RURAL VICTORIA
The car headlights jumped up over a small incline. We ducked down in our chunky
jackets in the dark scrub. There had been the choice of leaving the car down the
street, or parking well out of the area and then hiking across swampy paddocks,
with bulls at one end and barbed wire fences at the other. We hid for sometime
thinking that the house lights were car lights. All the dogs had gone. Only one old
beagle bitch remained since the confiscation. She was chained up to a steel pole at
the far end of the property. It was redneck backwater territory, a few kangaroos
loose in the top paddock of the mind country. There was a man on the other side of
a road shooting at a possum up in his front yard tree, the crazy dog running circles
beneath the branches, half mad with fear and the kill. The owner reached for the
old rifle on drunken Saturday nights alone. One day it would be the dog's turn to go.
The old codger who owned this dog farm was senile. He had a shot gun and could
have fired on any one of us in the dark. If I was him and eight people in black were
in my yard, then I'd grab for the gun as well. The place was just about closed down.
He got up and the lights came on, all the activists running and tripping over the
debri. Someone twisted an ankle and yelped to stifle the pain, but the old bloke was
only cough and phlegm on his way from the bedroom to the bathroom. Weeks
before when the place was being inspected, we drove right up to his loungeroom
window, and there he was his bare hairy chest looking straight out at us. He was
the man who kept dogs in pits, who blinded puppies under upturned ten gallon
drums, then after showing a council inspector, suddenly he dropped the drum back
down, so that one of the puppies who had poked his head out was slowly
decapitated. He was a moron, a cruel old bastard, a stinking specimen of a human
being. We met them all the time, we see the bad work they are doing.
Mist, pine forests, darkness, valleys in flood by fog, looked like lakes but they were
paddocks, cold, barren, unnamable, five hundred tiny fluffy terriers and soft warm
brown cockaspaniels, just love to run my hands along the side of them, the dogs
were caked in mud, straw and their own shit, grey and white runny shit all up our
clothing, sticking to our legs, prolapsed uterus's from over breeding, that is when
the uterus just caves in and falls out of the anus, the tired old breeding mother
trying to shit out her own organs, because her life has become shit, hundreds of
neglected barking dogs in the mist, two dog farm managers inside the house, in the
city if one dog barks, the entire street is opening its windows in annoyance or
concern, yet these people hear the boredom, the distress, the loneliness, the
physical pain, the freezing winter, the lack of shelter, in the barking of hundreds
upon hundreds of disease ridden dogs, still they manage to sleep through it, they
live through it, they live surrounded by it day in day out, they shovel shit, hit dogs
on the head with shovels and make their slow profit, their psyches must be shot,
somewhere they must hold the troubled guilt inside, to mistreat and farm a dog,
pet shop owners love the puppies produced from these farms, they hate animals
and love money, they know, like the dog farmer knows, the average public want
small and fluffy puppies, but just look at the origin of them, the grey shit steams
and melts in my palm, the straw is wet, it is raining, mist below zero, they sleep on
cracked wet wooden boards, concrete or mud, food bowls are full of straw, sloppy
dog food and shit, dogs are racing to the backs of the pens, some cringe, others
still wagging their tails, the one beneath the old box with the chain buried deep into
his neck will attack, his insanity buried in there with him, he is beyond hope, this
place churns out products, shit and uterus's, it is a puppy factory, the dogs in the
pet shops come from it, meanwhile thirty thousand dogs a year are killed at the lost
dogs home, we have surplus dogs, we destroy life, but still be churn out more, in
chasing the eternal profit, with each troubled bark our psyches are shot, tonight we
had to leave five hundred dogs behind, eating shit and rain.
I see the country in a different way. Rural is a machinery for breaking down life into
human consumption. Yellow paddocks cleared and holding early morning mist are
Victorian. Trees have been broken down. A magpie sitting along the fence post is
preening himself. It is called a common bird but he is persistence. He has managed
to avoid the crop harvester that sweeps up everything of the land into itself. The
magpie is a rare survivor amongst the prickly yellow gorse, that moves across the
fields as impenetrable as rocks. This rampaging gorse growing so much, as though
it tried to dig its way back to the United Kingdom. The country is industry waste,
farm chemical, and prickly gorse. All those sheds and suffering animals locked
inside them. There is a huge human made reservoir that has flooded the valley,
clearing paddocks by drowning them. This toxic water is grey beneath a grey sky.
One of the things that ran into this reservoir is cat shit and piss from a cat
breeder. There had been complaints about her locking the cats in a tiny tin shed.
We see the shed in the distance, and the way that it shines silver even on the dull
days. We can hear all the cats meowing inside. A racket went on as the tin door
scraped along cement. We don't stay around too long, as we don't want to push our
luck. Many cats are trapped in cages. They will never see sunlight or breathe the
open air at night. The shed is full of junk. A lot of the junk obscures our view. The
cats are literally crazy. The stench of cat urine fills the air like paint stripper. My
throat is burning as we cross the paddocks in the dark. Cats yowl really loud in the
night with their flattened back ears, and their huge unforgiving eyes as big as
planets. We can hear them meowing in the sheds surrounded by prickly gorse,
calling out to something that never comes close. There is something about all that
empty land and all those sheds full of animals. Where I live anymore doesn't matter. |
