Tag: texas

Steps to Reduce Animal Suffering, Part 1: Dismantle the Patriarchy.

Laura Wild2 Comments

Seven cats and two dogs were beyond my help in the states of Texas and Louisiana. Using plastic bags and scraps of paper, sometimes cardboard boxes scavenged from nearby trashcans, I did my best to at least move them out of the road. I don’t really know why I felt so compelled to do so. Maybe because it forced me to acknowledge them, instead of just continuing on down the road like the very cars who had taken their lives. The act of carrying their bodies, many of them still warm, slowly but surely caused me to become used to the experience. I was their pallbearer by default; absent from their lives, yet somehow profoundly impacted by their deaths. Maybe I should have left them where they died, so that others would see them and slow down or drive more carefully. Unfortunately, the ammount of roadkill I saw on a daily basis in the rural South convinced me that most drivers were too entitled to care.

Entitelment is the word that comes to mind because of the numerous degrading experiences I have had as a female cyclist. I have been driven off of the road by several men in trucks, had thick plumes of exhaust deliberately blown in my face by countless men in trucks, and have received immeasurable unwanted attention from men both in and out of their trucks. It isn’t annoying, it is far past that- it is terrifying. If I have to watch one more man in a truck run over the body of a dead cat in the road I am going to explode. It is apparent that many drivers have no problem gambling with the life of a cyclist simply because we have the audacity to share the road with them, so it is not surprising that they seem to have complete disregard for the lives of animals on the road, too. I imagine it is incredibly painful to get hit by a car; and believe me, I have had plenty of time to imagine it. Sadly, I know these drivers are not stopping to check that the animals they hit are not suffering, because they can’t even be bothered to step on their brakes for the few seconds it takes to safely pass a cyclist.

This breaks my heart. I feel so overwhemed by the amount of animal suffering that I have witnessed in the past few months that I am completley exhausted. A recent conversation I had with a man in Alabama as I removed one of the aforementioned cats from the road sums up the type of blatant ignorance that I am referring to when I say “Southern Entitlement.” He wanted to know why I didn’t stop to move all road kill (squirrels, raccoons, armadillos, etc) from the road. I told him there were simply too many. He responded with the same level of stupidity that I encounter when people accuse me of being cruel to vegetables after finding out I am a vegetarian, and said, “Then you aren’t a real animal lover, are you?”

Oh yes, I am a real animal lover, and I am sick of that part of my charachter being used to discredit my rationality. It is not irrational to be kind, and yet I find myself constantly having to justify myself as an activist to much older people who think that being “middle of the road” is the only way to be a realist. What part of being a feminist, animal-loving liberal activist makes me weak? Could it be that all of these qualities challenge the patriarchy?

When it comes to understanding why a certain demographic seems to be at the root of these problems, I find myself constantly trying to avoid stepping on toes. So here’s my obligatory disclaimer; not all men are careless towards animals and creepy to young women, of course I know this! It has been my beleif for a long time that the patriarchy is nearly as detrimental and limiting to men as it is to women. In fact, it is the gentle, kind, and respectful men in my life that cause me to be so concerned with the toxic (and fragile) form of masculinity that is rampant in the South, particularly among far right-wing conservatives. How many of the trucks that drove me off the road were sporting Trump/Pence stickers? 3 out of 4. That seems incredibly relavent to me, so much so that I don’t think I need to moderate my opinions on the subject of male agression and the negative affect it has on the welfare of animals.

The latest stray puppy that I had the pleasure of rescuing from the middle of nowhere was a tiny brown pitbull named Hazel (see below). She, like many of the rescue dogs I have met in my personal life and on the Southern Tier, was terrified of men. How she developed this fear is only to be guessed at; maybe she was being molded into a fearsome watchdog, or physically abused in any number of ways. Her condition was made worse by the other men in my company when I discovered her, whose suggestions for her welfare involved throwing cookies at her, yelling at her, and slamming the van doors to scare her away. She was growling and appeared to be agressive, especially when the sherrif showed up and tried similar tactics to wrangle her. It wasn’t until they all left, and the women on my cycling team were left alone with her, that she emerged from her hiding place, wagged her tail, and let us rub her belly.

The agressive display of dominance that some men feel obligated to express could have cost this sweet pup her life. The sherriff told me that if he took her to the shelter and she growled, she would be euthanized. Another rescue I called said all pounds in the area were under orders to put down every pitbull they receive. It is evident to me that improper treatment is what causes this particular breed to become agressive in the first place. That was obvious yesterday as I watched Hazel cower in fear under the shelter of our company van.

Only by a stroke of luck did I come into contact with an organization called Lucky Puppy Rescue, and that is exactly what Hazel was when I brought her there. Run by two women who care for about fifty dogs out of the kindness of their hearts, I was incredibly releived when they were able to take this puppy in. I could see right away that the dogs in their care were given the treatment they deserved; they roamed freely together in harmony, were well behaved and trained, and hardly barked when I arrived with their new playmate. Almost all of them were rescued strays, and almost half of them were pitbulls. That sounds like a miracle to me.

Below is a picture of the owners of this rescue, Teri and Becky, with a few of their dogs. They are running their rescue solely on donations, so if you are able please help them out, I can’t think of a worthier cause. I have also included a link to their webpage.

I leave this entry on somewhat of a sour note, as I try to remain optimistic about the conditions I have seen in the deep South. I can indeed confirm that chivalry is not dead, but neither is racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. However, a lot of innocent animals are. While this reality is true in every part of the country, this area seems to have an uneven distribution of ignorant and entitled people.

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Visit theluckypuppy.org to donate.

 

I think this counts as an awakening.

Laura WildLeave a comment

Our 21st night in Texas, that’s what I want to write about. The state was huge, needless to say, and I had been anticipating it since the day I decided to do the Southern Tier. Sometimes the prospect of riding across the whole thing seemed more daunting than the rest of the country. The first half of it was in the desert, until we reached a peak in elevation just before Austin, and then leveled out into what would eventually become the lowlands of Louisiana. Most of it was the same story I have told over and over again… about the familiar toll of my 6 o’clock alarm, the gentle mornings, the harsh afternoons, and the yellow evenings that ended in a display of fiery brilliance that never failed to cast my shadow on the ground before me. I changed a lot of tires, screamed at a lot of large insects, applied a lot of aloe vera lotion to my burnt skin and ate a lot of Mexican food.

Riding my bike was starting to feel really familiar, and even comfortable, despite the fact that I was almost always fatigued. I couldn’t describe those iconic days accurately in a million words, but I’m going to try to express what it felt like when the hot Texas sun went down, and was replaced by stars that shined brighter than anywhere else. They had no city lights to compete with.

On the 21st night, the last night, we tried to wrap our minds around the scope of the state that we had overcome, but it was impossible. Our heads weren’t in Texas anymore; we had given up on our daily plight to be present a long time ago. We’d been day-dreaming for the better part of a month, wishing ourselves away from that place even in the easy spots, even in the cool mornings and mild, shady afternoons of the hill country.

We couldn’t help ourselves; it’s what we had to do to not be driven insane by the constant vibration of our thin tires against the chip-seal pavement. It’s what we had to do to keep from being hypnotized by the eternal buzzing of an earth that was never silent, or lulled to sleep by a night sky bigger than our eyes even allowed us to adequately ponder. The same sky that turned to darkness two hours earlier than we were prepared for. I suppose I was physically still in Texas in mid-October, but in many ways I felt like I had really been home all along. All I had to do was close my eyes, and there I was. And there we all were.

I guess I was always looking upwards then, if not for the unconscious boost of optimism brought on by literally holding my chin up, it was because I just couldn’t look away. I guess that’s what you do on a quest for enlightenment. You tilt your head back, and you breathe a deep breath, and you stop trying to hold on to the moment you’re in and you let yourself get lost in your own fantasies.

Because it was fall, I was usually thinking about my auburn-haired mother. This was our favorite season, and I could picture her in the red and orange canyons of the Black Hills where the leaves were the most brilliant, the same leaves that would be long dead before I returned to them. She’d be taking their pictures while they posed, taking advantage of the soft Autumn weather that we were both so addicted to. I wanted to be there, I wanted to be in that moment almost more than the one I was in. I had the whole world to look at, every last star in the entire galaxy was twinkling above me and I would have traded it all for one breath of those tart fermented leaves.

What’s funny is how I tried to escape it all. As if I wouldn’t dream of it day in and day out; as if I wouldn’t miss the same people that I blamed for stunting my wanderlust. But they still had ahold of me; the whole city still had me in its grasp. I knew that someday I would think of that moment in the first year of my adult life, on my first great adventure, when I had conquered the magnificent state of Texas and yet somehow still felt conquered by the less-magnificent state of South Dakota. Maybe when I looked back on it I would think I was wise for my age, or maybe I would think I was clueless. At this point I’m leaning toward the latter, though it was easy to find any philosophy profound when it was envisioned in the wee hours of the night.

What matters is that I was wide awake when the sun came out again in the morning, and I saw a dawn that burnt away every lesser source of light in the sky and every last drop of dew on the ground. It was easier to concentrate during the day; the light brought an added sense of clarity, and the feeling of desperation I had to make sense of the universe disappeared with the rising sun. The few bouts of understanding that I experienced on my trip were intense, but short lived. They came to me swiftly in a moment of contemplative awareness and faded away as soon as I was able to find my blissful ignorance. The answer to the unknown was actually quite simple for me; though it was beyond breathtaking, I didn’t belong in Texas. The word ‘enlightenment’ was starting to seem less and less significant to me, and I was beginning to get a whole new appreciation for the word ‘home.’ I was starting to like the idea of it more, too.