Thoughts on the way to Nebraska

2-14-08
I write today form a lakefront (frozen in for now) summer house near Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska. Getting here has been a series of full and varied days... Traveling northeast along blue highways in New Mexico we saw lots of Pronghorn and Raptors and discovered a lovely State park, Villanueva, along side the Pecos river just south of Las Vegas. Our two mile hike there led to beautiful vistas and was good decompression from the last minute details and poignancy of leaving Socorro 2/9.

In Las Vegas where Erv’s well received Condor program was standing room only, we relaxed in Jan Arrott’s log house and enjoyed her showing us the sights including a meditation center of “light”- fractured rainbows from prismoid reflectors in it’s many windows. We also sampled some of the several ecosystems that meet in the area. Jan’s home, for instance, is on prairie grasslands; the meditation center nearby is in pine forest adjacent to natural hot springs; and not far away are rugged desert canyons we drove through just for the adventure and variety of it! In the Las Vegas area we saw migrating Sandhill Cranes, ducks and geese, a Ferruginous hawk, Meadowlark singing their hearts out in welcome of the milder weather, and our first flocks of Western Bluebirds.

On to Kansas, we crossed the border near Clayton, NM where we paused for lunch in an historic hotel and checked out the bullet holes in the saloon’s tin ceiling where a patron once celebrated Garfield’s election. Southern Kansas is predominantly flat and dedicated to cattle and corn, the stubbled fields occasionally punctuated by slowly pumping gas and oil rigs. Next stop, Garden City, Kansas. This city, as much of the state, revolves around cattle/beef. We couldn’t bear to tour a slaughter house but did visit one of the many feedlots, this one housing 20-30,000 cattle. (Within 30 miles of Garden City there are over a million cattle in feed lots - more cattle than the population of the western half of the state.) The cattle are trucked in from Texas, Mexico, and Nebraska as well as Kansas. Many arrive as calves and live the next 250 days of their lives on diets formulated for a 2-3 lb/day wt. gain before being trucked over to the slaughter house where 5-6000 are processed daily. Most of the rest are yearlings who are “fed up” for about 180 days. The multi-corralled lot was a clean (relative, of course, to the “natural” smells and mounds of manure) efficient, meat making factory - the meat developing on the hoof until ready for market. The lot we toured - with a nice gentleman, Jim Price, who has been involved in some aspect of the cattle business all his life (as have many in my own family) - housed only steers. A separate lot houses smaller numbers of heifers who receive hormone suppression along with their feed so that no calories are expended in estrus and related “agitation.” I can not fault the men and women who work hard and as conscientiously as they can in the beef business but I do question the value judgement inherent in our huge outlay of resources for an end-of-the-chain food source
( the crops raised to fatten cattle could feed millions of people instead of the relatively few who consume beef products) and I must also ask whether it is justifiable to “use” creatures in this way. The calves in these corrals are born, trucked to feed lots, fattened and processed - they are simply living beef “machines.”
Continuing north we took another side trip to a small art gallery/fossil museum and chatted with the owners, amateur archeologists as well as artists - an interesting couple who directed us on an off-road loop to see Monument Rocks - calcerous limestone towers (chalk-like formations made up predominantly of shells of microscopic animals that lived in an ancient sea that covered most of central North America over 80 million years ago - and you can really sense that here). We were equally amazed by their odd presence in this grassland and by a small herd of ponies and llamas we passed at a watering hole along the way! Later that day 2/13 we arrived at Rowe Sanctuary - cold, beautiful landscape.