Waste

Most people in my situation ask - why did my baby die? I have to say that I have never really asked that question. Plenty of other questions but not that one. I some how accept the fact that babies do die. I think this has to do with being bought up in a farming world. In my childhood we often stayed up late into the night bottle feeding orphaned lambs but we frequently found them stiff and cold in the morning. No one could tell us why. On the farm next door to us a litter of eight puppies died. The bitch lay on them and suffocated them all. I also remember a couple of mornings when a mare was expecting a foal and I went out with my mother into the fields and found the foal lying in the grass, perfect and dead, with the frost settled on its soft baby hair. Perhaps through these experiences I learnt that baby animals do just die and there is no reason for it. I think that the truth is that people who don't really know anything much about the natural world talk endlessly about its miracles. People who actually live very close to natural processes (as my mother does) tend not to talk much at all. But what they know is that natural processes are largely characterised by appallingly high levels of waste.