Showsight - April 2017

electronics in one form or another. Little is actually real. Urban chil- dren today do not know where their food comes from, or how things are made. Even using a simple phrase like “where food comes from,” disguises the immense complexity of the agri- culture industry that relies on low-paid laborers, many of them immigrant, who are required to pick food in fields and orchards that cannot be harvested with machines. The outdated image of Old MacDonald on the farmwith pigs, chick- ens and cows is a model from the 19th century that could not possibly feed the world’s current population. As real and necessary as corporate farms are, they are nearly hidden behind the shroud of private enterprise that provides urban grocery stores with cheap, packaged food. Even produce is cleaned, pro- cessed and wrapped in sanitary plastic. Everything is cleaned and sanitized to the extreme. I am still perplexed by the Wisconsin law that says consumers can- not buy raw milk directly from a dairy farmer (I call them neighbors). We’re the Dairy State! How is it possible we are forbidden from buying raw milk for our own consumption—even if we are willing to assume all risk? Even our sports are becoming digi- tized with Fantasy teams and on-line games. As soon as a child believes she is not good at actually playing a sport she’s given the opportunity to “play” it with her thumbs only. I see it with my grand- sons. When they were 3 and 5 years old they loved playing with my puppies, and would entertain themselves for hours pulling puppies in wagons and bathing them in kiddie pools. They also played beginning sports like soccer and T-ball. At 10 and 12 I can barely pry their tablets out of their hands long enough to eat lunch. Sometimes they will read books, but playing with puppies or in organized sports has lost its appeal. They will still help me clean kennels, but only because I make them do it so they will learn how to do some real work instead of staring at a screen all afternoon. Or I bribe them with a mov- ie. They used to help their grandfather work in his garden, but those days are over, too. At least they are interested in the performing arts, so not every wak- ing minute is spent in front of a screen. Animal Rights people think Disney movies tell them all they need to know

about animals. Sometimes I honestly think they believe that spiders, dogs and pigs can actually talk. And most of them are so isolated from actual animal care and reproduction that many look at you with completely blank stares when you ask them where the next generation of dogs will come from if everything is spayed and neutered. Even more fright- ening is the number of vet students who will give you the same blank stare in answer to that question. We used to dis- courage people from breeding their pet once so their children could witness the wonders of birth. No worries. Nobody wants to witness that disgusting mess now. They want somebody to hand them a healthy, cute, clean, groomed, partially trained puppy that will never get sick, and they will only have to add love for everything to be perfect. Pure Disney. Personally, I will miss the Greatest Show on Earth. I really admired train- ers who could work with wild animals like the circus people did. Dumbo did a lot of damage to the reputation of those trainers. We learned from Disney that all animals kept in captivity were abused, and all trainers and dog sellers are evil incarnate like Cruella Deville. There was no in between—you were a good puppy and baby elephant, or a horrible puppy seller or mother elephant abuser. Our fantasies never matched anything like reality—and that has only gotten worse as urban and suburban people become even more removed from agriculture and animal husbandry. No matter how good we got as puppy breeders, we were no match for the Dis- ney stories that taught people we were all puppy abusers because we sold pup- pies for (gasp) money. We became the “other” to an entire generation of people who learned who we were from movies. We did not see coming the replacement of reality with fantasy because we were so busy in our real world of caring for our animals. In our growing fantasy and fake news worlds we have cultivated a fear of the “other.” This has become an even more serious problem than the isolation of agriculture and animal husbandry from modern urban life. We not only suffer from a lack of exposure, but now we are suffering from a demonization of any world we don’t know or understand. Is it any wonder that there are so many people who rail against government

when we have been propagandized for 50 years that government is bad? We see it on TV and we believe it. We cannot even bear to listen to news that contradicts our strongly held beliefs, so we seek out sources that reinforce our prejudices, and that results in even less understanding of the “other.” We have been taught to fear what we don’t know or understand. Nearly half of my career was spent working for politicians, and I have a very strong appreciation for the pressures and demands the mostly uninformed public place upon them. It is an impossible balancing act to keep enough people satisfied, if not happy with your actions, to get re-elected. By design, every politician is going to irri- tate 30–50% of the population all of the time. I don’t know why anyone would choose to run for office—it’s almost as bad as choosing to breed dogs. Every- body wants to tell you how to do it, though they have zero experience doing it themselves, and they insist you get it “right”, but they’ll throw you under the bus the instant something doesn’t go as they thought it should. I don’t have any solutions to our current malaise. I believe it is impor- tant to be exposed to all kinds of real things, and it’s important to recognize that there are experts upon whom we should rely. I believe we need to listen more and shout less. I believe we need to get better at distinguishing truth from lies, reality from fantasy. I believe we need to be respectful of all people, and resist the urge to demonize entire popu- lations we don’t know anything about. Circuses are dying because they could not afford to fight back against the mass of misinformation that flooded their industry. Dog breeding may be next, and horses after that. Then all of animal husbandry. And then immigrants, and then people of different religions and then poor people. There is no end to the potential demonization of which people are capable. Circuses won their lawsuit against the Animal Rights movement—and they lost their industry. Too few of us under- stood what was happening, and too few of us stepped forward to support them in time to save them. It’s a tough lesson. It can happen to anyone, and fear will always lead us in the wrong direction. We need to be “for” more than we are “against”. Our future depends on it.

96 • S how S ight M agazine , A pril 2017

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