Rumen-ations: Complex digestion for interesting times

2008-12-21T18:58:00.000-08:00

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

-John Newton, December 1772

I always thought that “Amazing Grace” was a Negro spiritual. The simple beauty of the hymn, I imagined, was an expression of the appeal of faith to a displaced people. My mental image was of the healing power of song and belief in the long held promise of the deliverance from suffering. Aretha Franklin, Paul Robeson, and Mahalia Jackson have all recorded versions of this song. Their versions are just part of the over 1700 versions of the song listed on www.allmusic.com.

Today, reading “Bury the Chains” by Adam Hochschild, my “Amazing Grace” assumption was left in pieces.

John Newton, the author of this hymn was a slave trader. He sailed the triangle in the 1700’s from London, to West Africa, to the East Indies. He carried slaves, sugar, and tobacco. There is no evidence of him being an exceptionally cruel slave trader, although, like other traders of his time, he presided over massive cruelty and human suffering. Slave ships were packed with slaves in disease ridden and dirty conditions. Many slaves died on route to the East Indies. Conditions were so bad that captains were constantly fighting two things: slave revolts, and slaves trying to end their lives to escape bondage. They addressed both through extreme force and intimidation.

The point of this post is not to horrify with details of the slave trade, but to talk about the great power of the human mind to ignore suffering. John Newton, was, by all accounts at the time, a kind and religious man. He was good to his wife, didn’t drink or take prostitutes and eventually retired from the slave trade to pursue a career as a minister in the Anglican Church. He was a devoted and fervent believer who made his name by writing hymns, such as “Amazing Grace.” It’s hard to understand, from a modern perspective, how his roles as slave trader and hymn writer are reconcilable.

There were some very isolated instances of opposition to the slave trade around this time, like the Quakers, but the majority of society did not consider it to be wrong. In fact, it was part of the culture. The example of John Newton is most striking because it speaks of an entire culture that is morally depraved yet entirely insulated from introspection.

I wonder what we co-exist with today that exudes this same type of deep, societal, hypocrisy. Part of me thinks that it is the way we confine and treat animals. I often find it too difficult to think about the conditions that our beef, milk, eggs, cheese, chicken, pork and other animal products are raised in. I know about animal confinement, but I actively ignore it at times, especially at this time of year. What would it be like, if at the dinner table at your in-law’s house, you were to say something about the way that the Christmas ham is treated? I am not capable, at most times, of broaching this subject around friends and family that serve me food. In some ways, it’s a betrayal of our social contract, but should it be?

2007-03-01T19:25:00.000-08:00

Gypsy Zoo Keepers (Part 1!)

To truly catch up on the traveling ruminations, we have to start in Lander, Wyoming, in the beginning of October. Central Wyoming was in one of its worst droughts in history and at the time we showed up had less than 5 inches of rain for the year. Julia and I were walking the goats up onto the tops of steep sandstone bluffs to get to the few grass plants that the cows didn‘t eat.

We had accumulated a ridiculous amount of domestic dependents for our mobile lifestyle. We were awash in Border Collie puppies. Bailey had given birth 6 weeks ago and we had 3 of her little puppies living in a little plywood fold-out portable box under the overhang of our 5th wheel trailer. We didn’t want to give them serious names(we only kept one) and thanks to a flash of irreverence they bore the names Bicycle, Chlorox, and Verizon.

Our newest additions were two little munchkins (both 3 weeks old) that are Bailey’s full brother and sister. We decided, based on how great of a dog Bailey is, that we wanted a few more pups from her full genetic pool. We drove to Arlington, Wyoming and picked out two speckled pups, one male and one female(Sly and Nell), from a breeder who uses Bailey’s parents to manage a herd of 800 steers that graze under a wind farm. Bailey’s full father, we found out, is an exceptional dog. He can walk a single cow with a calf out of a field and into a barn a half of a mile away.

3 week old puppies are almost completely helpless. They can barely move and basically just cry and drink milk. At about 5-6 weeks they start to get a little bit of personality, but before then their entire purpose is to fill their bellies with milk. When we traveled with the puppies we put them in the small bathtub in our trailer, along with our kitten(YES we had a kitten too), and covered it up with a piece of plywood to keep flying objects and a milk goat from crushing them. After a few hours on the road we would stop and heat up some milk to feed them.

For anyone still successfully following this blog I want to quickly summarize our life in October of 06 with a roster of animals:
1. 2 adult border collies
2. 6 border collie puppies ranging from 2 to 12 weeks
3. One kitty of unknown age picked up from a barnyard in Judith Gap, Montana
4. One unusually mischievous milk goat
5. Two slightly insane people (Julia and I)
Housing: One 25 foot 5th wheel trailer
To be honest it really didn’t seem ridiculous to me at the time, and I’m not entirely sure why. Stay tuned for part two to find out how and why we moved back to California with our gypsy zoo.

2007-02-17T10:51:00.000-08:00

Exploding vestigial organs!!!

The cecum is the beginning of the large intestine. The size of a mammal's cecum has to do with the amount of cellulose, or difficult to digest plant matter, an animal eats. The koala bear, whose diet is exclusively eucalyptus leaves, has a cecum equal in size to the rest of its intestine.

The human cecum is relatively small. The green plant matter that we do eat tends to be low in cellulose. Most scientists who study human anatomy think that the appendix, a 2-6 inch protrusion from the end of the cecum, is a leftover from a time when our cecum was much bigger and our diet was much higher in cellulose. That is why most people (with the exception of those who don't believe in evolution) call the appendix a vestigial organ. Comically, there are several web sites by people who, in an effort to disprove evolution, come up with functions for the appendix has in the human body.

That little vestige of times past caused me some trouble this week. When the appendix starts to get infected it feels like a stomachache. After a day or so it feels like you have a little fiery cauldron in the lower part of your abdomen. Every time you move or go over a bump in the car, the cauldron spills over and its hot contents scald your abdominal area. Over the next period of time, the exceedingly stubborn (read: ME) try to dismiss this continually heating cauldron as advanced indigestion. Pretty soon, however, the cauldron itself starts cracking.

It was about this time, at Julia and Nina's urging, that I walked into the emergency room. A few hours later I was blissfully sedated with an IV of saline and antibiotics while a surgeon was removing the burst appendix from my body. My first Valentines Day present was a syringe of morphine into my IV in the post-operative recovery room.

As I sit here on Friday, one day after being released from the hospital, I feel extremely grateful to be alive. One or two generations ago the same condition could be fatal. Modern medicine has its problems, but its hard not to be in awe of its ability to pluck people from the depths of illness. Antibiotics, for example, are so ubiquitous these days that we are developing some highly resistant bacteria. Without them, however, my recovery process from a gut full of intestinal juice would not have nearly as smooth.

Even the IV itself, which hydrated and relaxed me when my body was starting to shut down, was not in use as a common practice 100 years ago. Surgeons would commonly lose patients to shock while performing surgery.

So I have to be largely off of my feet for the next few weeks, and I figured it was as good a time as any to get rumen-ating again.

Jon

2006-08-18T19:54:00.000-07:00

We have new family members!

2006-07-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

2006-07-10T11:56:00.000-07:00

Grazing, grassland and history

When Louis and Clark traveled up the Missouri River, they described stopping for hours to wait for a large herd of buffalo to cross the river. It is hard for me to imagine a herd of this magnitude. When Julia and I move our 600 goats around, we get many incredulous looks. Most people have never seen such a large herd of goats, and possibly not a herd of any ruminant (cow, sheep, bison ect.) so big and concentrated. These two observations give me perspective on the effect of humans on the land between the Mississippi and the Rockies in the last 200 years. Perhaps no difference is more fundamental than the way that we relate to our grasslands and the animals that graze them.

Large herds have a rejuvenating effect on grasslands. With electric fences and dogs, we simulate the effect of a large herd. Hooves of the animals push grass seeds into the soil and trample old brittle grass. They graze off the top part of the grass, turning the mature leaves into fertilizer for the root systems. In arid, brittle environments, these manure pies serve as biological refuges for microorganisms that cannot survive in the dry soil. Grasses depend on the disturbance of grazing animals to stimulate new growth, and to protect and feed them.

Grazing animals, however, are not conscious of the important role they play in these ecosystems. They do this by simply protecting themselves, and sating their voracious appetites. Without predators to keep the herds together and moving, our grasslands would not be the same

When Lewis and Clark traveled along the Missouri they found mostly healthy grasslands. They found, besides millions of bison; wolves, coyotes, and Native Americans that all depended upon the health of the grass and the ruminant animals. White settlement changed these patterns drastically. First, hunters killed buffalo for their tongues and winter hides, leaving the whole carcass to rot. Then, urged by a new technology in leather tanning that gave value to hairless summer hides, the killing was wholesale, virtually eliminating the bison in a period of less than 15 years, ending in 1883. In the next 20 to 30 years cattle ranchers moved up from Texas. In the areas with especially rich, deep topsoil, the plows sunk into the ground to grow wheat. Small pox and genocide eliminated most of the native tribes, and the wolves were successfully hunted out of existence (the state of Montana had a $15 dollar a head bounty on wolves in 1915). In 100 years these plains changed from a grassland ecosystem with millions of bison, Indians, and predatory animals, to small groups of Eurasian cattle, barbed wire and cowboys.

With our small herd we can imitate the effect of millions of bison that came before them: our herding dogs are our wolves. Bailey and Kodi know how to keep the herd bunched together. They provide the steering for our mass of goat hooves and mouths.

Lewis and Clark would be shocked if they tried to travel up the Missouri today. They would both be pleased with the modern improvements that we have made, like the ease of attaining food, clean water, and the effortlessness of transport. But Lewis, the trained naturalist who surveyed the grasslands and recorded and named many of the species found in the northern plains, would be sad to see our losses in diversity. He would probably lament the acres of land degraded by erosion, overgrazing and invasive weeds. The land, if one knows where to look, tells the story of our success and failure. Fortunately, history is not static, and we do not have to live with the results of our failures. We can, with good grazing management and knowledge of the mechanisms of our grassland, bring back some of the ecological vibrance of the past.

2006-05-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

2006-05-19T14:28:00.000-07:00

Julia looks away while Bailey chases goats
More Bailey chasing goats
Sunset in Bridger 5/18

2006-05-19T14:17:00.000-07:00

Goats grazing in Bridger, MT
Snacking on Russian Olive
Leafy Spurge plants secreting latex sap after goat's first bite

2006-05-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

Immigrants and Weeds

Tonight, George Bush is going to address the nation on immigration. I’m going out to set some electric fence, move 600 goats, and reduce the population of leafy spurge on a property along the West Yellowstone River in Bridger, Montana. To a strict literal interpretation, our two tasks could not be any more different. However, some striking similarities exist between our two pursuits. Julia is my Rove, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld (I accept the implications of total reliance on her talents). The goats are my national guard; electric fences my borders; and the dogs are the communications network that hold it all together. Both W and I are approaching problems with a foreign population on US soil. How we view the problem, and the approaches that we take to solving it will greatly affect the success that we will have in our quests. Ultimately, the success or failure of our goals will depend on our ability to address the root causes.

Leafy spurge, euphorbia esula, infests some 2.5 million acres of grassland in a 1200-mile radius centering in Montana. Spurge is native to Eurasia, but it has spread across the world. It competes intensely for resources, has 15 feet or longer taproots and reproduces at the subsoil level by rhizomes. Spurge contains latex in its milky sap that causes stomach ulcers, blisters and even death if consumed in sufficient quantities. The damage bill renders some ranges and wildlife preserves uninhabitable.

Tordon wipes out all broadleaf plants, and is the chief method of combating spurge. It gives an instant victory for the sprayer; the spurge will recede until the next year. However, Tordon makes the weakened biological system even more vulnerable to reinfestation.

Spraying spurge is the chemical equivilant to deportation. Deportation is expensive, ethically questionable, and does not address the root cause of the massive immigration into the US. Immigration presents a problem because illegal immigrants do not pay taxes but use the same resources as tax paying Americans. The unambiguous reason, or root cause, why there are so many immigrants crossing the borders is because of the immense economic disparities in the world economy. Immigrants cross the borders to obtain access to resources that they cannot as easily, or at all, in Mexico, Haiti or any other country where US Green cards are more valuable than winning lottery tickets. The free market dictates that people flowing into the US will equalize the world wage rate. This, however, would be a nightmare for the average wage of the US citizen and is simply not an option for a US politician representing his or her constituency. So we will continue to talk about guest workers and border security while the pressure grows and grows. Like a hurricane gaining strength to transfer the enormous accumulated heat north, the immigration pressure will continue to move people to the colder, richer US. Bush simply has his finger in the dyke.

Fortunately for me, the root causes of spurge infestation are easier to address, although they may be a little harder to understand. Unlike Bush, I have immediately available the tools that will allow me to release the pressure that spurge puts on its ecosystem. Spurge infests rangeland and riverbanks that have been tossed out of balance by years of over and under grazing, making them extremely vulnerable to infestation. Because leafy spurge seeds create no threat to a healthy grassland, our challenge is to create stable, productive grasslands where spurge cannot thrive.

The goats assist in creating this environment because of what they eat and how they're managed. They selectively eat the flowery tops off of it like a pig rooting truffles from the forest. In an area overgrazed by cattle, leafy spurge remains with tiny grass plants struggling around it. Through grazing, we direct more of the solar energy to the grasses and turn a noxious weed into valuable fertilizer.

The US track record in protection of our ecosystems indicates mismanagement. We have degraded soils and reduced their capacity to support life as we have settled the country. Leafy spurge, spotted knapweed, star thistle, and others make evident the detrimental effect of our decision making. Our ecosystems are now vulnerable to weeds that don't support biodiversity. From another perspective, however, these plants are essential.

Most noxious weeds build up the organic matter in our soils and keep them from washing into the oceans, a habit that we have pursued with incredible ability (topsoil is far and away our nations biggest yearly export). They colonize otherwise bare soil where no native plant could survive. In some ways, immigration is no different. Immigrants keep our agricultural, manufacturing, and construction sectors alive. Weeds bring up nutrients not normally available to the ecosystem. Diversity, both human and ecological, is a net benefit when the systems involved are vigourous. We should stop viewing both weeds and immigrants as a problem and look at them as an opportunity for soluations to local and global instability. We can do this by eliminating the vacuums that are created because of lack of resources. Nature does not like vacuums, people and plants will move to fill them as long as natural laws rule our existence. I hope that we can take steps to alleviate global poverty and build soil to create healthy communities.

2006-05-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

Julia and I made the front page! (well, sort of)

This article was on the front page and back page of the Sunday Billings Gazette. The only mention of Julia and I is as the two young herders in the second paragraph, but the pictures were taken on the job where Julia and I are working in Bridger, MT. In the picture of Lani, in the upper right, Bailey and Cody (our border collies) turned the goats so that the photographer could have the scene set for a few more snaps.

I think its a well written story and does a good job of expanding upon the role of the goats.

Enjoy:

http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/05/07/news/state/25-goat.txt

2006-05-04T19:46:00.000-07:00

Julia and Goats in late afternoon
"Do you think that we are supposed to chase this thing?"
Sexy Sadie

2006-05-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

Julia and I have an unusual life.

We reside in a 24-foot trailer. Our home cannot have a foundation because our job requires us to be mobile, to live on the land where we are working. We are often away from the power grid, and so we rely on an 80-watt solar panel for all of our power. This might not seem like a lot of power, and, in our age of energy abundance and inefficiency, its not (a typical incandescent light bulb is all that this can run). We manage, however, to get by pretty effectively. We can run our technological gadgets (laptops, cell phones, ipods) and still have enough power left over for some non-essential items like the fan on our propane heater and the water pump.

The primary responsibility that Julia and I have is to the land where we are working. We work towards the goals of the landowner, or manager, who hires us. The tool that we employ to handle this responsibility is a herd of 600 goats. My language of description is key here. The easy way to describe our job is to call us goat herders. I think that this is somewhat misleading because it implies that our emphasis is on the goats entirely. We are trying to move away from the dominant paradigm in land management which considers animals as separate from the land, or as an influence that only fouls or spoils it. Our goats work with succession, manage plant species, adjust soil profiles, and change the way in which the ecosystems function. That is the basic story of our job. I hope to use other blogs to talk more about the specifics of how the goats work with the land.

The one goat that I want to talk about, however, is a goat that violates some of the rules of our job. This goat not only has a unique personality, but she is one of the few goats with a name: Sadie. She often acts in quirky ways that are, for lack of better description, “very un-goat like”. We use dogs to control our goats. Kodi , Bailey, and a rotating cast of dogs from our boss Lani, help us control where the goats are at any given time. The goats respect the dogs, moving in unison when the dogs get into their flight zones. Sadie does not. I think the dogs respect Sadie. She doesn’t put up with their intimidations and frequently fights back, chasing them away when they get too close. She sleeps outside of our trailer. If we are not careful to close the screen door, she lets herself in to snack on whole oranges and bananas and pull calendars off the wall to see how they taste. We even have to tie her up while we feed the dogs because her relentlessly diverse appetite has given her a taste for dog food. No dog can get to his or her bowl with an un-tethered Sadie nearby. Why do Julia and I put up with such an unruly goat? She feeds us. Sadie is part milk goat, part family member, and all of the reason why I find the wires on our solar panel pulled out on a morning when I have gotten up later than Sadie thinks she should be milked.

One of the things that make goats (including Sadie), and other four-legged, cloven-hooved animals special in their relationship to our ecosystems is their eating habits and the way that they process what they eat. Sadie puts the local vegetation and citrus peels through a four-stomached digestion factory and turns in into delicious milk. The first and most distinctive aspect of this factory is the rumen, the chamber where fermentation of masticated plant material takes place. When a goat, sheep, or cow is chewing their cud they are actually chewing regurgitations from their rumen. In a goats world, this regurgitation might be enjoying the taste of a particularly good piece of sagebrush a few hours after grazing. The human analogue to this behavior is reflection, or rumination, the process of recalling the events of our lives after they happen to us. In fact, the thesaurus, under ruminate, has "chew over" listed. So, when I was thinking about, or chewing over, the web address for this blog about goats, ecology, and life I thought I found an appropriate one: www.rumen-ations.blogspot.com.

I wish you all well.

Jon and Julia