Greenstorm's Journal

I've been processing roughly 15lbs of pork per day (this is final product, deboned and trimmed and canned, so maybe 50lbs skinned hanging weight per day, which means roughly 12lbs bones for stock or discard, 13lbs fat into strips for rendering soap, 10lbs trim) for most of the last 14 days. It's a lot of work, and that's got me through roughly 700 of the 1600lbs of hanging weight pork I need to process total. Basically because it's stored outside in the shipping container, frozen, I have to bring in a couple shoulder or legs, let them thaw in a cooler because I don't have fridge space for these huge hunks of pork, debone and trim them when they're fully thawed so the knife can get through but not warm yet because that's not food safe, then can that meat right away since I don't want to refreeze and then thaw and then can. The whole process needs a fairly precise timeline and a significant time commitment; I can't take out eight shoulders and then decide I only have energy for four of them, or contrariwise I can't suddenly decide I have energy to do another leg or two if I haven't taken them in to thaw 10-12 hours previously.

All that is to say, I've canned a lot of meat and need to can a little more, but it's taking longer than I want to get through it because of the planning/thaw process. I thaw conservatively, so meat doesn't go bad, but that means that when I have extra energy I can't get ahead -- and getting ahead in unplanned bursts is how I do my best work.

So this morning I took two overflowing totes of mostly pork legs (maybe 14 legs and I think one or two shoulders) down to the new butcher shop the next town over. They are butchers only -- they don't slaughter or skin -- and I've been eyeing them but lining up my slaughter guy and their availability seemed like a little too much. Last night they posted that they had free time to make sausage if anyone had meat in the freezer, so I called them up... and they're going to make me a 25lb batch of plain smoked ("mennonite") sausage, a 25 lb batch of pepperoni, a 25 lb batch of jalapeno-not-cheddar smokies, a 10lb batch of pizza/sandwich salami, and then grind the rest of what I brought them. All sausage will be pork-only. I'm curious about the weight of what I brought them, I think it's maybe 250-350lbs hanging weight? The legs have little extra fat and trim, and a smaller percentage of bone. We'll see. But it takes a lot of work off my plate, especially the part of the work where I need to debone and then grind everything while it's still cold.

It's especially nice because the butcher folks are a young couple who have been doing this business for less than a year, maybe. They have a great social media game and are really transparent about their work, their workspace, etc. I'd like them to stick around.

Now I just have a bunch of loins to debone and sort into chops and tenderloins, the sirloins off those loins to can the last couple batches (I don't have a bone/bandsaw, so the pelvis in the sirloin precludes chops, sadly), and then as many bellies as I want to make into bacon. I've been considering a bacon-making party; invite people over, have them make bacon, then take it home in cure to smoke themselves (or put in artificial smoke) so it gets out of my space. I mean, having bacon is nice, but especially my very fatty bacon is a lot.

Anyhow, the processing is going to cost some money and it'll return a pretty standardized product, but it's a weight off my shoulders and I'm glad to have someone else do it. If they do a good job I can offload more of it onto them in the future, like maybe the deboning for my canning meat (imagine how easy that would make things) and I'll be able to feel out how trustworthy they are at handling the very nonstandard, fatty carcasses of my little pigs.

This does mean I'm not making any prosciutto out of this batch, which aligns with my attempt to get rid of the really noisy charcuterie fridge but does mean that in a year I'll run out of prosciutto. Maybe I need to ask for a new, silent fridge for my birthday this summer.

Anyhow: self-care choices have been made. Now I can focus a little more on my spring gardening, that landracing talk, etc. It's important, because I'm definitely less functional than I used to be. Last night as the canner cooled I spent the whole evening in the bath with the NAFEX apple family tree talk.

drive through the night:
the feeling of morning;
vision before colour

I got up at 4 in the morning so I could give the stove a bit of a burn on fresh wood before turning it down. The road was dark but not snowy, frosty but not wet. Newly-painted centerlines stood out under my single aging headlight and my high beams had a long reach. Sometimes I had company on the highway, usually in clumps going to the mill, to the pipeline camps, to a town. Often I was alone and that was better.

The Highway of Tears is becoming familiar. The cell signal is much better courtesy of a political push; this is how we deal with missing indigenous women (though to be fair the men die at a pretty high rate too): we put money into a program, in this case into some company's pockets. They put a bus in down here too, though it's not tremendously useful. Meanwhile the folks north of me, in Middle River and Takla, apparently call the ambulence when they are in dire need of a ride to town.

There was a lot of dark this morning. When I woke up, when I pulled out of the driveway with my grow lights shining through the window behind me, the sky was the clear bowl full of stars that dominates our winter landscape. The moon was a sliver superimposed on a sphere, low near the trees, and it took a very long time for the sky to grow pale grey behind me as I headed west.

There's no snow on the fields. The word I associate with this open, windblown, waiting-for-winter feeling is sere, colourless-dun and patient. When the light came up I was in the Bulkley Valley as it opens up, as the mountains rise to shape a valley, as the trees retreat to the hills and leave even the patchwork of the previous valley. With the mountains it feels wilder; with the fields it feels cozier and more settled. I like it here.

When I stopped for gas I could tell it was light because the truck, still for the first time in three hours, started crowing. The ducks were upset, chattering away, and that's always hard on my heart.

Three days of especially hard labour, of angling the vibrating pressure washer to kick up a minimum of bird-shit-spray, stray, and feathers into my eyes and sinuses as the light fled; of rounding up the ducks and pulling out the keepers over and over as they kept running back to rejoin the main group; of hauling and pushing and pulling heavy carriers as gently as possible; of carrying bucket after bucket of grain to every group of animals so they'd have days of food for the day I was gone and for an extra day in case something happened; finally four hours of relentless driving in the dark until the light crept up behind me and a bright spot of sunrise showed in the south (why the colour just in the south? I have no idea).

Unloading was easy, having enough carriers is a blessing that way since the animals don't need to be transferred.

The morning was for errands, but first I passed a sign that said "Alpine World" on the highway. When I stopped, the man who ran the plant shop said he'd forgotten to bring in the sign the other day and gave me a two-for-one deal on winter-bare potted apple trees: a Gloria and a State Fair will join my collection. We chatted about apples for a bit, then I moved on. The feed store was less helpful: $22 for a bag of layer pellets ($48 for organic) and I figure I should just wait till I get home. Then the wholesale place, where I get my yearly bakery-quality flour to mix with my home-ground stuff and where I picked up hedgehog mushrooms grown by a small local company. Since I'm innoculating logs with them I might as well taste them, right? The "taste like crab" thing arouses both my suspicion and my interest.

I'm also somewhere I can replace the headlight that went out the day before, so I picked up one of those and some oil. I think she might be burning a little oil? Too hot to check right now though.

By that time it was 11, and my check-in at the hotel was 1:30. I borrowed their parking lot, right in downtown, and walked to lunch and to more errands and sightseeing: replacing insurance, getting soft pretzels and doughnuts for lunch on the road tomorrow, inhaling and looking for inspiration in the european deli/sausage shop, picking up beer from the local brewery, looking at potter's shops and bookshops.

Halfway through my plate of pierogies and sour cream I noticed a cat come to the front door of the restaurant and sit expectantly in front of the glass. After a nod from the owner I let him in and he stalked meaningfully into the back room; twenty minutes later as I was nearing the bottom of my London Fog he stalked back out and sat by the door again, at which point I let him out. "It's not my cat" the owner said, "but he can come in"

The most delightful part of the town was the little farm/craft hub. It had two walls of fridge and freezer cases, with each little section labelled with a different farm: this one had lamb, this one had pork, this one had frozen meat pies. I was badly tempted by another set of mushrooms, and by a mushroom grow kit, but my strategy of doing a full circle of the place before picking up a shopping basket paid off: I was over budget, but not as much as I could have been.

Beside the fridges and freezers were tables of storage produce, mostly garlic and squash at this time of year. There was a bunch of baking, dried mushroom powder and coffee and jerky, and then the other wing of the building was occupied by arts and crafts. All sorts of paintings were on one wall, glass baubles hung from the ceiling, and a blacksmith's display of hooks and pokers took up the back. Textile arts and cosmetics were displayed in two rows down the center, each arranged by artist as the food had been arranged by farmer. Here was a farmer that raised their own alpacas and spun impossibly soft scarves; there was someone who sewed waterproof canvas diaper covers and bags; on the other wall was jewellery and sweaters and round hats and pointy hats.

Altogether it was perfect: in effect a condensed farmer's market full of lovely displays closely side-by-side. The lovely variety and texture of goods was highlighted by how closely the displays could be spaced: unlike a farmer's market there was no crowd and no one was standing behind their goods watching. Lacking the budget to buy paintings I bought three greeting cards from one artist and four from another which will get clustered in frames in my two bathrooms. I chose three kinds of garlic because of course I did, music and spanish roja and marino, half of each to eat and half to plant. The music was notably bigger than the others. I also brought three chocolate bars out with me, half-sized ones (!) suitable for my way of eating sweets: sour cherry with light and with dark chocolate, and a peanut dark chocolate. The mushroom kit remained behind, as did the soft fingerless driving gloves and the frozen spanakopita and the blacksmith's towel hooks.

With that I checked into the hotel. When I reserved the room I asked for something on the top floor (I don't like people above me) with a bathtub and that's what I got. With a courteous "are you alright with stairs" I was given actual keys and headed down the long corridor, up the stairs, and then back the length of the building to find a big, old, worn, sparkling clean, comfy room facing a quiet back street. One thirty, time to collapse, to touch base with folks, to just enjoy the feeling of...

...there's nothing. My hobbies aren't here (though I brought patterns and books to read) and folks are still at work. These days of working my body hard (I was hobbling last night until I put on my muscle salve) and planning and keeping the pressure on myself let up into this evening of perfect release where I sit in a hotel room and contemplate the options of bath or nap, pizza or sushi, light from a bulb or an open window.

I love this feeling and I also can't get here without the buildup. A lack of demands is in itself a demand, and I can't experience it except when the cliff of necessary work falls out from under me and I'm left in midair, still trying to run and finding that instead I'm flying. In a good world I fly far enough to land on the next, carefully-chosen cliff and dig into another good run followed by another flight, and so on. Pacing those leaps and those runs is everything, is the difference between energy and burnout, is the difference between flying and crashing.

There's room in this space for all of me, for delight in the farm hub and deep sadness as the way the goslings' father called after them as I carried them away, for the texture of locally-raised beef jerky strips and lazy contemplation of dinner and the sideways leap of just sitting and writing instead of any of that. There's room for feeling capable and confident as I look up headlight replacement videos and for relief at being able to go home from a place where civil rights stickers in the windows are all in reference to vaccines and masks and wistfulness and envy and possible future thoughts about living somewhere full of small farmers and a little hub I could contribute to. There's room for my body to be tired and for the bed to come up and support it and for me to stay sitting up, typing, with the silvery feeling of exhaustion in my head and for that to be an ok choice.

Pizza or sushi? Bath or nap? I could install the headlights first, even?

Either way, I made it. I did all of it, on my own, and I am here fully filling up my space.

Vision first, but then: colour.

Prepping for the trip still in odd moments at work. It's going to take a bunch of prepping.

o Talked to the abattoir, I can pick up either around 5pm the day of (fresh) or 2-3pm the day after (frozen). Neither of those really allows me to drive home across full daylight. Processing what I'll do.

o Keeping an eye on the weather. Snow is supposed to hit afternoon/evening of "the day after" (so maybe I should load the fresh birds up in coolers with ice and try driving straight home? But it's a 4 hour drive, and I'll have done the 4 hour drive in at 5am that morning, but I'll maybe avoid snow?)

o Updated BCAA/roadside auto insurance, just in case

o Got grain last night, need to offload a bunch of it still, which means...

o Need to cut and power wash a couple more grain barrels (and need to powerwash carriers and coolers)

o Still researching possible places to stay, there's a nice place (The Creamery Inn) in a small town nearby, but that isn't close to restaurants. There's also a treehouse place in that small town that would be fun if Tucker was coming along. Hotels in the bigger town are an option. Keeping an eye on budget, of course, this will cost me a couple hundred in gas and more than that in butchers' fees.

o Got snow tires put on.

o Slowly acclimatizing the ducks to eating in the goose shed, so I can put them in there Wed night, close the door, and get them in the carriers on Thurs so I can leave at 5am Friday.

o It would be great to get the mat off the truck bed and wash under it.

o I definitely need to put the top on the truck, which I haven't done singlehandedly before. It's several hundred pounds and very awkward, I think I have a system that involves scootching it along 2x4s. I should probably find someone who can be a safety check-in after I do that. I guess that'll happen Wed evening, since I need to unload tires and grain tonight.

o I need to choose which geese are going, I have three selected but need to select the other couple.

o Also need to pull my breeder ducks.

o Need to get lumber and other odds and ends under cover suddenly, since it's supposed to snow and if it sticks then everything is there forever/until May or June.

o Really should cover straw.

o Need to pack, including birth control pills and pads since this of course will be happening over my period.

o Need to make sure the truck has emergency supplies if I need to sleep in it, patch a tire, etc.

o Need to figure out how to get both full carriers and coolers into the truck, this is a lot of items that take up space. Tetrisy.

o Need to load the animals up on food/water on Thurs night.

o I'm tired.

Here we are. Solstice.

It's a couple days until the actual night, but I'm in that liminal space now. This is, finally, the dark fertile peace. It's the rest before germination. Everything before was just inputs, ready to be broken down into the new year's growth.

I never sleep well before I load animals. Loading took a couple days (as it should, to be gentlest on them and to stress them least). The big one was the geese: I put their food and water in the doorway to the woodshed lean-to and then went outside a couple times during the day to walk them into the lean-to. Then I closed the lean-to door behind me and shuttled them into the woodshed, a batch at a time. I only got just over half in there, but there were enough of the ones I wanted to send 12 to the abattoir.

That was day 1. They needed to be kept without food for day 2, then in the evening Tucker helped me load them up into crates. The workflow was as follows: I went into the woodshed with a headlamp, the geese flocked away from me and scrambled themselves into a corner, I caught the ones that were going (mixed or mismarked), and carried them one by one into crates while Tucker closed and opened the many doors (including crate and woodshed door) involved.

Choosing is always the hard part for me. Choosing from scared geese late at night, the night before slaughter: that's very hard. And geese are hard because I love them and think they're so beautiful. I mean, I love my pigs and think they look neat with their spots and mohawks, but it's not quite the same.

So then day 3 I drove to Telkwa and back (google says it's 3.5 hours of straight driving to get there. Add a trailer, a bit of slush on the roads, and stopping for gas and I left at 7am and got home just after 5pm). I saw the abattoir for the first time: it had friendly competent-seeming people, it was tidy and looked well-run. It felt like a real neighbourhood place, that is, it was smallish, with maybe 5 people there, and there were geese, rabbits, ducks, and roosters waiting in line. I would not have trusted my little ones anywhere else.

More aside about the abattoir: it's a huge incentive to move to that area. Having folks who are polite, responsive, flexible, take all animals, and do things the old way makes such a difference. I also, while I was unloading, felt acute envy for the folks who worked there. I so miss working with my hands, doing an actual physical job, turning one thing into something else (all creation is just repurposing), being out in the sunshine and open air. I am dead sure that job could not pay my bills but more and more I want it. And, I suppose, less and less do I want to be in charge of a place like that.

So anyhow, I didn't sleep well for several days because loading took several days. I should remember that I can't back the trailer into my driveway at night after a long day (or several days): I tried several times before driving around the block and nosing in. This was Ron's trailer, so it's much more responsive than the double axle I've been driving and it just kept jackknifing. This time I quit before I backed it into the ditch at least.

Today I need to put the trailer somewhere reasonable, likely back it out and back it back in (hello, language) and then on Monday/Tuesday (over close to actual solstice) Tucker and I will drive out in his little car and pick up the processed animals. We'll stay in a hotel overnight, pick up some sushi, and maybe look at some mountains or waterfalls or properties for sale.

I'll make some prosciutto out of the breasts of some of those geese, or some smoked spickgans-style hams. I'll confit some of the bodies and likely can those. Some I will keep whole, and roast over the coming year. None of these have the demanding load on my attention that rounding up animals for either slaughter or sale does: this is mostly rest.

I still have quail and many chickens to process but plan to do that on my own time, it doesn't have a deadline. It's not rest, but it's not looming.

The hard part is done. Now comes putting things in order.

Now and forever is the time to honour and mourn the hard part.

It feels like rest.

I've just finished scalding and gutting a suckling pig. She was born Sept 29 so that puts her at just shy of 7 weeks. She's a nice size for roasting and the scalding went pretty ok; it would have done really easily in a mechanical plucker I think. She had a rectal prolapse that I couldn't get to go back inside her; I saw it this morning and brought her in (she seemed cold) to warm up and in the hopes that I could fix it. I could not. So maybe this is my first entirely solo pig kill; I used the little captive bolt stunner.

The little ones have been somewhat constipated, which is probably the root cause of this. I've been trying to get them to drink water but they just will not. At this point I'm mixing enough water with their grains to just be a very very wet soup. Maybe I should try bringing them hot water?

This girl was the daughter of Black Chunk, who was herself born here. She has three uncastrated male siblings that will become their own roasters in mid-December, but I'm getting them done professionally.

It's getting dark out there now - 4:30 is dusk with daylight savings time - and the pigs are frolicking all over, chasing each other and having zoomies. I think someone might be in heat, and I think Rapunzel might be pregnant. I have Penny on my calendar as due on American Thanksgiving but she's not looking super round. I guess we will see.

Tucker reminded me that even though things are getting better for me, I told myself I still want to downsize the farm. And I do. I cannot decide between keeping Baby and keeping Oak though.

My feelings about this all perhaps belong in a different post, written once I have a cup of tea.

4 roaster pigs and up to 15 geese in Telkwa before noon on Dec 17th, poultry done on the Friday pigs done on the Monday. I'm really hoping I can get them into the SUV without trailer.

4 adult pigs or whatever in Vanderhoof dropped off on April 19th.

Today was a slaughter day. It was harder for me than they've been before, and I suspect the sadness of it will linger: these are the first sows I've slaughtered, that is, the first ones who had babies for me. One of them, Sparky, was one of my original sows. They were both good girls.

The kill was clean, and the bleed out was very good: when I stuck I actually hit Sparky's heart. The shooter/helper today was a friend's husband who'd done a bunch of these in Newfoundland (?) where he's from; in addition to his excellent shot placement he also was very useful at dragging heavy stuff. We went from his arrival to gutted and halved by noon, then he headed home and we spent some time recovering. I am bringing a bunch of bacon to him (from a previous kill) tomorrow.

Then will be a very lot of butchering. Sparky's the heaviest pig I've done, so there's a lot of physical strength needed, but her size is welcome. It means I'll be able to do some good big chunks of cured meat. I didn't cure much if anything from the last couple slaughters, except maybe bacon, so I'm in need of new prosciutto stocks.

I feel better having it done

Yesterday both Josh and Tucker made it a point to call me in the evening and chat, which was nice.

And now I'm tired and wishing I was able to put myself into a good paper book for an hour before sleep. I used to read so much and now I can barely keep my attention on a page at all. It's such a loss, especially on nights like this.

At this time last year I got my first muscovy "ducks" (which are not actually ducks in the same way coastal redcedars are "thuja" and not "cedrus" or rose of sharon isn't a rose- their common name is a legacy of our tendency to reuse colonial names instead of using new names for new species). There were five of them, all female: Lilac, Silver, Cream, Chocolate, and Chocolate II. Later in the year my family brought me up a drake from the coast ("Drake") and the little flock was completed.

We can discuss how I name my animals some other time.

The muscovies overwintered in a little shed I modified out of a lean-to. The girls had relatively rough feathers; they hadn't had water to bathe in where they came from, just drinking water. Bathing encourages their waterproofing gland and makes them sleek and weather resistant. I didn't let them out because I wasn't certain they'd stay, but I did give them a very small outdoor yard that had a tub of water to bathe in. They bathed a lot, and pooped a lot, to the point where I needed to chip ice-shit mixture away from their tub to empty it.

In the spring Chocolate started sitting on a nest of eggs even before the snow was gone. She hatched 6 adorable ducklings and mothered them well. Lilac and Chocolate II hatched, and Chocolate II stole the babies, taking care of a total of 18 little ones. They were also adorable. As the weather warmed the Silver and Cream also sat but with less success and I lost some ducklings both to an unknown issue (narrowed down to niacin deficiency from too much foraging, heat stroke, or mushroom poisoning) and to the evacuation.

Tiny yellow/black fluffballs grew up into truly lovely birds faster than I could imagine. Muscovies are very quiet birds. They make a little hissing or trilling sound depending on sex, fly around some, and congregate in little groups to chat and look at the sky. Often they'd be perching on my deck railing when I looked out in the morning, and even still the youngest little girl will fly up to my railing to hang out.

Thing is, none of the birds I have can live well in the same sex ratio in which they're born. I ended up with very roughly 18 male muscovies to 8 females hatched this year. Once those eggs hatched the fate of most of those males was set. If I wanted to continue keeping muscovies - and I love them and would be very sad to be without them - either I or someone else would have to kill some. When I raised rats I carefully placed all my babies in pet homes. There are not pet homes for male birds. And... I was not going to ship my babies off to be confused and terrified before they were killed.

I had a taste of what was coming in the summer. Lilac had a prolapse: that's where the poop/urine/egg tract (it's all one hole in birds) inverts and there are parts hanging out the body that really should be inside. I hate it when this happens to any animal. There's a really high chance for infection if it's not dealt with quickly and it just hits my creeping horror buttons. We caught her, tried to re-insert the organ, but there was too much damage and things wouldn't line up right. Tucker helped me; we calmed her, held her down, and chopped off her head with an axe. When she had finished bleeding and twitching I plucked her, gutted her, cut her up, and put her in the freezer.

I don't remember if that was before or after I caught everyone and put them in a rigged-up trailer to evacuate them in the face of our wildfires. We drove for hours, then they had to be caught in the trailer and transferred to a small enclosure. The enclosure had a pool and plenty of straw so they were happy there until they had to be shepherded back into the trailer and hauled back.

Work was busy and the birds were still growing so I left well enough alone.

At some point they molted, growing new feathers to keep them warm over winter and it turned out Chocolate II was actually Lilac II.

When snow started to fall in October I realised just how much muscovies forage. Once the ground was covered my feed bill quadrupled. I started going through a full bag of feed a day, which I supplemented with corn to add carbs/heat/fat to help the birds prepare for the winter. When I went away for a week I left my petsitter with a pile of feed bags over a meter high so they wouldn't run out.

The males were starting to come into sexual maturity. They were tusseling over food, but more worryingly they were starting to mate. Open pools of water act as an aphrodesiac for birds so when I filled my kiddie pools every evening mating would start. Because I had double as many males as females, and because they mated on water, the females would be in the pools for a long time with their heads pushed under water over and over. Over-mating can also increase the chance of prolapse. It was time.

Josh came over last weekend. There was a bunch of stuff that needed doing in addition to the birds and we both did all that first: clean the chimney, assemble the snowblower, get straw. On the night before butcher I filled the pools many times so the muscovies could all play their game of diving into the pool, flapping their wings in a shower of sparkling water, and running out and away as fast as they could. They traded dives like kids waiting their turn on a slide. The next morning their feathers were frosted on the tips.

There were more muscovies to butcher than I had time and energy and choosing which ones would go on this first day was difficult. I kept some specifically in to choose among to breed later and some just because I liked them (Chocolate's first 3 boys, Friendly the black muscovy who eats out of my hand, and a gorgeous chocolate drake) and some were just harder to catch so they didn't make this round. We carried them to the large kill cone set up between two aspen trees at the far end of the yard, tucked them in there, and I held their feet while Josh cut off their heads. After the first one ravens began to circle. Some dogs were making a ruckus down the road and Avallu moved from one corner of the property to another to protect us. He didn't complain that the enticing blood smells made his job harder. Thea was locked inside so she wouldn't get her puppy curiosity and enthusiasm in the way.

Some I stroked their heads and I cried a little. Some were businesslike. When the head was cut off blood came in twin streams from the stump of the neck and stained the base of the trees an astonishingly red colour against brown leaves and the little bit of snow on the ground. When the heads landed on the ground they blinked and the beaks opened and closed; the bodies in the cones convulsed a bit and then eventually stilled. They were placed side by side in the snow until it was done.

None of this was easy. Not easy, either, was the following ten hours of wrestling with scalding and plucking and gutting and finally letting the carcasses freeze outside once they were gutted.

It won't be easy to cut up the carcasses, to slide breasts into the sous vide and then sear them, to confit or render down the bodies for stock. My feelings are sadness and some sort of resigned awe, or perhaps awe-struck resignation. Every human is made out of dead things: dead animals and dead plants that grew out of dead animals at some point in our past. That's a fundamental truth. There is meaning in putting my hand on the taut reality of that truth and feeling it thrum.

But honestly, more than anything, I love my animals. They are a self-contained society of alien beauty and behaviours. They enrich the world by their presence. If I am going to allow them to breed, if I am going to let their generations progress into the future with each one slightly more suited to my land as I gently steer their evolution, then some will also need to die. My choice is to be the person who kills them.

And so I have.