Keggie Carew

this is excellent; it maybe should be 5 stars instead of 4.5. it's a fantastic look at ecology and animals and ecosystems and how politics (and money) gets in the way of doing the right thing. and how that effects animals and, in turn, the planet. it's smart and not without snark, it's got well known studies and personal anecdotes. it's very well done and the narration is also fantastic.

"It does not follow that because animals do not have complex syntactical language, they cannot think, as is often assumed. Coco's cognizance of human syntax, or lack of it, is not the point here. It's the dysfunctional relationships inevitable when we pull wild creatures into our world and remove them from theirs. It rarely works out well and we should stop doing it."

"Weapons gave us strength from club to spear to bow to gun. Pulling a trigger distances us, as does butchery, cooking, shopping, and euphemism."

"We forget abundance at our peril. And theirs."

"Here's the point. Food and agribusiness is a five trillion dollar global industry and counting. And that's political. Which is why you could be taken to court if you locked up your dog, but Saucy Sausages, Inc can put ten million pigs in metal cages so they can't even turn around, let alone put their nose in a drift of oak leaves, snuff the breeze, or ever feel the sun on their back. That is the reality for farmed animals. Me, humanizing them? No, animalizing them. Mammalizing them. There is no such thing as a factory pig farmer. It's a factory. The owner is behind a desk looking at numbers, spreadsheets, calculating inputs and outputs. The stock person has a job to do and a family to feed. The migrant is desperate for work. The consumer likes sausages. Government will not protect pigs because they don't give donations to political parties.

The profit is in the volume. Volume. Don't let's kid ourselves we are talking anything more than cheap sausages to gratify our greedy guts. This is not about feeding the world, the defense dredged up every time there is a question about animal welfare. Forget that a third of our food is wasted (1.3 billion tons or 3 trillion meals a year); over a third of global arable land grows crops for livestock, driving deforestation; that 7 kilos of plant protein produces 1 kilo of beef; and that there are now more obese humans than starving ones who have never eaten a sausage. For a hundred calories fed to animals, we receive 17 to 30 calories in meat and dairy products, like feeding a hundred bucks into a slot machine and winning back twenty. Every time. And we are supposed to be the rational creature. What a staggering waste of cereals, land, water, energy, and medication. Not to mention the required agrochemicals and resulting pollution. This is what threatens food security and drives poverty. People living in poverty are used as pawns to defend rich men's profit or assuage the average person's guilt. What twentieth and twenty-first century agricultural scientists and factory farming tycoons have achieved is to turn the farm animal, once again, into Decartes machine, and somehow, not enough people have noticed. We are complicit. We keep buying. We keep looking the other way. There is no outcry, apart from the lunatic fringe. We hate talking about it. We loathe reading about it. So we don't."

"Things have not improved for industrial farmed animals. They have simply become more systematic, more hidden away behind locked gates, signed 'No Entry' or 'Biosecurity.' There are things going on that should not be okay by anyone's standards. Gestation crate, veal crate, enriched cage. Animal welfare is a game of words, of enriched terms, of get-outs and loose interpretations. Guess what they call slightly bigger crates where a sow can turn round? Freedom pens."

"The methods, designs, and deaths we administer and allow in factory farms are legitimized evil."

"Our weight accounts for 36% of the biomass of all mammals on this planet. The animals we eat take up 60%, which leaves the mammals of the wild world just 4%."

"The term 'endangered species' has lost its potency from overuse."

"...we lose species faster than ever before. What a thing to wipe out a species. And what an indictment for it not to be a crime."… (meer)

Excerpted from a longer article:
Animal-Human Relationships
From turtles and koalas to animal babies, explore several new books that examine the lives of animals and their relationships with humans around the world.
...
Beastly: The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us
Keggie Carew, 2023, Abrams Press
Themes: Nature, Animals, Wildlife
Divided into ten parts, readers explore the relationship between humans and animals through history. Focusing on key encounters, Carew examines a wide range of creatures and the importance of biodiversity.
Take-aways: Weave the author’s anecdotes into a discussion of animal-human interactions through time.

...
Whether helping educators keep up-to-date in their subject-areas, promoting student reading in the content-areas, or simply encouraging nonfiction leisure reading, teacher librarians need to be aware of the best new titles across the curriculum and how to activate life-long learning. - Annette Lamb… (meer)

Random selection - Tracey Thorn mentioned this biography in her book so I added the title to my wishlist and then accidentally downloaded a copy at full price (I normally wait until books drop under £2.00 because I'm cheap, what can I say?) Well worth the money, however!

My name is Tom Carew but I have forgotten yours.

When her father developed dementia and started to forget not only his family but also his amazing life, Keggie Carew set out to remember for him by researching his top secret career in the Jedburghs of the SOE. Tom Carew fought alongside the Resistance in France, earning a DSO and Croix de Guerre, and with the Patriotic Burmese Forces in Burma as part of Force 136 during World War Two.

I found both the wartime chapters fascinating, although I did begin to skim read some of the detailed research about Burma. but luckily this is also a very personal and poignant account about who her father was, to his three wives and his four children, and also the man who started slipping away memory by memory until his death in 2009. Keggie recalls with heartbreaking honesty how she and her sister had to find a care home for him - which he subsequently escaped from - when they could no longer cope with him at home. Thomas Arthur Carew was an inspiring and occasionally infuriating man with a larger than life personality, and the reader gets to know him through the eyes and heart of a daughter's tribute. Keggie is an artist and not a writer, but the intimacy and intensity of her words really got to me in places.… (meer)

Tom Carew was quite an amazing guy; at the age of 24 he parachuted into Nazi-occupied France as part of a secret operation with the codename Jedburgh. As secret agents went, he was bold and talented and unbelievable brave and caused lots of disruption; he even managed to escape from the Germans after having been captured. Having completed a successful mission he next destination was Burma, a place that would forge his reputation, making him somewhat of a legend as ‘Lawrence of Burma’ or the ‘Mad Irishman’. His exploits culminated in the award of a Distinguished Service Order (DSO), the youngest officer to ever obtain this.

To Keggie though he was just her dad. She was proud of his record during the war, even though she didn’t always understand what he had done, nor the significance of his actions. He had a liberal view of school, taking her out to take part in activities and providing the school with dubious reasons why. Her parents then split, and with the arrival of a step-mother on the scene, it meant that the strong bond she once had with her father, had gone. This gap lasted far too long, but in 2003 her step mother passed away and they pretty much picked up where they left off. She accompanied him to a Jedburgh reunion to meet up with lots of other veterans, their attitude to life and refusal to defer to authority was quite refreshing and it prompted Keggie to start to begin to sift through the files in his loft to learn more about his wartime antics. What suddenly made this uncovering of her father’s history more urgent was that Tom had suffered a series of small strokes and was starting to show signs of the long decline into dementia. And as Tom’s memories ebbed away, Keggie began to recover them through the documents.

It is a complex story that Keggie tells about her father and family. She weaves together the plight of her father as he forgets who his children are with the drama and excitement of the behind lines war activities. He was quite an amazing man and his military achievements gained him a DSO, but after the war, he found it hard to settle into regular life as a civilian. Even in his care home, he managed to cause a certain amount of chaos. Keggie’s writing is immersive and at times dense, the section about his military work in Burma was almost as hard to get through as hacking your way through a jungle there, but she writes with a warmth and generosity about her father, a man who was a genuine character and hero.… (meer)