I would like to respond to Liz Ellis’s letter
regarding her position on the cowardly and now infamous “Burns
Amendment” (HCN, 5/2/05: Wild horses harm ecosystems). The Burns
ploy has nothing to do with flora and fauna. It has everything to
do with killing off (literally) the grazing competition, providing
further impetus to the horse-slaughterhouses of the great state of
Texas (where else?) and a fast buck for entrepreneurs all too
willing to meet the strange culinary tastes of the French and
Japanese. And, of course, you can’t forget the bunchers and
killer buyers who make their pathetic living at the horse auctions.
It’s all about dollars.
Ms. Ellis prefers desert
flora and fauna to sentient creatures that are too dumb to realize
they’re non-native. I wish she’d visit one of the
slaughterhouses to which she’s verbally consigned the
creatures doomed by the nefarious Burns amendment. Perhaps she can
console the animals as they’re reeling from the bolts being
driven repeatedly into their heads. Perhaps she can assure them
that “It’s okay. You won’t feel as much. You’re
non-native. And in the long run, you’ll be doing something
truly magnanimous and with far-reaching implications for the flora
and fauna upon which you formerly used to step and overgraze.”
It all reminds me of a line from “Crucifixion,” a great
song by Phil Ochs: “So good to be alive when the eulogies are
read.”
Harry C. Koenig
Pueblo, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Non-natives deserve to live, too.
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