It has been very frosty outside the past week, the ground is a solid, hard block that crunches when you walk over it. A friend of mine visited on Saturday to talk about a trip to India and in particular the Mumbai area and when she arrived she said she had heard a lot of lambs. I told her just before Christmas in the run-up to Easter sheep are brought into most of the surrounding fields to lamb. like all the animals here they are beautiful to look at but only looked after in as much as they are useful. Many sheep here have arthritic front legs and eat grass kneeling and all the lambs, so lovely to see, are there to die long before they reach adulthood.
It is a sight I have never been easy with, to know that the cattle I see are not the same as eighteen months ago, that their eyes which look at the world will be eaten just after their heads are cut off hanging upside down in a long line to be industrially processed. I have always thought of this as a human sickness, eating away at any pretense we have of goodness or ethics.
We do not consider life to be worth anything if it is not ours.