June 8th, 2009
Noir was found in a slaughter pen, waiting—although he didn’t know it—to be transported to Canada or Mexico where it is still legal to slaughter horses for food. A volunteer from New England Equine Rescue (NEER) spotted the black gelding. He was clearly bright. He had obviously been highly trained. And he also had sarcoids on his ear, sheath and chest. The presence of the sarcoids (cancerous growths) suggests the reason he was in the slaughter pen. Sarcoids are expensive to treat, difficult to cure and sometimes fatal. That an animal with sarcoids could even be considered as a food source, provides a peephole into that nasty world where horses are killed to provide “gourmet” meat to places on the globe where horsemeat is considered a delicacy.
NEER volunteers patrol the slaughter pens on bailout missions, looking for horses to save and hauling them into the rescue network. The black gelding was one of the lucky ones. Mary, his rescuer, called him The Trick Horse when she discovered that someone had taught him to bow, to beg and to rear on command and balance on his hind legs. That owner may have fallen on hard times and perhaps sold the horse to a new and less caring owner. His story will probably never be known. Horses in slaughter pens are acquired without disclosure, and fraud and misrepresentation are common. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Animal Rescue, Clearview Farm, equine rescue, Myrhe Equine Clinic, NEER, New England Equine Rescue, Tom Noone
Posted in Animal Rescue, Equine (Horses) | No Comments »
May 21st, 2009
I’ve just come from another library speaking engagement where I talked about alopecia and my book BALD AS A BEAN: The Experience of Sudden Hair Loss. Librarians like me. I suspect it has more to do with my willingness to speak for free than with my subject, however, BEAN usually draws a good crowd. A bald woman does have a fascination factor. In any case, I start my talk with a quiz—a tonsorial version of consciousness raising—which I call “hair raising.
This is the quiz: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Alopecia areata, Bald As A Bean, bald woman, chemotherapy, hair, hair raising, NAAF, self image, universalis
Posted in Alopecia Management | 1 Comment »
CHARLIE CARD BLISS
July 5th, 2009It was the eve of the July Fourth holiday, Dickie had an appointment with a client in Boston, I was going along under my old creative director’s hat, and neither of us wanted to cope with the city’s holiday exodus. Still, Dickie looked doubtful.
“Do you know how?” he asked me.
“The only tricky part is finding a parking space at Oak Grove. Provided we can do that, it’s simple.”
The single benefit of the pre-holiday hysteria was that a few souls were escaping even earlier than usual from Boston, and there actually was a space in the Oak Grove parking lot. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Charlie card, follow your bliss, Joseph Campbell, MBTA, Orange Line, Scollay Square
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