact of her being able to find unpleasant the odors that I find lovely, along with her telling me on the hillside above the sheep barn that the head monk of her sangha had told her I would not be a suitable member because I had sheep, I knew, looking down at the flock before the barn—a little intoxicated with their aroma—and smiling slightly but sadly, that not only had I been barred entrance to her sangha, I would never be able to touch her breasts. 

I don't actually draw a knife across the throat of my sheep but I select the ones that are to be killed that day and I transport them to the slaughterhouse. I suppose for these ancillary facts I am considered a bad Buddhist in the eyes of Carol and the good many of her fellows. Nevertheless I sit six mornings out of seven, I do zazen, except on the morning of the day that I spend at market in New York, on Saturday. Why do I sit?  Even when it's difficult or I have things on my mind and it seems tiresome and long, I enjoy the discipline.

The Japanese Zen master Eihei Dōgen 永平道元 (1200-1253) said that, "Zazen is enlightenment." What did Dogen mean? Zazen is one of the the first practices taught to those starting on a Zen path; beginners are told to focus their attention on the breath as it goes in and out of the body—when you notice that your mind has wandered, you return your attention to the breath. And like the breath, the question a Zen practitioner keeps coming back to is, "Enlightenment, what is it?" If the Dalai Lama were not enlightened, who could be; or is he just the simple monk he says he is?

Conundrums are learning opportunities; but there is no guarantee of learning the right thing, you could learn the opposite; there is no guarantee. And life comes with a too late clause; many people die before they're ready, as if anybody is ready to die, in sound mind. 

Maybe we can come closer to understanding the process of enlightenment elsewhere. Let's attend a meeting of Debtor's Anonymous. DA is a 12 Step program, "Hi, my name is... and I'm a debtor."  A debtor who is having a hard time being solvent will hear from the DA audience she's tearfully or angrily confessing to, "Keep coming back." 

We may even feel responsible for our lack of solvency, for our unhappiness. And we may even feel that we deserve it. This lack of happiness can haunt us; people often see a therapist. 

What progress toward a successful therapy (sans medication) does for us, as does the approach to Enlightenment, is to make us into the recipients of a gift: happiness is very bright to an unhappy person; it is almost warm flashing neon viewed from the depths of despair, but there are other gifts that might be unseen in the giddy glare of happiness; they are almost unnoticeable because they are common. These smaller and more day-to-day gifts are aspects of life itself, so often overlooked in our busy pursuits of occupation and wellbeing. 

And yes, some of these everyday gifts are thoughts about death. We live in a wake of death caused by simply going on from day to day, all of us: you, me, Mark Bittman, HHDL, Carol, members of her sangha, everybody. Life supports life; the taking of life perpetuates the living and the only way we can stay alive is by killing. And eating or, in reality, killing to stay alive requires an intention realized or not, but acted upon. Food died for you, you killed it; it gives you sustenance and the only things that can provide life to living things are living things in and of themselves. All life, in a broader sense, is cannibalistic devouring life to live.

Based on the horror that we call eating you can see why people, when they even think of the food process at all, choose what they consider to be a lesser evil and eat only plants calling themselves vegetarians, why Mark Bittman calls the killing of animals, at the prompting of his vegan friends, "maltreatment," and you can see why Carol and her good fellow Buddhists frown upon keeping sheep that they suspect might be slaughtered, even if I didn't, the keeping of animals, as an occupation, is not highly thought of in Tibetan Buddhist circles.  Abhorrence, denial, guilt and exclusion, or a modern day shunning, are several, and there are more, palliative, projecting or self blaming personal responses to the eating of meat. 

Yet, there is a satisfactory answer, a singular way of successfully addressing the common horrors of life, like killing to live, or as we euphemistically term it, eating; but I am loathe to name this solution because I might be imposing here in the same way my mother imposed on a young and errant me, not by silence, although that was a part of her change of tone coupled with a matter-of-fact look that made me feel alone and cold such that I would do anything to have her warm love—anything at all—I would even be a good boy. Ha! We never grow out of the need be more virtuous than we are, do we.

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In a previous draft I'd mentioned a contest in a column of the New York Times, The Ethicist, Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat. Having deleted the reference but now that the winner has been declared by the judges, one of them being Mark Bittman, I bring it up again because Jay Bost, writer of the winning essay, states what is paramount to sanely going about one's daily life and that is pertinent to this discussion; he, and only he, of the 6 published finalists from over 3000 entries submitted to the Times expressed a sentiment that should be common not only to the eating of meat but also to everything, and I do mean everything, that enters one's field of concern. 

It's best to read Jay Bost, but let me quote part of the last paragraph where he says that eating meat is ethical if three reasons are met,

First, you accept the biological reality that death begets life on this planet...Second, you combine this realization with that cherished human trait of compassion and choose ethically raised food...  And third, you give thanks.

Reason number one, I described in different, probably much colder, words; and reason number three was what I was approaching in this attempt at an essay, what Mark Bittman and so many others ignore: thankfulness and of course we will return to it as gratitude is tantamount, not only to eating, but to living as well; and last but not least reason number two, Mark Bittman understands "ethically raised food" well (I have no critique of him here); food ethics are his food politics and it mostly fills his column. That's why I enjoy reading him; he informs me and, more often than not, we agree.

But it's difficult to keep those three reasons in mind when we're hungry: We grab something to eat and really don't give much thought to the fact that what we're eating is alive, or once was, and who knows how this food was raised and consequently killed, ethically or otherwise (there were no or inadequate labels on it to specify); and of top of all that, why should we be grateful, as if paying for the food and service weren't enough, and expensive it was too. Besides I always tip well, no matter the quality of the service.

Yes, down deep we're good people. Rather than to admonish you or to chastise you or to impose upon you by correcting you, or me, when we've tumbled form our moral pinnacles, let me offer a solution, one that makes life easier, one that resurrects good feelings that may have been lost in the plummet. 

(first draft, more to come) 

At Chelly National Park Monument, photograph by Ansel Adams 1937

"More than 50 photographs by Ansel Adams are on exhibit at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in downtown Tampa...They are on view through July 6."

@artknowlege

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This photograph brings to mind that we rented a darkroom on Columbus Avenue and I learned how to develop and print black and white film from Ansel Adam's granddaughter, Noel, in San Francisco.

Titus, the Artists's Son 1657, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn 

The Wallace Collection in London, England from Art Knowlege News

A 17 Micron Saxon Merino Ram

Wool is measured by its average fiber diameter (AFD) expressed in microns (one micron equals one millionth of a meter) and by its yield, which is the percentage of clean wool that remains after vegetable matter and grease have been washed out.

We always shear the first Monday in March, about two weeks before lambing begins. This year that Monday falls on March 5 with lambing beginning on or about March 23; that date is dependent on when we put the rams in with the ewes. Gestation in sheep takes five months.  

Shearing the ewe before lambing makes birthing easier for all involved: the ewe, the lamb and the shepherd.  The ewe can better mother her lamb, the lamb can better find the teat and the shepherd can better see how the mother and newborn are doing.

Shearing in late pregnancy: there is no danger of premature birth or of losing the lamb to an abortion (the sheep term for miscarriage) as there would be if the ewe were shorn in the early months of gestation. We schedule no handling of bred ewes in the first 3 months of pregnancy, no feet trimming, no deworming and no vaccinating for fear the ewe will lose her lamb. 

Last year at shearing we separated the lamb fleece (wool from sheep born a year ago) from the fleece of the older sheep by sorting the sheep into two age groups before shearing them.  After shearing I ended up with 1 bale of lamb's grease fleece and 4 bales of the grease fleece from older sheep.  The bales weigh about 600 lb.; they are shipped to the scourer for washing.  The yield is simply determined by weighing the grease wool before and the clean wool after scouring. For micron testing, core samples of the clean bales of wool are taken and sent to a wool lab for laser analysis.  I can have the wool micron tested at Texas A&M or privately, as I did, at Yocom-McColl Testing Laboratories.

The micron test results came back Friday:

The AFD of lamb's wool, which is 100% Saxon Merino, measured 17.4 microns with a yield of 63.7%. This is an Ultrafine wool.  

The sample was from about 150 fleeces; some lambs had finer wool (sub 16 micron) and others had coarser wool. Green Mountain will spin it into yarn in March or April depending on their schedule. I suspect they've never spun a wool as fine as this.

The Superfine wool from the older sheep (also 100% Saxon Merino), which is coarser because older, had an AFD of 18.7 microns with a yield of 65.3% which is a record or a near-record yield in the United States. American sheep usually yield less than 50%.

I'm pleased.

Here is the Sirolan Laserscan Micron Test Report from Yocom-McColl on the core sample of my Saxon Merino lamb's wool furnished by the scourer.

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary  from Wikipedia

In New York you can go an exhibition at a museum during market hours, given competent market help which I am fortunate to have, or go to a play after you fold your tent for the day. The sheep don't care what you do there as long as you bring back enough money to feed them.

The temperature outside was just below freezing and I was dressed for it. But going up Park Avenue South to the Club located on Gramercy Park I did wonder if the doorman would let me in; I was, by all appearances, a street person who slept on subway grates to stay warm, with two pair of pants under my old and ragged Carhart insulated overalls and a two-sizes too big barn coat over my 3 shirts.   Plus I had my clunky waterproof Muck books on, the ones I slog around the barnyard in, and I didn't have to turn and jump over the puddles as the fashionably but ill shod New Yorkers did walking along the slushy avenue, I splashed straight ahead, I was someone who walked on water.

At the red lights, to myself and to the imaginary doorman, I rehearsed in a droll and innocent manner, "I say old boy, is there a show of etchings here?" like I were William Powell playing the suave and tuxedoed Nick Charles in The Thin Man to whom no door is closed. 

It worked.  "Downstairs and to the right," I was told. "Will the artists be here?" I asked in passing.  The man in at the door shrugged, "On a day like today..."  We smiled knowingly, even though we knew different things.  I was in.  Now where was Myrna Loy?

(to be continued)

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

"[Barthes] realizes that his greatest achievement is not what he is, nor even what he has done, but rather how he has done it. So his self- portrait is not primarily a recollection of events or earlier works. It is, rightly, a delineation of the method rather than the man. And so persuasive or provocative are its assertions and associations that it is impossible to read this portrait of a style passively."

San Francisco Review of Books, Jacob Stockinger

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The word doxa picked up a new meaning between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC when the "Seventy" (evdomikonta) Hebrew scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. In this translation of the Scriptures, called the Septuagint, the scholars rendered the Hebrew word for "glory" (כבוד, kavod) as doxa.

...

Pierre Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, used the term doxa to denote what is taken for granted in any particular society. The doxa, in his view, is the experience by which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident”. It encompasses what falls within the limits of the thinkable and the sayable (“the universe of possible discourse”), that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying”.

Doxa, Wikipedia