Good blogging

Clearly, the author has better things to do than decorate dropcaps ;~) That blogger would be Stephen Bodio [a longtime Terrierman favorite], and this past week his Querencia included photos of an Anatolian LGD squaring off with a burro; a discussion on the merits of hunting cranes [prompted by my own fave blogger Julie Zickefoose]; and a link to a New Yorker review by Bill Buford of "three books by authors from three backgrounds—a farmer, a chef, and a pig-slaughtering, bacon-loving descendant of butchers — remarkably alike in their gleeful chauvinism about being carnivores." The River Cottage Meat Book, writes Buford, opens with "an eleven-photograph sequence that shows the author taking two cows to slaughter":

The pictures are not sensational, but they are unflinching [...] Why is it considered entertainment when a predator kills another animal in a wild-life film, Fearnley-Whittingstall wonders, “whereas the final moments of human predation of our farmed livestock are considered too disturbing and shameful to be made available even for information.” The reader understands the point. Meat comes from an animal—a banal connection that has been obscured by the way supermarkets prepare and present our food—and the animal has to be killed. If you fear the sight of a carcass, you shouldn’t be eating from it.

All this, and not a marching Santa in sight. Two opposable thumbs up.