My mom exchanged many letters with Ben while he was serving in the Pacific. What did he miss? Swimming at our summer cottage.

I knew my Uncle Bennett by small mementos: the photo of him in uniform in the library of our summer cottage; letters my mom received when his plane was shot down; my grandmother’s poetry when he died; his purple heart; a fraternity mug from Williams college, which he attended before enlisting.

I also knew him from a photo album that showed him, horsing around as a teenager in summer, swimming in the lake and his tombstone in the local cemetery, on which my grandparents had inscribed a few lines from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem:

Here he lies where he longed to be, home is the sailor, home from the sea and the hunter home from the hill.

My dad said Bennett was the co-pilot of a plane with 16 guys on it shot down over Marcus Island on May 9, 1945, just before the end of World War II.

My grandparents found out on their anniversary. Everyone on the plane died and no one was found. The plane was seen going down and is now likely disintegrated on the ocean floor. It was so long ago. I wasn’t born then.

Nina, my older sister, dug up that his squadron was called the Reluctant Dragons and that he flew a Liberator. Here is a photo she found, too.

Uncle Bennett, second from left, bottom row.

I like to think of the reluctant dragon that was my uncle and not the one who got lost at sea and became a phantom to me and my four sisters. But the latter is sharper in that way that absences have.

My mother never spoke about Bennett to me. I don’t know why. I’d like to replace my memory of him with something living, not just a photo or small objects and lines of verse. But I don’t know how.

Horse in kill pen at U.S. slaughterhouse (Photo: USDA)

It’s been a busy week in equine America.

The racing community’s been debating the breakdown of horses at Aqueduct, on the set of “Luck” and in general. Separately, the equine welfare community’s been fighting new legislation and proposals to open horse slaughterhouses in Tennessee, Missouri and Oregon, while consumer and humane watchdog groups are fighting “ag-gag” rules, one of which was just signed into law by Utah’s Governor.

I hope those interested in fixing what’s broken in horse racing will focus on the larger humane and agribusiness issues, because they are all related. Unfortunately, ag-gag and horse slaughter aren’t on racing’s radar pretty much because racing’s focus is nearly always inward-facing. This is especially true of people and industries whose fortunes are tightly tied to how they’re publically perceived.

Racing’s image is tarnished right now as is PETA’s, the insular animal rights group that is often mistaken as the only group in America with a voice on issues relating to animal welfare, legislation and advocacy.

This has a lot to do with Ingrid Newkirk’s talent for creating spectacles (like her statement about bringing horse slaughter back to the U.S.) but also the manner in which PETA exposes things that do, in fact, need exposing. As it turns out, PETA provoked the racing industry and race fans to fury, first by asking questions about two horses that died on the set of HBO’s “Luck” series, then by demanding changes and third, by dragging the producer, trainer and a vet associated with “Luck” in front of the Los Angeles DA on what many in the racing community say are false and misleading charges of violating a California humane statute.

Horses breaking down is the public scandal that racing now has to confront, particularly in light of the independent task force put in place to investigate the Aqueduct breakdowns, The New York Times’ upcoming multi-part series on equine fatalities in Thoroughbred racing over the last three years and, of course, PETA’s request for an investigation on behalf of the three “Luck” horses that suffered catastrophic injuries and were quietly euthanized.

But if the racing industry, the new investigative team requested by NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and The New York Times fail to bring up the 26,600 Thoroughbreds (TBs) that got thrown away and slaughtered last year for horse meat, they will have failed to expose one of the most important issues dragging racing down in the gutter, and that’s the horses that get bred, shed and bled as part of racing’s business profitability model. These horses constituted 19% of all U.S. horses slaughtered in Canada and Mexico last year (out of a total of 138,000), and was equivalent to killing off 70% of the annual U.S. TB foal crop, according to a new case study using USDA figures.

Equine Mathematics Don’t Always Add Up

Let’s look at the numbers that the media is now focusing on: three horses dead on a TV production set, 18 dead racing at Aqueduct since November 30, and 750 dead of injuries on racetracks across the U.S.

This is a lot fewer fatalities than the 26,600 TBs slaughtered in Canada and Mexico, about the same number that have been slaughtered since before the Dallas Crown, Beltex and Cavel slaughter plants closed down in 2007 in Texas and Illinois.

Go over to the main racing news Web sites, however, and you’ll find no articles and little commentary on the slaughtered horses. Bring it up and people change the topic to something more comfortable: bashing PETA.

Well, that’s easy. PETA euthanized 1,900 shelter animals, rehoming only 24 of them. People also like to call them to task for grandstanding, pit-bull attack methods, and the salaries it pays officers. Well and good. But the racing industry is guilty of doing exactly the same things, as much as it doesn’t like to admit it.

Only in horse racing are the deaths of 1,900 cats and dogs deemed more heinous than the fatal breakdowns of 750 horses a year and the slaughter of 26,600 still in the prime of their lives. And let’s get something straight here. It’s not always the bad apples that spoil the good. That’s a common refrain and it’s just not true.

One Bad Apple Is Not The Point

The millions of American pets that get abandoned each year, and the ones that PETA is accused of killing weren’t discarded by the worst among us—a minority of people, to be sure. The three to four million cats and dogs that get put to sleep annually are discarded by people who claim to “love animals” but don’t make a commitment to their lifetime care.

So it is with Thoroughbred owners and trainers. It is not my wish to criticize unjustly, but the claim that only the bad breeders, owners and trainers are responsible for discarding the 26,600 horses slaughtered in 2011 just doesn’t wash.

Good breeders, owners and trainers do this. They may set aside money for racehorse retirement, they may find loving homes for some of the horses in their stables to make way for younger, faster animals, but all the horses that eventually get slaughtered would be alive today if the people that bred, bought them and trained them made a commitment to their lifetime care. If they won’t do it, why do they expect anyone else to?

I get regular flack from a turf writer over at Forbes.com who won’t discuss the slaughter issue and freely tells me I don’t understand racing (or writing, for that matter). Instead, she’s focused on racehorse retirement. Why? She thinks it important to focus on the good in racing. This to me is like focusing on carbon credits. They’re only needed because everything else is so polluted.

Sure, racehorse retirement (and other forms of rescue) is incredibly important to help save some of the discarded TBs and other breeds from slaughter, but to focus on retirement and treat the other issues with kid gloves just lets the main culprits off the hook.

Slaughter is a safety valve for these individuals, but no one talks about that, either, all of which makes the new ag-gag laws, the newly proposed slaughterhouses in Tennessee, Missouri and Oregon and the new laws legalizing horse slaughter a far more urgent issue to address, with wider, more serious and long-lasting implications.

Better Reporting Needed

The New York Times has done an abysmal job of covering slaughter, offering up one factually compromised 2011 article by NYT Kansas City Bureau Chief A.G. Sulzberger that was full of pro-slaughter disinformation. Last week, the Pulitzer-prize winning paper again published a severely underweight article about a Bureau of Land Management proposed wild horse “ecosanctuary” that failed to educate readers on any aspect of the BLM’s practice of rounding up and warehousing wild horses, not to mention its close relationship with pro-slaughter groups and ranchers.

Both issues are worthy of the same scrutiny, expertise and resources the paper is now committing to peering into the bowels of horse racing—especially since 80% of Americans are against horse slaughter, according to a recent ASPCA survey conducted by Lake Associates.

It will be a mistake if The New York Times only considers the performance side of racing and neglects the larger “horse industry” in its upcoming series. By that, I mean the people who make their living in agriculture (cattle ranchers, breeders of herding stock and Western performance horses) who are also the ones angling for new slaughter plants to be built in the U.S. and the ones who populate the Ag committees in Congress and control most important legislation affecting horses, wild horse and burro protection, food safety issues and the humane treatment of slaughter-bound animals.

I told one Paulick Report reader who was particularly angry at me for writing about “Luck” that he should keep an eye on the ranchers because when it comes to horse influence in America, they’re the ones that pass the laws—not the TB people. He brushed me off. Ranching? What does that have to do with racing? Boy, you really don’t know anything about horses, do you?

I get that a lot from racing fans. No one appreciates an “outsider” questioning the integrity of a sport they love while at the same time suggesting that the horse industry is a big tent, with horses other than TBs in it.

Well the slaughter issue unifies many of the different breed registries looking for an outlet for unwanted horses and retired breeding stock, and the media needs to address that. Lord knows, I’ve tried doing that in all my articles on Forbes.com, but it’s time for other influential news sources to come forward and identify all the various stakeholders and all the interlocking issues for the public—and not just relate it to the upcoming Kentucky Derby, either.

The New York Times has as good a shot at putting that story in proper context as anybody. I hope they take the time to do it from a non-racing centric position, though, because once they’ve spoken, a lot of people are going to go right back to sleep. Sad as that may be, it’s a lot easier than facing what’s really going on out there with the horses.

UPDATE: The New York Times story Mangled Horses, Maimed Jockeys, appeared March 24 and no mention of the slaughter issue. Hoping this will be part of their coverage of this important topic. Will have to wait and see.

For more on this topic,  follow me on Twitter and on Forbes.com or read these other Forbes.com posts:

Contraceptives For Wild Horses Are Just What The Government Ordered

Rounding Up America’s Wild Horses (photo gallery)

How Many Congressmen Does It Take To Screw A Horse?

Horse Slaughterhouse Investigation Sounds Food Safety and Cruelty Alarms

Who’s Who in Capitol Hill’s Horse Meat Power Posse (photo gallery)

Paula Bacon, Texas Mayor, Kicks Some Tail

Horse Deaths Won’t Stop Production of HBO’s “Luck”

“Luck” Ran Old, Unfit, Drugged Horses, Says Necropsy Report

Saving Princess Madeline—A Racehorse’s Tale

Racing Industry Silent on Slaughtered Thoroughbreds

Photo Courtesy of Laura Leigh

There are more wild horses and burros living in long-term holding pens today than roaming free. Who thinks that’s a good idea?

Who would have even imagined that 40 years after the passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, that we would even be having this conversation? And yet that’s the state of things today, thanks to the Bureau of Land Management.

Don’t spread this around, but I remember when that legislation was passed. I was a seventh-grader, an avid pony clubber,  and I was outraged by what was being done to the mustangs. I was also rabidly anti-Nixon, mostly because of the Vietnam War and also because my dad liked him and I decided that whatever my dad stood for politically, I was against.

Still, the legislation passed while Nixon was in office and even if I didn’t like him as a president,  the passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act made me feel as though our government stood for some of the right things. It stood for wild horses and it stood for the will of the American people who overwhelmingly called for the mustangs to be protected. For a moment, I thought it also stood for me because, you know, I was a seventh-grader and a horse lover. And who pays seventh-graders and horse lovers any mind?

Well here we are today and Congress isn’t paying seventh-graders or even 70-year-olds any mind when it comes to a lot of issues, including the plight of America’s last wild mustangs and burros. What used to  seem like a government that worked to accomplish the people’s business now works to establish businesses as people—and there appear to be more of those who want the mustangs rounded up, slaughtered, gone than ever.

You can read about them in my new article on Forbes.com, “Contraceptives For Wild Horses Are Just What The Government Ordered,”which examines the consequences of the BLM’s Wild Horses and Burros Program and how a lot of special interests are zeroing out the mustangs and laying claim to public lands without paying much for the privilege.

I spent about a month studying the issues, talking to a lot of people, hearing about their work and methods, watching YouTube videos and DVDs, looking at photos, reading reports they sent me and checking on various facts by browsing the BLM web site and comparing it against other data.

Trying to narrow down a story from so much available information was really hard. The data was buried all over the place and the issues never became clearer. They simply multiplied the more I dug.

Over the last month, I gave up a couple of times—but a small voice kept protesting. Don’t stop, keep going!

Please read and share the article and photo gallery, Rounding Up America’s Wild Horses. Follow me on Forbes.com and Twitter. Leave a comment and be part of the conversation there. My inner seventh-grader thanks you.

The legendary filly, Ruffian

I used to love horse racing. I grew up with horses, did Pony Club, mucked out stalls with a pair of rubber gloves and bucket and dreamed about horses, horse shows, horse anything. I even went to college in Saratoga.

Then, the summer before my freshman year, the unthinkable happened: Ruffian broke both sesamoid bones in her foreleg racing Kentucky Derby winner, Foolish Pleasure, at Belmont Park.

I remember the race, the day, the sight of Jacinto Vasquez trying to pull her up as she galloped on her pulverized leg and later, the news she’d come out of surgery only to smash her cast while thrashing in her stall.  The news she was gone was unfathomable. An estimated 20 million people watched the race. I can’t imagine that anyone wasn’t affected.

Ruffian was the second horse I’d love, but the first I’d lose. She had every gift in life, but length of years, as the late Ted Kennedy would say in his eulogy for JFK Jr. Ruffian, the hope of horses and of one college-bound, horse-obsessed girl, was no more.

College in Saratoga was grand. I lived off campus my last two years in a Victorian townhouse at 176 Regent Street and dated a bartender at the famed racing hangout, Siro’s. We went to the track a lot. It was exciting and then, I saw another horse break down. Not a big horse, not a famous one. An anonymous one.

It lay on the track as the crowd watched a van drive up, erect a screen, and then, minutes later, drive away.

I went home and never returned. Yes, I return to Saratoga. I have had family there for many years. I may enjoy the excitement around the Travers, but I will not go. My heart is with the horses, and my money stays in my pocket. It’s the one form of protest I have as a horse lover and humanitarian, and I cherish it.

This past year, when I learned about the connections between horse slaughter and horse racing, I resolved to share it as widely as I could. It surprised me that so many people didn’t know. Yes, they knew about Barbaro, a few knew about Eight Belles and Go For Wand and Lauren’s Charm and a few others. But strangely, they just shrugged it off. “What do you want me to do about it?” their expressions would say. “It goes with the sport.”

I’ve made a bit of a career, recently, in being critical of it. This pisses off a lot of people. The ones who feel defensive about supporting racing like to tell me I don’t understand it or that progress is being made in racehorse retirement or whatever. I tell them about my years in Saratoga, but that’s not what they care about. What they care about is not examining themselves.

I have done that with regard to racing and while I will always love the horses, here’s what I’m requiring of myself these days: I don’t  give my money, my time and my support to anyone or anything that exploits them. That includes watching HBO’s “Luck.”

There is a point at which people get so used to seeing horses break their legs and get euthanized that they start finding it acceptable. Me? I started watching slaughter videos. I can watch them because I’m not subsidizing it. But horse racing? It’s a different kind of watching.

Ruffian’s breakdown and death led to a public outcry for more humane treatment of racehorses. That was 37 years ago.

That is what my post today on Forbes.com, Horse Deaths Won’t Stop Production of “Luck” is about. Two horses died during the production of two episodes of HBO’s series on the underbelly of horse racing.

Here’s the deal: You go to the track, you subsidize horses breaking their legs. You watch HBO, you subsidize horses breaking their legs. That you can sit at home and watch it is no excuse. If you watch it, you subsidize it.

Ruffian, I still think of you. Someday, this will be over.

For more on this topic, visit my personal blog, follow me on Twitter and on Forbes.com, including these posts:

Racing Industry Silent on Slaughtered Thoroughbreds

Saving Princess Madeline—A Racehorse’s Tale

Horse Slaughterhouse Investigation Sounds Food Safety and Cruelty Alarms

How Many Congressmen Does It Take To Screw A Horse?

Who’s Who in Capitol Hill’s Horse Meat Power Posse (photo gallery)

Can War Horse Beat Clooney For Golden Globe?

Paula Bacon, Texas Mayor, Kicks Some Tail

Is Your K-Y Jelly Cruelty Free? Do You Care?

Apparently, the topic is resonating with a lot of people. Are they K-Y users? I think not. Mostly, they’re people like me who caught a glimpse of how much animal testing is still going on. If you haven’t, check out these products from Procter & Gamble that are all tested on animals:

Always, Aussie, Braun, Christina Aguilera Perfumes, Clairol, Downy, Crest, DDF, Dolce & Gabbana, Dunhill Fragrances, Escada Fragrances, Febreze, Fekkai, Gillette Co., Gucci Fragrances, Halo, Head & Shoulders, Herbal Essences, Hugo Boss, Iams, Ivory, Joy, Lacoste Fragrances, Max Factor, Mr. Clean, Natural Instincts, Nice n Easy, Olay, Old Spice, Oral-B, Pampers, Pantene, Physique, Puffs, Scope, Sebastian Professional , Secret, SK-II, Swiffer, Tide, Vicks, Vidal Sasson, Zest

Have you bought any? I have. Lots of them.

As it happens, Forbes conducted a survey last year asking consumers to rate CPG companies on a range of attributes, including “trust.” Guess who’s considered among the most trusted companies in America? You got it. P&G. And they’re in good company.

Incredulous, I asked an editor if the subject of animal-testing came up in the survey, and she said “no.” They hadn’t thought about it. This made sense and yet it seemed ridiculously dumb. Consumers care deeply about animals. That they didn’t know what they were buying also made sense to me. How would they? And yet, I felt as though I should have known. The Forbes editors should have known. The companies should have been transparent.

It’s a new day and I’m sharing this experience in the hopes of shaking things up. Please share if you want to join me. Thanks!

Mayor Paula Bacon of Kaufman Texas with her horse, Hershey

You almost never hear people described as “gutsy,” anymore. Ballsy is popular. Brazen. But neither accurately describes Paula Bacon, the former Mayor of Kaufman, Texas.

Paula Bacon, a two-term mayor of Kaufman, is gutsy. In her last year in office,  she managed to rid the town of a plague it had suffered for two decades: the Dallas Crown horse slaughter plant, which had been dumping horse guts, tainted blood, manure and legal expenses on the town since the ’80′s.

Today’s post on Forbes.com, “Texas Mayor Paula Bacon Kicks Some Tail,” is about that fight.  It’s also about what life is like in a slaughter town: the costly sewage problems, foul smells, legal battles, vermin and falling property values. It’s about the sights and sounds of slaughter, the horses, the humane issues and outspoken residents like Jualine and Robert Eldridge, a nurse and a respiratory therapist, who lived with Dallas Crown in their backyard, preventing them and their neighbors from using their backyards for two decades because the stench was so overpowering.

Pro-horse slaughter advocates argue that slaughter will be a boon to America’s “horse industry,” raising horse prices, providing “good jobs” as well as a “humane alternative” to slaughtering horses in Canada and Mexico.

They have clearly never had a slaughter plant next door—one that sends all its profits overseas while eating up Federal funding paid for by American taxpayers and property taxes paid by local residents. To have a foreign-owned slaughter plant in your back yard isn’t probably much better than a domestic slaughter plant: both are known for fouling communities. Whether the owners live in Belgium, as Dallas Crown’s still do, or in another community where the air smells like air is supposed to, none live with open containers of offal next to their homes, the way the Eldridges and their neighbors in Kaufman did. They’ve never had blood backing up into their bathtubs and running in the gutters.

I’ve written a pretty long story on that for Forbes.com, but I’ve also put together a photo gallery of 13 pictures that complete the tale. Some were taken by Bacon, some by other townspeople and some are from a 906-page USDA report on humane violations at Dallas Crown, and another Texas horse slaughter plant, Beltex, also shut down five years ago. They’re hard to look at, but anyone who argues that horse slaughter is actually a good thing needs to decide if they could stomach having what’s in these photos become a living part of their communities.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that Beltex and Dallas Crown were situated next to lower-income neighborhoods? That the employees all disappeared once the plants did and the crime rate fell? And that the profits all went back to Belgium? Is it a coincidence that Indian reservations are now being courted as a site for horse slaughter in 2012?

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could find horse slaughter an economic benefit once they see how Dallas Crown wiped its feet on Kaufman before people like Paula Bacon and the Eldridges worked to take their city back.

Today, Kaufman has done what the horses that passed through Dallas Crown’s foul yards did not. Kaufman, Texas came back from the dead and prospered, a spring in its gait. It’s a cautionary tale worth discussing and sharing.

For more on this topic, see my other posts below. Or read today’s post, “Texas Mayor Paula Bacon Kicks Some Tail,” on Forbes.com and check out the accompanying photo gallery, “Life In A Slaughter Town: Kaufman, Texas.” You can also find some of my other Forbes.com articles on Thoroughbreds, horse racing and the horse industry.

My hero: Dick, the rescue horse.

War Horse opened this week, an event chronicled in today’s Forbes.com blog post, “Can War Horse Beat Clooney For Golden Globe”?

I sure hope so, not just because I’m a sucker for a good horse movie and fine film making, but because of War Horse’s ability to elevate a simple moral message so easily lost on the red carpet: compassion’s ability to neutralize brutality, compassion’s essence to survival.

Horses are recipients of both compassion and brutality, perhaps no more so than today, when there are people who actually say such things on Facebook as, “For so long feeding a horse for a month was under $50, and now within the last two years it has escalated to over $100 per month per horse. I am so tired of every horse out there being called a rescue. My wish for Christmas this year was that every rescue horse was taken for slaughter reducing the demand for hay. It is now getting so hard to feed the remaining horses I have that I am getting angry at the mere thought of Un-Wanted Horses not being slaughtered.”

It got 13 “likes.” Worse, this is someone’s Christmas wish.

You think any of  them will see War Horse? Probably. They’ll claim it’s a pro-slaughter message because to them, everything is a pro-slaughter message. Somehow, they’ve gotten to the point of equating their very existence with sending captive bolts into the heads of animals that, like Joey in the movie, have worked in our service, done our bidding. Galloped the track, jumped the seven-foot wall, pulled the carriage, hauled the tree, calmed a disabled kid, helped an ex-con learn what it means to nurture, taken a toddler on their backs, rounded up the dogies, chased the foxes, chased our dreams for us or just happened to be nurse mare foals or the offspring of PMU mares as a cruel accident of birth.

Here’s why I asked my sister Sally to write the War Horse review for me on Forbes.com instead of doing it myself.

First of all, she has written about working animals for most of the last 20 years and is a frequent contributor to Salon.com, The New York Times and The Village Voice. Mostly, though, as a younger sister, I’ve read most of her writing. She wrote a piece once on various smells that was so beautiful. I remember thinking, I’m getting misty eyed at the description of wood smoke and how a lawnmower smells when running. It was that evocative. More than that, however, I couldn’t write the review.

Back in the Springtime, I watched my first slaughter video the night before going to see the stage play, War Horse, at the Vivian Beaumont theater. I’d read about it two years earlier when it first appeared on the London stage and just the description of the puppets made me cry. But as I sat and watched them on stage, after months of keeping the tickets safe on my desk, a strange thing happened. My throat didn’t tighten. I didn’t need the hankies I’d stuffed into my purse. I’d seen such brutality the night before that I had to remind myself to watch the play and not play out the terrible scene of horses struggling against humans shooting them in the head at point-blank range as they slipped and fell and rose only to be shot again. I ended up marveling at the production but not feeling it, and that felt like a terrible loss, equal to the one that Albert and Joey encountered together during the war.

I’ve never been a fighter, but I understand how wearying it can be. In the midst of pushing back against people who think it’s consistent to call yourself a Christian and then hope for other people’s horses to be bled out while conscious, I didn’t have the depth of feeling to say what War Horse meant to me. All I could focus on was trying to remain calm while parsing the logic of people who hate anyone who don’t think as they do. Kind of like the villains in War Horse, except there, both sides to the conflict wanted Joey for their own. If he could survive, then they could, too.

So I’ll tell my own little story, here, about a horse who taught me that at an early age. His name was Dick. Just Dick. Dick the horse. I’ve got a chapter about him underway for my other blog (www.ModernChristianSpinster.com), so I’ll just mention him briefly here, but suffice it to say that Dick was a rescue horse, the very kind the UH people think is driving up the cost of hay. He was a Palomino given to my family when my oldest sister was perhaps 13. And he raised all of us, taking us to Pony Club events, on long hacks in the green woods of Oyster Bay and for me, to several equitation championships.

Dick was the name he came with and it’s the one we kept, putting it down on horse show entry forms, even though the result was hearing ”And, in first place over fences is Vicki Eckhoff on Dick” announced over the PA system. But I was proud of him and the name was his for keeps.

So here’s the story about Dick that made him of Joey stature: I was jumping him over a triple combination in a lesson one day and he stumbled between fences. I fell off in front of him, yet he stayed on his knees until I got out of his way. Then, he got up.

On another occasion, my sister Karen’s Beagle had been barking at him in the paddock, until he chased her down, knocked her over, and pinned her to the ground with his hoof. She was unhurt, but never barked at him again.

The smell of his fur under my nose, the feel of it with my arms wrapped around his neck, is vivid today, as it is for everyone whose life has been changed by one of these large, compassionate, willful yet willing creatures.

The UH people like to posture that they’re the only ones whose instincts on horses matter. Mixed in with that is a lot of hatred and—it seems—deep hurt. Sally talks in the Forbes.com piece about how children learn compassion through non-verbal communication with animals, through touch and compassion and care. But the lesson is there for adults, too. They just have to take themselves out of the center of everything. They need to stop thinking that the price of hay is essential to their survival. Even more so, perhaps they need to recognize that they’ve been brutalized. Here’s the thing, though: brutality won’t save them. It can’t, and it won’t.

U.S. Representative, Bob Goodlatte

Which state representative puts horse meat recipes like “Filly Filet” on one of her many Web sites? Which former Congressman-turned-lobbyist pocketed thousands of dollars in farm subsidies while writing billion-dollar farm bills? And which prominent Democrat made the request to slip language into a conference report that sent untold thousands of wild horses and burros to their deaths in the 107th Congress?

You’ll find the answers in Who’s Who in Capitol Hill’s Power Posse,  a photo gallery on Forbes.com. It’s a follow-up to my Dec. 21 post on Forbes.com, “How Many Congressmen Does It Take To Screw A Horse?” Now, you can put the Congressmen’s names, photos and actions together.

By the way, the Democrats have been very naughty here. And a republican—Bob Goodlatte—turns out to be both a Christian Scientist and one of the original birthers.

Mary Baker Eddy would not approve.

Larry Craig: a key member of Capitol Hill's horse-slaughter power posse

It gives me no joy to feature Larry Craig on my blog just days before Christmas, but he’s here to represent the U.S. Congressmen, horse-slaughter lobbyists, advocates and journalists who are the topic of today’s new post on Forbes.com, “How Many Congressmen Does It Take To Screw A Horse?“

You’re familiar with the marginalization of “We the 99%”? Say hello to “We the 70%”. This is the percentage of Americans opposed to horse slaughter who were screwed when Senators Herb Kohl and Roy Blunt, along with U.S. Representative Jack Kingston went behind closed doors to remove language banning slaughter inspections from the recent Agriculture Appropriations spending bill.

A lot of people are wondering how that went down in light of all the widespread support for The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act of 2011, both in Congress and among average Americans. Today’s post looks at the culprits, the bills they’ve blocked over the years, the tactics used and how many horses have been screwed in the process.

It also reveals the USDA’s dismal record in regulating horse slaughter and the flaws in the GAO Report that President Obama and the U.S. Congress relied on for guidance in deciding to refund USDA horse meat inspections after a five-year ban. Finally, it examines the biased, suspiciously-timed media coverage that has misled and confused so many Americans on what the facts are.

A key part of today’s post is a photo gallery I’m working on putting names and faces to Capitol Hill’s horse-slaughter power posse. It’s almost ready, so I hope you’ll come back and look for it.

Not what I wanted to be working on the week before Christmas. I will celebrate that, good will, and peace on earth even as I continue to probe how our government has been wrapped up and stuck under the Agriculture lobby’s very own, possibly genetically-modified, hopefully cage-free Christmas tree.

Deck the halls.

For Davey—Washington Square Park, NYC

Original post from March 27, 2010

My sister became a widow yesterday, for the second time. Her husband, David, was very shy in person, so I guess this would be a shock to him, to become the subject of a blog a day after passing on.

He really did his best to remain out of sight, though he was extremely talkative over the phone, happy to discuss recipes, slow cooking and his fondness for making art. He was a big man with a big heart, but he had a tiny footprint. In fact, for the last year of his life, he left basically no footprints at all—not in the outside world. Beside his recent trip to St. Vincent’s, where he passed away yesterday morning, he had not set foot outside at all. Not even into the hallway of their fourth floor walk-up in the West Village.

She said he was like the third Collyer brother. Indeed, in the time they were married (17 years) their small apartment filled up with stuff to the point that there were boxes piled on top of other boxes with cookbooks and vintage comic books and two small dogs (beagle and dachshund) competing for a very small amount of available floor space. You might wonder how one average-sized woman and a plus-sized man managed this in a 400 square-foot apartment, but that, I think, is a measure of their modesty and also a skill that some New Yorkers have for living within their means, but many do not. Neither ever called much attention to themselves; they just quietly went about their business, which is something I aspire to do but have yet to achieve.

I called David my brother, because I never had one and he seemed a good candidate. Let me say that I also love my two other living (and now ex) brother-in-laws, but David was different because we were the only family he had. He was an only child, raised poor in Arkansas, who came to New York City, went to Pratt and met my sister in a bar 20 years ago. She was on a date with someone else and thought he was cute. The bartender arranged for them to meet and after they’d chatted a while, she said she had to leave and he gave her his phone number. “He told me I had to call him because he was shy,” she told me yesterday, after we’d been to the hospital so she could say a final goodbye to him. “I told him that I would but that he would have to do the talking, because I was shy, too.”

And so they married, on a Halloween, three years later. I remember pulling up to the UN Chapel in a cab where the ceremony was, and meeting this lovely shy man in a corduroy jacket sweating up a storm, he was so nervous. That afternoon, after the service, my entire family went down to Chinatown for a celebratory dinner. And David told my sister he was happy, because now he had a family. He had her, he had sisters. We had him.

A year ago, when he became home-bound, I told him that I would no longer refer to him as a brother-in-law but as a brother. I called him “bro” and he called me “sis” and it was as corny as you can imagine. I never called my own sisters that, but it was fun to have a brother, even if I never saw him. And this suited him. He had put on a lot of weight, and it embarrassed him. He didn’t want to go out into the world, where he knew people would stare at him. So he prevented that from happening by not going outside at all.

My sister, who has always been outgoing, was forever going out without him. When I would ask what he was doing, she’d say, “oh, he’s home resting and relaxing.” And so he was, until he went to St. Vincent’s four weeks ago with some respiratory ailment that someone more medically inclined could tell you about, but I can’t.

Yesterday, after I left my sister, I walked home through Washington Square and she went home to their apartment. It was a cold day, a typical March, the kind of day with low temperatures and grey skies and the wind relentlessly blowing. But there were people out in the park, sitting on the fountain in the center, listening to a young man play an old upright piano, as if an upright piano with a man playing it in the wind and cold on a Friday afternoon in March was the most natural thing in the world.

He first played the theme song from Schindler’s List, and I stood, watching a toddler approach him, looking up and holding out a hand as the man played, unaware. A plastic bag blew in a circle directly behind him, like leaves in the wind and I caught myself thinking that my bro had missed the beauty of that day by leaving too early in the morning.

He then played a Chopin Nocturne and I felt a strange hollowness, the kind that sets in when something beautiful is happening and you know you’ve lost something irreplaceable and there’s nothing you can do. I thanked him for the music and told him how it was odd to hear something so beautiful when my brother-in-law had just passed on and he thanked me for telling him. And then he played another song.

I went home to fetch my dog for a walk. Afterward, I got food for dinner as my sister was coming over. David had always cooked for her, and I wanted to do that, too. Beforehand, though, I sat at my computer and looked up crematoriums, which is what she’d asked me to do before we parted earlier in the day. She didn’t want flowers. She said no to a funeral. I said, “Are you sure? I helped organize Dad’s and Mary’s with Sally and everyone said how nice they were.” And she responded, “no, that’s OK. Just find a couple of crematoriums. Nothing fancy.”

Let me say arranging funerals is not my specialty, although perhaps I may have more of a future there than as a copywriter. For my dad, I helped arrange for a large Presbyterian church, appropriate organ music, numerous speakers (two from London), people from all over the US and multiple obits written for the newspaper. As a final touch, there was even a Naval Honor Guard. For our middle sister’s service, Sally and I found a small chapel in Saratoga Springs and a Buddhist priest and made arrangements afterward for a reception at our home on Lake George. So I was ready to offer my services for David, but my older sister said they would not be needed. “And I don’t want any kind of service when I go, either,” she said. “Just everyone go out to dinner and have a good time.”

Sitting at my computer, I did a Google search and came upon a resource that seemed so absurd I had to laugh: “Crematorium Finder.” I’d found my dog through “Pet Finder” and here I was on “Crematorium Finder,” thinking about how the former was cute and the latter was not and that this had been a strange day.

I called three places and within 15 minutes two had called me back and I learned that cremating someone isn’t quite as simple as Crematorium Finder makes it sound. First of all, you can get someone cremated for $350, which I thought sounded pretty cheap, but then you pay a lot to a funeral home to go and pick up the body and deliver it to the crematorium and that costs about $1000.

I thought this was a lot for a trip that is essentially one-way and reflected  on a friend, whose boyfriend had been a WWF wrestler who had wrestled in a cowboy outfit in, of all places, Japan. She had told me that he had passed away there some years ago and, because he was so tall, there wasn’t a crematorium that could handle him. And so, he had to be shipped back to the states, to be cremated here.

“My brother in law was a big man,” I told the funeral director, not wanting to have any unpleasant surprises when they went to pick him up.

“What did he weigh?” he asked. “Because some of them have a limit of 400 pounds.”

“He was about that,” I said. At which point the funeral director upped the estimate by $150.

I asked him, “Why the expensive car ride?” Not being familiar with these things, I figured they were just out to gouge us because we were in mourning and that’s what funeral homes do. But he set me straight: “Only a funeral director can pick up a body,” he said. I’m pretty much a do-it-yourself person, but I also knew we couldn’t get him there in a taxi, so I said, “Of course.”

“And you’re also paying for the paperwork,” he added.

“What paperwork?”

“The death certificate.”

“There are no funeral home services tacked on to that?” I asked.

There weren’t. After hanging up, I decided to complete my investigation by looking at urns online. My sister had said she didn’t want anything fancy, so I looked for unfancy,  but it was hard to find. There were marble urns, and porcelain urns and also some very executive-looking wood container called “The Statesman” that I guess you could keep in the library or in the halls of Congress or someplace of that stature.

I called up my sister Sally to get her input and for fun, we made up some other absurd titles for urns depicting the life that the unlucky deceased had left behind. We liked “The Bon Vivant,” “The Slut” and, also “The Snob.” We also briefly tossed around the idea of getting into the “un-funeral” business because we happened to be so good at putting them together, and then I realized that my sister, the new widow, would be arriving in 15 minutes and I still hadn’t started cooking the chicken.

She arrived at 7 and I served her a glass of wine from a bottle I’d bought for the occasion. May I add that it had a screw top, but it still cost $14, and she seemed to like it. I then briefly sat her down at my computer with her wine glass and I said, “What do you think of the Statesman?” and she said, “Oh, I don’t know. Can’t we just get some simple container like the paint can that they put Dad into?”

We then had a little discussion about our mother, who had also been cremated, and how when our time came, we all wanted to be scattered up on our property at Lake George. We talked about scattering our Aunt’s ashes several years ago over Bear Mountain and I asked her what David’s favorite places to be scattered might be and she said, “Oh that’s easy. William Sonoma and Dean and DeLuca.”

And I said, “I think that’s illegal.”

We both confessed to keeping a small baggie of our mother’s ashes in our homes and I also told her I’d kept a lock of my dad’s hair. And then I refilled her glass and served her the best meal I’d ever prepared. And we made a toast to David.

We have not made any further plans. We did go out for coffee today at Amy’s on Bleecker and sat next to Sofia Coppola and split a cupcake and my sister said, “I just can’t believe he’s not here.” And I said, “I know. And even if you try to stop thinking about him, you won’t be able to, because he is here in some way and he always will be.” And then I went home to walk my dog and look at more urns that might suit the man that David was.

As an aside, let me say that if you ever see me and my sister in William Sonoma holding a paint can, please don’t say anything. But do say a prayer for David, my bro, the large man who lived small.  Leave a message below, if you’re so inclined. And let’s all wish him well on his journey. We, your sisters,  will miss you. Amen.

March 27, 2010