I didn’t want to watch the documentary, The Cove. It wasn’t high on my agenda as ideal background noise as I faffed about on the computer after a long day at work.

But inertia won as I was loathe to get up from the coach to find the remote.

So I finally watched The Cove because I was too knackered to change the channel.

I don’t know how to describe how I am feeling today.

I think I am in a little bit of shock still.

The film was very distressing

Even though I knew the dolphin slaughter was coming I was unprepared for the psychic impact of hearing the dolphins distress.

The sound of dolphins screaming isn’t easy to ignore.

I honestly dont know if I have the energy to focus on dolphins as well as all the other horrible things we do as a species.

We have a long list of awfulness to our names.

The Australian Kangaroo cull comes to mind then there is the factory farming of domestic animals.

We can also own up to the practice of shooting Brumbies from helicopters.

Designer pets and puppy farms. Sharks caught soley for their fins and then thrown back into the sea alive.

Poisoning of our wildlife with the horrific 1080 poison.

The list goes on and on.

But for the moment I am trying not to listen to the echoes of dying dolphins in the back of my psyche.

You can watch the cove on ivew if you missed it.

You can donate to Save Japans Dolphins

Or you can google any of the other appalling things that I have mentioned here and then come back and tell me what you think we can do.

I don’t know what I am going to do as I haven’t had a deep think about it yet.

Our planet is at tipping point. The ocean is in crisis.

Where the fuck do we think our grandchildren are going to live if not here on this dying planet?

We need to find some solutions today people. Not tomorrow.

Otherwise we wont have a tomorrow.

Yesterday I was standing in line waiting to buy some crayfish. I was talking to the woman in front of me and we were both watching one of the workers cook a crate of crayfish, that he then snap chilled and brought over to the counter to be bought by hungry locals. The woman and I were casually chatting about crayfish and favourite recipes, when I mentioned that I was buying live crays and that my husband was going to cook them himself. The woman looked me straight in the eye and icily said I hope they bite you!

She then proceeded to buy six good sized cooked crays and walked out the door.

It wasn’t until I arrived home and replayed the conversation in my head that the hypocrisy of the woman’s statement struck me. She was more than happy to buy cooked crayfish but was horrified by the fact that I was buying live crayfish. Her six crayfish had presumably been alive themselves only an hour previously. I wonder if when she ate them, they bit her?

Late yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from my daughter Veronica telling me  that one of her ducks probably had a prolapsed cloaca. The duck was obviously distressed and was bleeding  from her cloaca. In the course of our conversation we talked about the pain the duck must be in as well as the problems of the blood attracting predators overnight as well as the risk of the duck getting fly strike.

Veronica quickly killed the duck, dressed it out and then wrote about it on her blog.

We have become so divorced from the realities of where our food actually comes from in this western society of ours that sometimes I despair for our future. We are spoiled for choice and we shop in large supermarkets with the most disturbing thing being the incessant Christmas muzak. Children think that milk and eggs come from the fridge and we are never ever bothered by the thought that all those rows of plastic wrapped meat and all those bins full of frozen poultry were raised and then killed by someone somewhere.

As I am eating my Christmas dinner this year I will know exactly where the meat I am eating has come from and who has killed it for me because I will be eating roast duck at Veronica’s.

I drove past the local tip the other day and noticed that the flock of roosters foraging in the paddock below it had grown. I had just assumed that some of  the nearby farmer’s chooks had decided that there was better forage at the tip and that last season his girls had hatched out lots of roosters.

I was appalled to discover that people have been dumping the roosters there. I knew that people dumped kittens at the tip but the thought of going to all the trouble of catching a rooster and then just throwing it away shocked me.

There have been a lot of new people move here in the past ten years or so, city people looking for a treechange, mainlanders mostly, attracted to the cheap land and easy commute to the city.

I can wholly appreciate the excitement of finally having a bit of land with space for a few chickens, mmm think of all the lovely fresh eggs. And it seems to be all fine and dandy until the novelty wears off and the bloody chickens scratch your garden to pieces or a hen goes broody and hatches out a clutch of roosters. What do you do then?

Apparently you just throw the fucking roosters away. Aaargh!

It is the waste of all that good meat that does my head in, as well as the casual cruelty.

There are a number of tangents that I could spin off into here, I could pull out my soapbox and have a little rant about ethical treatment of animals and our responsibilities to our livestock.

I could blather on about the environmental damage that wild chickens do to the fragile landscape.

Or I could lead into a discussion about throw away roosters being the least of our problems in this 21st century, when we already have a well established tradition of throwing away the  most vulnerable of all in this society of ours. Our elderly and our disabled, our mentally ill and our useless are all thrown away.

Not to the tip, like the roosters but our broken ones are marginalised and pushed to the very edges of society. Our elderly are packed off to sub standard and under funded nursing homes. Our indigenous are demonised and our leaders shame themselves and us as a nation, by loudly trying to “Stop the Boats”, when that tiny percentage of desperate people is the least of our problems.

Now I have run out of steam and the early morning daylight is filling the sky with interesting colours. I will gather up the camera and see if the play of light through the gum trees chases away these dark thoughts of mine.

This photo of a dead sea bird is the inspiration for my newest work. I took the photo from this website.

There are reports that journalists are not allowed to photograph anything within 65 feet of the oil booms.

My head is a messy place at the moment, I have been researching reports of leaking methane and benzene in the Gulf of Mexico and the news isn’t good.

So today I have been listening to loud music, feeling sorry for myself and playing in the mud.

If you mouse over the photos you can read a description. I don’t have the energy to say much more. I am shattered today. I think the pot will look good when it is finished.

Here is the finished work. This bowl is available at the Off Centre Gallery in Salamanca.

How do you like the new look to my blog? Veronica spent all day working on my new theme yesterday and I am really pleased with it. There are just a few minor tweaks that need to be done, like soften the white background to more of an ivory colour and then frog ponds rock is ready to roll into the year of the tiger. Yay.

It is nearly time to send the pigs off to be killed. This is the first time that we have ever sent animals off the property to be slaughtered and I don’t really like it. So I have been procrastinating about ringing up the slaughterman and the girls just keep on growing.

We could kill the girls here but we dont have anywhere to hang them after they are done. So I have made the hard decision to have a professional slaughterman do the job. I have no idea how we are going to get them into the trailer to transport them there but The Spouse is working on a plan.

I felt a bit foolish asking the slaughterman how he would kill the girls but it was very important for me to know the details, as some people just cut the pigs throats and let them bleed out, in order to collect the blood to make black pudding. He shoots them first and then cuts their throats once they are dead, so I was very relieved. I am still a bit worried that they will be in a pen together when they are killed and I will have to ask if they can be separated. The Spouse thinks I am being silly and says the girls will become more stressed if they are separated.

Ack! It is hard being a carnivore.

Duck season has opened and I am always reminded of the scene in a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Daffy and Bugs are arguing about whether it is duck or rabbit season and Elmer just blasts Daffy anyway.

This long weekend hunters have headed off to shoot ducks and protesters have headed off to protest and disrupt the hunt. A protestor has already been injured.

Police say the rescue helicopter was called about 9:00am (AEST) to retrieve a 35-year-old woman who was part of a campaign to disrupt the hunt at Moulting Lagoon.

The woman, from Battery Point, was thought to have been bitten by a snake but it was later diagnosed as a suspected marine sting to her foot.

I find it interesting that the woman was from an inner city suburb and then I wonder what sort of shoes she was wearing. And all I can think of is ‘silly girl’ and shake my head.

The problem with these sort of emotive issues is that everyone gets all het up about eating poor cute little duckies and furry little wallabies. They ponce about the place waving placards and blowing whistles and then on the way home they go to the supermarket and buy a package of perfectly wrapped and presented pork chops, or skinless chicken breasts. They congratulate themselves on a job well done and don’t even give a thought to how the majority of our food is produced.

Where are the protestors with their placards at the top flight restaurants that serve wagyu beef. I dont see them being all disruptive in the deli section of woolworths protesting the hideous conditions pigs are kept in, to give us cheap bacon. The hypocrisy of it all does my head in.

Now to totally change the subject before I really get worked up. I used the contact form on the bloggies page and got the breakdown of the votes for the Best Australian/ New Zealand category. God had already sent me the breakdown (thanks God) but I went ahead and asked for my own anyway as I have always been a tad suspicious of direct messages from God.

Not Drowning, Mothering: 800

Frog Ponds Rock: 533

Today Is My Birthday!: 477

Life and Other Crises: 453

Mamamia: 430

My grandmother is 87 today and Isaac will be one in a few days.

I successfully avoided getting together with my extended family at Christmas.Today we will all be together for the first time since Mum’s funeral. Combined with the fact that I handed the keys to Mum’s house over to the lawyers on Monday has made this past week very emotional.

Tears are never very far from the surface and my men are tiptoeing around me lest I rip their heads off.

Veronica has been busily disagreeing with a “hate blogger” which has provided me with a much needed distraction from myself. The comments section of that blog is a hoot. Accusations, sweeping assumptions,aspersions and arseholiness are the main themes.

It is all very amusing for about five minutes until you realise that it is real people they are ripping on. I am very proud of Vonnie for standing up for what she believes in and loudly saying that by our silence we are giving these stupid hate bloggers more power. Personally I believe in Karma and I cant be bothered with the small mindedness of chicken liver and her pathetic cronies but I will stand shoulder to shoulder with my daughter and say this crap shouldn’t be tolerated.

David is aghast at the ramming and subsequent sinking of the Ady Gil by the Japanese security ship the Shonnan Maru. The Japanese are killing whales in Australian territorial waters and our government is hoping that by ignoring the problem, it will just go away.

I have been very impressed by my son’s articulate and passionate response to the sinking of the Ady Gil. David would love to join the Sea Shepherd’s crew and be actively involved but the ships are vegan and my son is honest enough to admit that he isn’t quite that committed. Yet.

There is a rally to support  Sea Shepherd at the Abel Tasman Memorial fountain at Salamanca at 11 am on Saturday the 16th of January.David is keen to attend his first environmental/political rally.

I am very proud of both my children for passionately standing up for what they believe in.

Thankyou for the response to my video of Harry and the pigs. Jientje and Barbara have asked me to make some more videos and so I will. What sort of things would the rest of you lovely people like to see?

I have had the camera out a bit this past week and I think that I might have enough decent shots to post a couple of photos later on this week.

Lastly I want to thank you all my dear internets. I really don’t know how I would have gotten through the last six months without your support. Thankyou.

It has been very busy in the frogpondsrock household lately. Well to be be completely accurate I should say, The Spouse has been very busy, while I have just been jumping around, hugging myself with excitement and being a bigger nuisance than normal.

I am getting two eight week old piglets in early January and I am drooling with excitement. The thought of home grown pork has me skipping with happiness. Whilst for some strange reason all The Spouse can do is groan loudly and mutter phrases containing key words such as, bloody women, hard work, enough to do and no idea.

Two piglets squeeeee!!! I will keep you posted.

We went and picked up three new chooks last weekend that were offered on freecycle. The Spouse groaned and muttered about bloody chooks, shitting everywhere,whilst I promised fervently that I would remember to lock them up every night. The spouse then muttered something under his breath about not making promises I wouldn’t keep. He does a lot of muttering, that man.

These three older hens are used to being handled so it will be lovely to see how Amy interacts with them. My resident hen is very skittish and runs away and hides in the bush, when anyone other than me approaches her. So I am really looking forward to having some tame hens about the place again.

Last night there was a brief expose on 60 minutes revealing the horrible conditions that our pigs are kept in. Whilst I thought the expose was rather tame, I was really pleased that the plight of the pigs had been taken up by the mainstream media.

I firmly believe that the way we can change the world is by thinking about how we spend our money and making informed choices as consumers.

Plastic kills albatrosses. Simple answer, stop buying plastic bottled water.

Pork farmed in horrible conditions. Stop buying cheap supermarket pork.

It is working for the battery farmed hens. A major supermarket chain recently announced that they would stop selling eggs from caged birds. We consumers did that, by not buying battery farmed eggs it became economically unviable for the supermarket to stock them.

Small communities seem to be leading the way with Bundanoon becoming the first town in Australia to ban plastic bottled water.

Coles bay, a Tasmanian seaside village banned plastic bags ages ago. I really think that it is just a matter of us slowing down for a minute or two and thinking about the consequences of our own buying actions.

Help End Factory-Farming at AnimalsAustralia.org

Help End Factory-Farming at AnimalsAustralia.org