Laura’s second love is horses. She is the past Vice Presidents of Return to Freedom: The American Wild Horse Sanctuary, and the National Wild Horse Rescue & Sanctuary, which oversaw the rescue capture of 236 wild horses from the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon. Laura operates a small horse rescue in northern California (along with the rescue and care of a colony of feral cats who’ve arrived in her barn).

Laura is a web site designer as well. Some of her sites include:

Perhaps you’ve seen the pictures; rows and rows of chickens stacked in tiers of cages, confined in wire a few feet or a few inches above their own waste — like dead sardines in tin cans. What the pictures can’t convey, though, is how badly this environment smells. Or how awful it sounds.

Fecal and decomposing flesh odors are encountered long before one enters the row shed. It is a heavy stench — and the birds will live in their own waste for a lifetime. Many of them will die from the sheer ordeal of confinement and disease, and their putrefying corposes rot on and under the wire mesh. And then there’s the noise: a cacophony of voices, rising in tremendous pitch, dropping to a level where one can almost hear one’s self think and then picking up again for some reason or another, some unseen trauma only the birds can detect.

Each chicken, averaging three to four pounds, with a wingspan of 30-32 inches is crammed with 4 to 8 other birds into an 18-20 inches high by 18-20 inches wide cage. That means each bird gets 48 square inches of living space — her entire life. In one factory alone, as many as 50,000-125,000 birds are packed and packaged like this. After a year of heavy egg production, the chickens are too “wasted” for anything but pot pies and the like; most Americans would be mortified to see a battery hen emerge from her cage.

Egg-laying chickens also die from such things as “cage layer fatigue,” and from “egg-bound,” which is a condition that kills them when they are simply too weak to pass another egg. They suffer from “swollen head” and “fatty liver” syndromes, foot and leg deformities, the rubbing and pecking off of their feathers, and, of course, maternal deprivation when every egg is collected from under each hen the second it is laid.

But those are the hidden sufferings, the ones unseen by the untrained eye. Here is another one: the egg hatchery.

Using a selective breeding stock (whose males have their toes cut off at certain joints and their combs sheared close to their heads), hatcheries collectively produce hundreds of millions of fertile eggs and incubate them in specialized warehouses. A single hatchery can incubate 68,000 to 110,000 eggs at once. The eggs are temperature controlled, stacked in trays that fill wheeled carts from floor to ceiling. Rows of these carts are housed in incubator rooms, ready for processing as soon as the eggs hatch. After 22 days of incubation (including its first day inside the hen), the chicks emerge en masse. And for every female egg-laying chicken hatched in the United States, a male chick is also brought into the process. What that means is that approximately 300 million female and 300 million male chicks are hatched each year for the U.S. egg industry — or roughly 20 every second.

At the hatchery, the females are separated from the males by “sexers” who grab the chicks from the trays, turn them over, sex them, and then send them into one of two places.

The female chicks (and many male chicks who escape the sexing process) are prepared for egg production farms. First, they are debeaked, a process involving the burning off of the ends of their tiny beaks with a hot blade in order to prevent them from “cannibalizing” each other in the close confinement of the battery barn. They are often debeaked again at 12-20 weeks old — before they begin laying. Many of them die within 24 hours from the shock and blood loss of debeaking, and many others are debeaked a third time as a result of poor procedure given the speed of the handlers — some 12-15 birds a minute, one bird every two or three seconds. Machine operators are also advised not to “sear the eyes when trimming.”

The pain of debeaking is obvious: chicks peep loudly and defecate profusely as they undergo the searing blade. Further, a number of chicks lose their beaks entirely — making it impossible for them to eat. In essence, they’ll starve to death at the battery farm.

The female chicks are then vaccinated against contagious diseases, also by automated mechanical injectors, some 7,000-8,000 birds a day at a single hatchery, or 2,500-3,500 chicks every hour per worker. Infection at the injection site (behind the chicks’ heads) is common and lethal. Millions more chicks also suffer and die in transport to the farms. The male chicks — because they don’t lay eggs and are not economically viable meat chickens — are simply trashed. Some a day or two old, most of them barely even hatched, the male chicks are tossed by the sexers into garbage tubs literally by the thousands. The ones on top form a weighty, suffocating layer, killing the ones beneath.

From there, unwanted male chicks are disposed of in a variety of ways: they are thrown into dumpsters, along with every day trash, and left to die, or into large plastic bags to suffocate. Or they are dumped onto augers, large “screws” that move the chicks into waiting fertilizer trucks. The augers, in the process, grind up and mutilate the baby birds. The chicks—dead, dying and mutilated — are dumped onto neighboring fields with manure spreaders. Writes one eyewitness, “I could see the chicks inside the spreader and many of them were not totally ground up. A horrible peeping came from the pile.”

In its ever relentless quest to automate more and more of its production techniques, the egg industry has experimented with industrial-strength garbage disposals to grind up the unwanted chicks. One research scientist described the event: “Even after 20 seconds, there were only partly damaged animals with whole skulls” in the disposal. On a battery farm, the relentless caged cacophony is deafening. In the hatchery — hopelessly buried beneath the nonchalance of egg factory processing—is the fever-pitch peeping of desperately dying, newly born birds.

During the first 24 hours after being laid by a hen, an egg develops a tiny beating heart. Left to its mother, it will become a vibrant life, able to follow her and its siblings in search of food the very day it is hatched. In the hands of the egg industry, this chick is merely one of two things: a commodity without feelings or needs, or a tiny living being callously turned into trash.

You may save chicks and chickens from the poultry industry simply by not eating them or their byproducts.

Fifty million years ago, a small dog-like creature called Eohippus evolved on the North American continent. In fact, this forerunner to the modern horse was traced to the Tennessee Valley. After evolving into Equus and disappearing into Asia and Africa presumably 11 to 13 thousand years ago, the horse returned to our soil with the Spanish in the early 1500s. From their hands, a few escaped onto the American canvas and reverted to a wild state. The horse had come home — but the welcome has only proved deadly.

According to Western writer J. Frank Dobie, their numbers in the 19th century reached more than 2 million. But by the time the wild horse received federal protection in 1971, it was officially estimated that only about 17,000 of them roamed America’s plains. More than 1 million had been conscripted for World War I combat; the rest had been hunted for their flesh, for the chicken feed and dog food companies, and for the sport of it. They were chased by helicopters and sprayed with buckshot; they were run down with motorized vehicles and, deathly exhausted, weighted with tires so they could be easily picked up by rendering trucks. They were run off cliffs, gunned down at full gallop, shot in corralled bloodbaths, and buried in mass graves.

Like the bison, the wild horse had been driven to the edge.

Enter Velma Johnston, a.k.a. “Wild Horse Annie.” After seeing blood coming from a livestock truck, she followed it to a rendering plant and discovered how America’s wild horses were being pipelined out of the West. Her crusade led to the passage of a 1959 law that banned the use of motorized vehicles and aircraft to capture wild horses.

In the end, it was public outcry that ended the open-faced carnage — and it came from the nation’s schoolchildren and their mothers: in 1971, more letters poured into Congress over the plight of wild horses than any other non-war issue in U.S. history; there wasn’t a single dissenting vote, and one congressman alone reported receiving 14,000 letters. President Nixon signed the bill into law on December 15, 1971. And so the Wild Free-Roaming Horse & Burro Act was passed, declaring that “wild horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene.” The Act was later amended by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 and the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978.

By the people, of the people, for the people. There has never been a truer case.

Wild Horse Annie’s 1959 legislation allowed the mustang (from the Spanish word mestengo, or “stray beast”) to get a desperate foothold in the American West. Wild horse numbers grew and consequently encouraged the wrath of ranchers who paid to graze their cattle on the public domain. The animals also annoyed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which was appointed to manage the West, horses and all—making the agency the biggest horse wrangler in the country.

It is a war as old as the West itself. What is useful is used, what is not is destroyed — with contempt. In a mechanized world, not even the cattle industry has a need for living horsepower.

The 1971 law also stipulated that the wild horse be managed at its then-current population level — a figure that had yet to be determined. But it’s that number that lies at the core of this deadly controversy.

The Numbers Game

The history of wild horse management is as complex as it is controversial. The BLM created its Adopt-a-Horse program in 1976 as a means of ridding the west of wild horses — with the public’s permission. Since the program began, more than 200,000 horses and burros have been rounded up off public lands and sifted through the adoption pipeline. The BLM claims it has adopted out 157,000 of the animals, though many of its captives have been sent to slaughter — and often with the BLM’s help.

In 1984, for example, the BLM waived its fees to encourage more adoptions, and thousands of horses began arriving at slaughterhouses for profit. Little had changed in the West: although there were no slaughters on the open range, no mass graves, horses were still being taken from the public domain to the killing plants. To counter the mass killings and appease public sentiment, the BLM then enacted a titling program that stipulated that an adopter couldn’t technically “own” a wild horse until one year after its adoption, thereby making it illegal to sell it to anyone else. In effect, it made the expense of caring for a horse during that time outweigh its meat price.

The 1971 Act stipulated that the wild horse be managed at its then-current population level, officially estimated by BLM at 17,000 (three years later, BLM’s first census found over 42,000 horses). To the horses’ detriment, both sides agreed to allow the government to manage wild horse populations at that “official” 1971 level. Eleven years later, a study by the National Academy of Sciences found BLM’s 1971 estimate to have been “undoubtedly low to an unknown, but perhaps substantial, degree,” given subsequent census results and taking into account the horses’ growth rate and the number of horses since removed. But the damage had already been done; “management levels” had been etched in stone, and processes for removal of “excess” horses were well in place.

The BLM was caught in the crossfire. Cattle interests wanted to see the horse removed; the public and activists wanted to leave horses on public lands. So just how many horses could the BLM legally remove? Underfunded, the agency agreed to settle the numbers question through a National Academy of Sciences study. Six years and $6 million later, and partly based on the number of horses being rounded up and adopted, the Academy reported that there was a base wild horse population of 50,000 animals at the time the 1971 Free-Roaming Wild Horse & Burro Act was passed into law. What they didn’t find, however — and nor could the BLM prove it to them — was any wild horse impaction on grazing. Of course, the finding wasn’t good enough for some. Though the figure settled the question of how many horses the 1971 Act protected, the BLM’s estimate of “excess” horses was, well, outnumbered. It had to leave 50,000 animals on public lands after all.

Enter Senator James McClure (R-ID), head of the Committee for Energy and Natural Resources and for Interior and Insular Affairs. Himself a man of the West, and believing the horse to be a useless free-loader on public lands, he set out to help rid of them. A stacked deck of officials was appointed to the BLM based on McClure’s ability to fund the agency, and — as some activists describe it — a “new kingdom emerged.” New trucks. New positions. And a new plan.

In 1975, determined to remove the wild horses but unable to capture them on horseback, the BLM amended the 1959 law (prohibiting motorized vehicles for captures), thus allowing them the use of aircraft, such as helicopters. It also couldn’t settle on whether the 1971 Act referred to the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture to oversee the enforcement of the law. The lands — and the rules — were split: the BLM and the Forest Service came under Interior regulations; USFWS came under Agriculture. In short, the BLM has the power to use motorized vehicles to capture wild horses but it can’t kill them; Fish & Wildlife Service can kill horses; it just can’t use motorized vehicles to catch them.
When the 1971 Act was passed, wild horses and burros were assigned 303 herd areas representing some 47 million acres of public land. Over the years, agency regulations — not legislative amendments — have stripped the horses of their range; they are now managed in 201 Herd Management Areas (HMAs) on less than 35 million acres.

In the summer of 1993, the BLM estimated the wild horse population in Nevada to be at 24,000. Determined to show that the BLM’s figures of “excess” horses were inaccurate, activists logged more than 250 hours in the air, along with Michael Blake, author of Dances With Wolves, counting wild horses. They found 300 skulls and only 8,300 free-roaming horses. “This government is taking our horses when and where they please,” Michael Blake told the press. “They are taking them in the dark of night. The wild horses not going to the slaughterhouse floor — where their throats are cut for money — are traveling to points of incarceration.” The BLM estimated Nevada’s wild horse population to be roughly 24,000. It recommended the removal of more than 9,600 animals — 1,300 more than horse defenders and Blake could even find on the entire Nevada desert.

In 2001, the BLM obtained a 50% increase in annual budget to $29 million for implementation of an aggressive removal campaign. Twenty-four thousand horses were slated for capture with an “appropriate management level” target of 26,000. By its most recent figures, the BLM estimates the total American wild horse population to be about 33,000 animals (of which about half can be found in Nevada).

Today, some 36,000 wild horses are awaiting their fate in holding facilities such as Palomino Valley in Nevada, and Susanville in northern California. Four-year contracts have been awarded to private ranchers in Oklahoma and Kansas to manage long-term holding facilities. Each can hold 2,000-3,500 horses.

In 2005, BLM’s wild horse and burro budget was increased by another third. In Fiscal Year 2010, it received another 30 percent boost, now costing the taxpayer $64 million a year to allow the BLM to continue to round up and pipeline thousands more wild horses.

Wild horse populations increased until the advent of the “Cattle Kingdom.” Ranchers no longer viewed horses as necessary tools for moving cattle, but as nuisance animals and competitors for grasslands upon which their cattle fed — marking the beginning of the mass slaughter of horses.

In 1812, Spanish cattle ranchers slaughtered 30,000 horses in the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, claiming they were robbing cattle of vital grass.

The Name and the Lands Game

In cattlemen terms, wild horses are “sons of bitches,” eyesores, habitat destroyers, and misfits; in BLM terms, they are “shitters.” History, on the other hand, will bear them out as scapegoats: contrary to popular belief, wild horses are not destroying public lands where they are found amidst 6 million heads of cattle and sheep. In fact, a 1990 General Accounting Office report showed that livestock consumed 81% of Nevada’s forage in the four studied horse areas.

Why is there such determination to rid our public lands of wild horses? For many — the livestock lobby, government agencies, and even environmental and wildlife protection organizations — the wild horse isn’t a wild animal at all, but a domesticated animal gone feral. This mongrel of a horse is not, they argue, native American wildlife. Considered an “exotic,” it competes for habitat with such species as elk and pronghorn antelope, and it decimates rangeland used by domestic livestock. It must be controlled, removed, and, if necessary, gunned down.

But the wild horse removal is a tragically grim and deadly tale of systematic elimination. Those entrusted with the power to enforce the people’s law have been using it to the detriment of the horses — and doing so behind the people’s backs. In fact, the BLM refers to roundups as “gathers,” making them more palatable to public opinion.

Despite numerous attempts by vested interests to cripple the 1971 Wild Horse & Burro Act, not a single amendment has passed. Americans have made their intentions known over and over again: They want wild horses — these feral, exotic, “sonsofbitches” — left in the public domain. And they wrongly believe the government is granting their wish. The Act states, “It is the policy of Congress that wild free-roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death.” And yet, unabated, the BLM, the Department of the Interior, and the Forest Service continue to engage in all those acts without reprimand.

When the law was passed in 1971, wild horses and burros were assigned to 305 Herd Management Areas (HMAs) and given some 80 million acres of public land in 16 states to call their home. Agency regulations — not legislative amendments — have stripped the horses of their homeland; they are now managed in 186 HMAs on less than 44 million acres in just ten states.

And it all boils down to money: under the Department of Interior’s “multiple-use” principles, only so much cattle, so much wildlife, and so many wild horses are allowed on federal lands. The wildlife is “paid for” by hunters’ licensing fees. Cattle are “paid for” by the meat industry: $1.35 per head per month to graze the public domain. Horses, on the other hand, take up one “Animal Unit Month” (AUM), but no one is paying their way. Each horse removed from the West frees up another AUM for cattle or sheep or game antelope (see Public Lands Grazing & the AUM Connection).

In most cases, horses are being removed from the public rangeland because they are monetarily valueless. One can easily adopt a wild horse for as little as $125 a head. The taxpayer cost of removing the animal from the wild is $1,125. Cattle ranchers pay a small grazing fee for each bovine on the range, but there is only so much land to go around, only so much that can be “rented.” Contrary to popular belief, wild horses are not destroying public lands where they’re found amidst 6 million cattle and sheep — it’s that no one pays to have them there. Or gets paid to keep them there. In fact, a 1990 Government Accounting Office report showed that livestock consumed 81 percent of Nevada’s forage in the four studied horse areas.

Here’s the catch: Under the Interior Department’s “multiple-use” regulations, only so many cattle, so much wildlife, and so many horses are allowed on federal lands. The wildlife is “paid for” by the American people, and, some would argue, by hunters’ licensing fees and hunter-run federal and state agencies. Cattle are “paid for” by the meat industry: $1.35 per head per month to graze the public domain. Horses, on the other hand, take up one “Animal Unit Month” (AUM), but no one is paying their way. Each horse removed from the West frees up another AUM for cattle or sheep or game antelope.

What about other forms of horse management, like immunocontraception or birth control? Great idea, say some, but not sound in practice. Where are you going to find the experts and the means to administer such a program? It works in isolated instances, but to manage the West’s horses with it? It’s cost-prohibitive, must be administered yearly, and it’s a great plan in theory, but in reality it’s just another sidetrack in the game.

Adopt-A-Horse Program

The BLM created its Adopt-A-Horse program in 1976. Since then, more than 200,000 horses and burros have been rounded up off public lands and sifted through the adoption pipeline.

In 1978, the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act was amended by the Public Rangelands Improvement Act: among other changes, a titling program implemented by the BLM stipulated that an adopter could not technically “own” a wild horse until one year after its adoption, thereby making it illegal to sell it to anyone else during that first year. In effect, it made the expense of caring for a horse during that time outweigh its meat price.

Still, the program has been marred by scandal, with thousands of horses unaccounted for and feared slaughtered.

In 1984, after a regulatory change that relaxed conditions for removal of animals from the range, massive round-ups landed 40,000 horses in holding corrals. The BLM waived its fees to encourage more adoptions, resulting in an estimated 20,000 wild horses ending at slaughter.

In 1997, AP reporter Martha Mendoza exposed widespread corruption within the program in seven articles that ran throughout the year. That same year, a federal grand jury collected evidence that showed BLM officials had allowed the slaughter of hundreds of wild horses, falsified records and tried to prevent investigators from uncovering the truth. The case was eventually closed down after federal officials intervened.

Today, one can easily adopt a wild horse for as little as $125 a head. The cost to taxpayers for removing that animal from the wild is more than tenfold.

Misfits Among Us

In response to numerous attempts by vested interests to cripple the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse & Burro Act, Americans have made their intentions known time and again: they want wild horses — these feral, exotic, “sonsofbitches” — left in the public domain. In 1985, a provision aimed at allowing the government to sell our wild horses to slaughter came to a vote in Congress and was defeated. In 2004, the horses were not so lucky: Senator Burns (R-MT) managed to bypass the democratic process by slipping his slaughter provision into the 3,300-page federal budget. The slaughter of America’s wild horses was rubber-stamped, the will of the people ignored.

t can be said that no other animal in human history has had the impact on our lives as much as the horse. Millions have lost their lives in human wars. They have been used to transport us and our belongings across continents, to deliver our mail and network our civilizations, and they have plowed the fields that feed us. In these modern times, the horse is an entertainer, an athlete, an icon, and a friend — with more than 6 million of them in the care of American horse “lovers.”

We have long celebrated the horse, in art and mythology (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the winged Pegasus, the Centaur) and in literature and symbolism (we still measure power in horses). But we have abandoned this animal of the plains. Though we owe them civilization as we know it, we no longer hear the wind in their wild ears; we cannot see the fire in their eyes. In return for the sacrifices of their ancestors, we have done little else but annihilate and degrade them. They are sonsofbitches. Shitters.

They are misfits.

And shame on us. Instead of demanding that Congress enforce the existing law that protects these animals in their homeland—a law brought about by the people, mind you—we sit idly by and accept the government’s figures and its biased portrayal of what is happening in the West. We prefer the taste of hamburger over the image of wild and free-running horses. And we line up at auction yards to adopt what are now fireless, broken-spirited wild ponies.

The evolution of the horse began with its ancient four-toed ancestor, Eohippus, meaning “dawn horse,” 50 million years ago. This small animal was about the size of a fox and made its home in swamplands, feeding off plant life. Eohippus slowly evolved into Mesohippus, the size of an average collie. Mesohippus had three toes and eventually became an inhabitant of the prairie. Its shape changed in conformity as its habitat changed: it grew taller, its teeth and middle toe grew longer, the latter growing into a hoof. The evolution continued until Equus caballus — the horse as we know it today — was formed.

I had that memory last night, watching television: how different it was from the reality of another world. Children, as young as I was then, scrambled for footing on the muddied banks of a Faroese island, grappling with their elders for the ropes that had caught a pilot whale in his death throes. The animal, groaning in agony, his head gruesomely severed behind the blowhole, thrashed violently in the blood-tainted waters, among his dead and dying companions, but to no avail.

And my heart broke again, as it had done decades earlier, watching a seal pup writhe in the blood-splattered snow beneath the sealer’s weighted boot.

As strong as I am — and after two decades, I think sometimes I am too strong, too casual about it, too proud that I’m able to endure the death of another; be motivated by it, I mean, and put in another day on behalf of death and dying — I am still moved, still heartbroken and sickened (dear God, am I sickened) with the empathy I felt with that one and single and solitary being in the throes of dying.

I could have turned the channel. It would have been that easy. I could have muted the sound, thanks to remote control, and shut out his screaming, the way only a whale can scream. But I couldn’t. I’d be damned if that animal died alone; to turn away would have made me as guilty as if my own hands were on the ropes that held that dying creature at bay.

It’s a long way from lazy raft rides in the neighborhood creek bed. My heel touching the lukewarm water today would only bring painful visions of blood-red seas — this, the price of enlightenment.

We who work for the lives of others live in the shadow of the death of others. This is our way, not by choice, but by demand. Better to have a wounded heart, a sick and hurting heart, than to have no heart at all, to feel for nothing, to care for no one, to live for death.

The world is ailing. Every morning when we awaken, there is a whale thrashing, a monkey screaming, a lone wolf howling, in the back of our minds. There is no escape from enlightenment, from truth, no escape from what lies beyond the morning sparrow’s song — not for us, those of us who work for the lives of others.

But shut our eyes? We cannot. Wish that we could? We would not. We know healing and change begin with the truth. And the truth begins with a broken heart.

Keep fighting the good fight.

I asked her what she had learned at Sea World about the whales. Did she, for example, know anything about their diet?

“Fish,” she said excitedly.

“You mean, dead, frozen fish,” I pointed out to her. “Did you learn they sometimes eat dolphins and seals?”

“No,” she replied. She didn’t know that about them.

Did she learn anything about their behavior, I wondered.

“They can do incredible tricks,” she added, less enthusiastic, but delighted to have learned something about the performing whales.

“So you learned that the whales can do in a pool what they do in the ocean, only in the pool they do it in order to eat, so as to not starve?”

She said I was making her feel bad.

I asked her if she had learned anything about their social behavior, their close family ties, their life-long bonds to one another?

No, she admitted, she hadn’t. She didn’t know the animals spent their entire lives with members of their own family.

I asked her if she had learned anything about their daily activities; that, for example, in the ocean, the whales swim between 70 and 100 miles in a day?

No, she added, even more solemnly than before, she did not know that about the animals.

Did she know about their sonar capabilities, their hunting abilities, their interactions with one another or other pods of whales, their habitats in the oceans and where they are found most frequently, or for how long they live?

No.

I asked if she knew how they love to scratch their bellies on the small pebbles on the ocean’s floor in Puget Sound?

No, she didn’t. And now she seemed ashamed and embarrassed by everything she didn’t know.

“So what did you learn about orcas?” I politely asked her.

Her reply?

“What’s an orca?”

It’s not that difficult. Just throw out some grass seeds of varying types, wild flower pods, a little horse manure from the stables down the road, lots of water, and life, as they say, finds its own way. Everything began to grow in what was once a barren, brown, rock-hard nothingness: varying heights of grass, clover mixed with small purple and white wild flowers, vibrant sticker bushes and other nameless flora, all creating a jungle of oxygen-bearing, sun-shielding life forms.

Now a hospitable place, in they came, the critters from everywhere: snails and butterflies, grasshoppers and wasps, dragonflies and a host of spiders. There were now lizards crawling the fences and along the branches of an unnamed tree. And there were frogs, sometimes snakes, toads, and moles, gophers, and the occasional hummingbird. A menagerie of wildlife, if you will, right smack in the middle of suburbia.

One night, the cats and I sat on the cool, linoleum floor of the kitchen, waiting for the mouse to emerge from behind the refrigerator so we could, well, do as we wished with her. They wished to play, maybe eat her, and I wished to rescue her, take the little beastie outside where she belonged.

We sat for some time, about two a.m., listening to the scratchings and tell-tale movements of the furry quadroped with the long tail. And we waited patiently because it was early morning and there were no phones ringing, no faxes printing, no email letters chiming. It was almost absolutely quiet in the house, except for, well, the stirrings of a mouse.

I was armed with a large plastic bowl and cardboard lid. Somehow, I would capture the little thing with the aid of the cats whom, I was certain, were as interested in the seizure as I was. It reminded me of my mother’s insect-rescue contraption: a see-through plastic cup. My cousin had spied it sitting upside down on the kitchen counter one afternoon; he’d read, in my mother’s handwriting, that the “device” was a “cricket catcher,” so marked to keep my father from washing it unnecessarily. For a long time, my cousin studied it, puzzled, we could tell, until he finally had to ask, “So, how does that thing work?”

Ah, city folk.

Finally, the scurrying furry beastie began to emerge from beneath the refrigerator, her footsteps quite audible on the linoleum as she approached the appliance’s edge. She was moving slowly enough, or so it sounded, drawing closer inch by inch, that I was certain I’d catch the rodent before the cats would.

And then out she came from underneath the frig: a caramel-colored, eight-legged spider the size of a gopher. And as much as I admit to loving spiders (they live in and outside the house), this one did send a chill down my spine. I was not prepared for an arachnid of that size — one I could HEAR as it explored my kitchen.

Still, despite the scare to both myself and the cats, I trapped the beast beneath the bowl, slid the cardboard under its eight legs, and promptly deposited it in the jungle behind the house.

I watched the spider in the lamp light, fascinated as it hesitated at the edge of the cardboard, its caramel color blending so nicely. The creature had to be bigger than any mouse I’d expected. “You’ll be sorry,” I heard my family’s echo as they once surveyed the overgrown yard. “Every critter imaginable will find its way here.”

And even the unimaginable ones, I quipped that night to myself.

But as the spider slowly disappeared under a bed of four-leafed clover and wild flowers, into the night that was alive with sound and movement, out among the lizards and toads, butterflies and bees, grasshoppers and crickets, I finally realized it was me who had been the visitor — and who had just moved home.

An owl broke the silence on a branch in the unnamed tree above me.” Hoot-hoot-hooty-hoot-hoot.” “Every critter imaginable will find its way here,” I heard their warning again, and I smiled into the moonlit blackness. Yes, I thought, that was the point.

And so it was quite ironic that I was listening to it one night while driving, reveling in a pricelessly rare escapism, when I was, well, hit by a truck.

I think, if I didn’t write, I’d be a director. I’m drawn to obscure images, abstract points of view, deviated angles on the otherwise routine panorama that makes up our daily lives. While driving interstate highways, for example, I savor the rhythm of the trucks and their trailers that crawl our nation’s biways. I’m able to ignore the environmental drawbacks long enough to appreciate efficient machinery in motion. Their speeds, in California, are limited to 55 mph while autos can drive as fast as 70. We usually pass them — sometimes, for some of us, the execution of the pass is accompanied by music, like a scene from right out of a movie, precision-scripted, well-directed, and artistically scored.

On this particular night, the night I was hit by a truck, it was me being passed. In fact, despite the black-shattering headlights breaking through the nighttime drizzle behind me, I didn’t even see it coming. And I certainly didn’t hear it because I had “You are my fire / the one desire” cranked up on the stereo. I didn’t even sense it beside me; I was too lost in the escape to notice. That is the point of the escape — to be totally and completely outside of this hypocritical, incompassionate world.

I was, instead, singing, feeling good, as I said, about being alive. I was on my way home, cuddled into the warmth of my car, looking forward to a fireplace fire.

The truck passed on my left at high speed, its headlights exposing the rain-swept highway, its roar just audible over “ain’t nuthin’ but a heartache…” I was dancing in my seat, keeping rhythm with the band, when the truck first broke into my line of vision. I took second notice: it was a perfect image, at perfect speed, motion on motion, the night’s rain sweeping from its undercarriage, the steam churned up by its 18 wheels.

In those fleeting moments, I was liberated. There were no deprived, crying dairy calves, no in-vain writhing, blood-splattered foxes in steel traps, no painfully electroshocked primates, no chained circus elephants. In the moments the truck entered my vision, I was completely and most gratefully free. I was part of this world, in it, seeing it in ways we all take for granted, but enjoying the view.

Who to thank for such moments? The Great Spirit? Almighty God? the truck driver? or just synchronicity: chaos posing as harmony in an almost missed connection I was lucky enough to reach out and grab? I just know I feel it, and feel it deeply: the gratitude I have for the cosmos itself for lining them up for me. Thank you. If there is a God, thank you, God.

But it was also in that same moment of personal liberation that the truck hit me.

I lifted my foot from the accelerator when it came into full view; I was too stunned, too unable to maintain my speed. Its load: the slatted two-tier trailer used by the industry to transport “livestock” to and from auction yards and slaughter plants. I could make out the large, steaming bodies inside, caught at the edge of my headlights.

In that very moment of setting me free, the cosmos robbed me.

It took every bit of joy out of me.

I thought about not going another inch, not another moment in life. I watched the truck speed away, taking with it the lives of sentient, exploited, fear-filled beasts. Suddenly, there were crying dairy calves, blood-splattered foxes in steel traps, electroshocked primates, and chained circus elephants flooding my senses with their pitiful cries.

And another voice screamed inside my head: Why keep going? What for? What’s the point of all this hurt I feel? And then, of course, in an instant, as I watched the truck fade away, its red taillights swallowed by the darkness, I knew all over again. The reasons I hurt — and why I had to go another inch, another painful moment in life — were because of crying dairy calves, steel-trapped foxes, electroshocked primates, chained circus elephants, and the unending stream of sentient, exploited, fear-filled beasts on their way to slaughter.

There was no more singing, no more dancing in my seat, no warming fire waiting at home. I was reconfirmed to my inescapable activism on behalf of “the weak against the strong.” The truck hit and empowered me all over again; it made me strive to do more, to do better. And it was — as it had been — a dedicated fight from which emerged a single hope: that someday it will be the world itself that is carefreely driving along, feeling good about being alive, but one so enlightened from the work we’ve done that, in the blackness of a rain-swept night, it — not me, not us — is, well, hit by such a truck.

And so here he came: a little black calf, barely a month old, dragging himself along on his front hooves while stumps of hind legs attempted to keep up. Onto the auction block he went, where he was promptly bought by a meatpacking company.

Enjoy your veal — er, meal — America.

Author Alice Walker has described our nation’s consumption of animals as a country indulging itself by “eating misery.”

It’s more than that. It’s the eating of little, innocent, newborn, deprived, shocked, crammed, shackled, and stabbed-to-death creatures who struggle in vain trying to stay alive. Flesh at any price.

America’s addiction to meat is a hideous creature itself with a denial technique the size of its monstrous appetite. Over ten billion living, feeling creatures a year are sacrificed to feed its faces, at the speed of 300 bleeding, kicking, screaming beings a second.

Oh, lucky are some of us who can sit back and dream about that day when the world goes vegetarian. We give it our all to reach such a paradise through our resource materials and our conferences, our books and our pledges, our ideologies and our philosophies. And the slogans abound: “Speaking for those who can’t” and “a voice for the voiceless.” But are we really doing those things?

If we could miraculously read the animals’ minds, would we find they would want to be martyrs for the cause? Would they care if we made a federal case out of their suffering? Would it matter to them that the goal — for them and for us — is a vegetarian world? Somehow (and maybe my mind is just that limited) I can’t imagine animals projecting that far, in those ways, into the future. In fact, I would go further and say that it is we who project onto them what the goals of the animal rights movement ought to be.

“Not bigger cages, but empty ones.”

I’ll be the first to sign up and help lead the “Charge!” But I often wonder if I’m pursuing an ideal because it is right (as if such atrocities were happening to me and mine), or because that’s what the animals themselves would want me to do.

It is rare to have empathy for others.

If it were so common, the world would be vegetarian by now and we’d have no arguments to put forth. Denial of the truths in our midst prevents so many people from feeling that nature-given gift of empathy. And so the machine that grinds up living beings without a single thought, much less a second one, continues relatively unchallenged and definitely unabated.

There is another gift we’ve been given by nature, and that’s the ability to imagine the world not from our own perspective but from the vantage point of those with whom we empathize.

When I visited a dairy farm not too long ago, I found the female calves chained in doghouse-like boxes. Though they had no teeth, they were fed a bucket of grain each day and only one serving of water. One calf in particular caught my attention. She could only have been a day old. Her umbilical cord was still attached, and she was crying pitifully. When I comforted her with the only thing I had to offer — my fingers to suck on — I could hear then the relentless bellowing of a cow across the driveway behind me. It didn’t take long to realize the cow was the calf’s mother. In that moment I knew that if I was ever to speak for those who can’t and to be a voice for the voiceless, I would have to abandon my strategies and campaigns, my writings and my educational outreach activism, and do one thing: find a way to give that cow back her baby.

One cow and one calf out of tens of millions of cattle (and billions of other consumed animals) is nothing, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, doesn’t the concept of “speaking for those who can’t” compel us to abandon schemes? Even grand ones?

I am torn by this dilemma. I believe the changes we make to the bigger picture change things only for those who are yet unborn. Not that they matter less, but their struggle has not begun. They are not in the midst of it, bellowing across the driveway or struggling to walk on legs torn in half.

End whaling. Stop the wolf hunt. Go veggie. Amen. But along the way, we must listen carefully. Because, you see, animals are not voiceless. They are crying, and if you listen carefully the sound is deafening. If it means you hoist the calf over the fence and give her back to her mother — because that’s what the animals want — then, by all means, unchain her — and lift!

I salute the trench workers, those who reach out to the individual, seemingly unheard voices among us, and set aside the utopia they fight for long enough to pull one more being into the land of the living.

I liken it to the way Oskar Schindler bought freedom for 1,100 Jews.

I don’t know how to respond to “He’s beautiful.” “Thank you”? For what? I didn’t make him. I didn’t create him. I can’t take credit for his grace, his spirit, his fire. Such questions leave me feeling awkward and speechless.

There’s a fine line among us. We recognize that animals have interests in their own lives, that they feel, think, reason, sleep, eat, drink, play, mate, dream, and die. But to whom do they belong?

They belong to no one, just as you and I belong to no one. But under the law, animals “belong” to those who have bred, raised, possessed, or purchased them. They are, legally speaking, our property. And we, legally speaking, are their owners.

Except in rare cases, injuring or killing a dog or a cat is a violation not of the rights of the victims but of the animals’ “owners.” In other words, the wrong wasn’t committed to the animal involved, but to the property of the human being who owned that animal. Damages are paid by the violator to the owner, and the value is determined as to the monetary “cost” of the injured or killed animal.

So I find myself, in those moments when visitors are admiring Shilo, unable to respond accordingly. I feel foolish thinking what they would think if they knew I didn’t consider Shilo mine, even though I paid to rescue him, pay to feed and house him, to train and groom him, to transport and medically care for him, and even though I have the receipt in my hand from the kill buyer proving that Shilo, under the law, belongs to me.

It is difficult in those moments because I recognize that the law of the land is speaking a completely different language than I am. At the risk of appearing the fool, on occasion, I’ve found myself appealing to the sensitivities of others.

“He’s beautiful.”

“Thank you,” I say.

On second thought, however, our community has risen quite well above the semantics of language. Animal shelters don’t encourage the general public to come in and “buy” a dog or cat; they encourage them to “adopt” an animal. It isn’t until the cash is exchanged and the documents are drawn that the word “owner” appears in the dialogue.

For as long as we regard other creatures as property to be bought and sold, to be owned or mastered, we humans will forever distance ourselves from the essence of our species: our ability to hold sacred the natural world, to view the other lives around us as gifts given to us by a great spirit, and in so doing, regain our empathy.

If we cannot relinquish our rights to animal ownership, animals will continue to suffer immeasurably — as did African slaves in the grip of human bondage — because their suffering will never be weighed for what it is, but only for what it costs their legal “owners” in terms of “property” damages.

But until we liberate our language, we will never liberate animals. It begins by removing the words “owner” and “property” (and any variation of those words) from our vocabulary, no matter the social consequences. Until we take that step, the court systems cannot follow.

Shilo paws the ground and dances in place, arching his neck, as if he knows he’s being admired. And then the inevitable remark: “He’s beautiful.”

I have found a new answer.

“Yes,” I say, “he is.”

There has been no rest for the incredibly, terribly weary. They arrive utterly exhausted, frantically falling over themselves as they dangerously slip on the feces- and urine-slicked floors of the two-tier cattle truck that has brought them here. They are pushed forward with electric prods into the temporary holding pens outside the killing plant. From California to Texas, they arrive bearing the scars of their strenuous 30-hour trek across state lines — from other states, the journey has been nearly 2,000 miles. They arrive injured, emaciated, pregnant. And they have come a long way; all of them: registered thoroughbreds, purebred Arabians, former wild ponies, speckled appaloosas, draft horses, donkeys, old-timers and newly born foals. Not a horse is safe from the Texas massacres.

A number of the horses in the 45-head-packed truck arrive too injured to walk from the transport themselves; like any downed animal arriving at slaughter, they are dragged by their legs to the killing floor. Dead horses are trashed — fallen and trampled victims of transport in a truck designed for animals half their size.

They arrive hungry. Thirsty. Terrified. But it matters not. In just a few hours’ time, they will be forced through kill chutes, shot in their heads with captive-bolt pistols, butchered, packaged, refrigerated and shipped abroad by air and by sea to countries where dining on horse flesh has become a reborn fashion.

These images circle through my mind as I climb to the top rail and survey horses mulling about in the manure and fly-infested confines of the kill pen — their last stop here in California before the long and torturous journey to Texas. These hapless creatures — a mere unwanted hundred or two of the more than 300,000 butchered in the United States — have become statistics in the yearly export trade in horse flesh: the little Arabian, back from her lease to the U.S.-based Mexican “Charro” rodeo, badly banged and bruised; the big white blind mare who circles nervously in her so-called protective enclosure; a rose-grey Arabian with swollen, runny eyes whose “owner” fell from her and then branded her wild, dooming her to the kill pen; the seal-bay thoroughbred filly who walks with an unacceptable twist of her right rear pastern; the cancer-afflicted Welsh pony; the unmanageable pinto stallion who relentlessly expresses his dissatisfaction over this unusual confinement; they’re all here: the emaciated backyard abuse cases, the “excess” racing stock, the lame, the injured, and the ill. Alone, by herself, an appaloosa mare lies colic-stricken beneath the rain-threatening sky. She was unloaded here due to an intestinal stone too painful to pass; if the condition doesn’t kill her, the slaughterman will.

But these unfortunate animals are only the exception, not the rule. Fully trained, young, sound, well-groomed horses pack the dusty, stench-wreaking pens, competing with one another for impoverished food and muddy-colored water.

I spy a young dapple-grey Arabian gelding. A long black forelock falls across his face; the wind picks up his thick mane and tosses it over an arched neck. He dances, paws the ground for a moment and then stares across the roadway to where the mountains meet the sky. A friend climbs onto the fence beside me. “Nice horse,” she whispers, and I agree. He epitomizes the spirit of one of the most noble animals on Earth.

Fifty million years ago, horses began their remarkable evolutionary ascent — but as recently as the Ice Age, human beings have been preying upon them for food, forcing wild herds over cliff edges as a means of slaughter. At the dawn of the New Stone Age — a mere 6,000 years ago — humans found ways to tame this flighty beast, raise it, as it were, for food, hides and then for transportation.

The horse had become the most important animal known to human beings and was believed to be fit for the gods — so much so that it was sacrificed in religious ceremonies, enabling believing consumers of its flesh to acquire its strength. With the advent of Christianity, however, old religious practices were discarded and in 732 A.D., Pope Gregory III passed a papal law forbidding the eating of horses. Before long, only pagans ate horses; overall, consuming its flesh had become taboo.

Instead, we found other uses for its strength and speed.

During World War I, more than one million horses died for the human cause; in one day alone, 7,000 equines poured their innocent blood onto the smokey battlefields. They plowed our fields, transported human belongings as well as human beings, moved covered wagons and stagecoaches across the West, provided the Pony Express and sheriffs’ posses, built our cities, and helped to fight our wars. In short, it was the horse who raised Western civilization.

Today, the Edinburgh School of Agriculture in England has estimated the worldwide horse population at more than 65 million, 10 million of whom live in the United States. Each year alone, horse sports draw 110 million spectators; in dollars, horse care draws: $15 billion; investment and maintenance: $13 billion; and rodeos: $110 million.

And the trade in their flesh is estimated at $150 million. It is a hidden industry, dating back to age-old taboos. Even the “Society for the Propagation of Horse Flesh as an Article of Food” failed to encourage consumers to develop a taste for horse. This time, the failure was a result of a 20th century move toward respect for animal life and a growing worldwide vegetarian population. Still, the slaughter continues, supplying the demand for pockets of horse-eaters in France, Belgium and Japan. In the United States — though legal — the idea of eating horses is so offensive that kill buyers prefer to be called “horsetraders,” slaughterhouses become “meat packing plants,” and the byproduct of their industry is hidden in pet food cans and, more largely — about 90% of it — is shipped abroad where it remains mostly out of our sight and out of mind.

The dapple-grey Arabian steps forward. He is curious about me and nuzzles my foot. I’m told he’s perfectly trained and has been in the kill pen but a day so he is still healthy and strong, his spirit unbroken. In Texas, he’ll fetch about $800 in horse steaks. For $50 more, to encourage the kill buyer to relinquish him to me instead, I can take him home.

Horses are now being slaughtered for human consumption as rapidly as one every two minutes. Prized for being leaner and healthier than hormone-injected beef or poultry, more than 65 million pounds of horsemeat were exported in 1985; three years ago, the figure had more than doubled; currently, the U.S. ships 125 million pounds to Europe and Japan — where they are divided into steaks, sausage and other cuts — making the U.S. the leading country in the horse flesh trade. The economy, the horse breeding craze, and the market for horse flesh, is fast making horses more valuable dead than alive. At horse and livestock auctions, where most of these horses are sold, animals are being bought anywhere from 50¢ to 90¢ per pound; rendering for pet food only pays about 10¢.

So methods for obtaining slaughter-bound horses vary. There are the auctions where most horse sellers are assuming they’re selling animals to horse lovers — not horse killers. Unlike other livestock auctions, not many suspect that the pound on the hoof is the target.

There are kill buyers, like dog and cat USDA “B” dealers in vivisection circles, who promise a family’s backyard horse a life of leisure on non-existent farms and coax below-market sales, turning profits by herding the animals onto double-decked cattle trucks bound for one of the 11 foreign-owned killing plants in the U.S.

Why the secrecy? “It’s an industry that involves killing pets,” explains Jim Weems, [former] Administrative Vice President of Great Western Meat Co. in Morton, Texas ["Meat's Hidden Industry," Jane Kelly; Meat & Poultry, Sept 1991]. “Of course, horsemeat companies are publicity shy. Our buyers go at these auctions to bid against people who are interested in buying a pony for their child.”

Great Western Meat Co. sends a special chill along my spine. Last year, 60,000 horses were trucked to that slaughterhouse, eight percent of them right here from California — and 60 were dead on arrival, from who knows what. I stroke the dapple-grey Arabian’s dished face and his ears and look into his liquid brown eyes as he shoves his head against me to ask for a scratch. Great Western Meat Co., I think again. That’s exactly where he’s headed.

It isn’t that people haven’t tried to protect horses from slaughter in the United States. Try they do. Still, both federal and state legislation fails. Horses have not yet been officially classed as either companion animals or livestock, so, when in doubt, they fall under guidelines issued by the Department of Agriculture. But, like most livestock animals in the United States, whatever laws exist governing their protection, they are seldom, if ever, enforced.

In a sworn statement before Cook County, State of Illinois, a former employee [name withheld] of Cavel International, a horse slaughtering plant, testified the following:

In July 1991, they were unloading one of the double-decker trucks. A horse got his leg caught in the side of the truck so the driver pulled the rig up and and the horse’s leg popped off. The horse was still living, and it was shaking. [Another employee] popped it on the head and we hung it up and split it open. … Sometimes we would kill near 390, 370 a day. Each double-decker might have up to 100 on it. We would pull off the dead ones with chains. Ones that were down on the truck, we would drag them off with chains and maybe put them in a pen or we might drag them with an automatic chain to the knockbox. Sometimes we would use an electric shocker to try to make them stand. To get them into the knockbox, you have to shock them … sometimes run them up the [anus] with the shocker. … When we killed a pregnant mare, we would take the guts out and I would take the bag out and open it and cut the cord and put it in the trash and sometimes the baby would still be living, and its heart would be beating, but we would put it in the trashcan.
“The horse industry is accountable for these atrocities,” says Linda Moss, co-founder of Equus Horse Rescue organization. “But to stop the slaughter, we need to change the nature of our industry. Breeders are going to have to cut back. Trainers won’t be able to unload horses they’ve wrecked. If we’re going to race horses, we should have more races for slower and older horses. You can’t just throw away these animals; you have to find the right place for them to be” [Ride! Magazine].

Day is turning to dusk and an almost cold wind picks up. I leave the kill pen for the car, hoping to find a sweater or jacket into which I’ll crawl. Along the way, I pass the kill buyer. He’s leaning in the barn’s breezeway, on a payphone, and he smiles a little at me as I walk by. Despite his friendliness, I can tell, by the tone in his voice, that he is irritated. “This isn’t right,” he keeps saying into the receiver. Seems cattle are more on the move this week and he’s having a great deal of trouble finding a truck for this week’s load of horses. He can’t keep the horses here for long; they’re costing him to feed and he has more than enough for one more truckload this month. “This isn’t right,” I hear him say again, and I can’t help but agree with him — from a slightly different perspective.

Still, I find the irony. He’s merely the middleman. He is not the enemy. The enemy is the bigger picture: the breeders of horses, the people who acquire them and then abandon them to any fate.

I pull the collar around me, lean onto the fence again to watch the dapple-grey Arabian. He sees me and shifts his weight; I know he’s going to turn in my direction now, to approach and stand by me, perhaps in his horsey way, to ask me to free him.

I scratch his neck and he loves it, but in the middle of our momentary liberation from the doom around us, headlights shatter the encroaching darkness. I turn my head and watch the truck make its slow journey across the pot-holed dirt driveway. It is coming for him. There are tiny lights along every edge of the trailer, and it is lit up like a Christmas tree. It is empty now, too, but it is a different kind of truck. There is ample room for horses in it, partitioned stalls that separate the animals from each other to prevent injury; there are padded walls and rubber mats on the floors; there is hay and sweet grain in the feed troughs.

The truck stops and Linda Moss gets out. “Is he ready?” she asks. I scratch the dapple-grey Arabian one more time and feel my heart warm. “He’s come to the gate,” I said. “I think he’s ready.”

So was the big, white blind mare. And two of the Charros’ “toys.” Then we squeezed in an Arabian filly just for good measure.

It was nightfall when we arrived at the temporary sanctuary (we’re looking for something permanent). Barn lights shattered the darkness, horses whinnied a welcome, and a volunteer crew emerged to help unload our cargo.

It is a wonderful feeling, a feeling beyond words, to actually remove other living beings from the jaws of death, and — in this case — to prepare them a room of their own with fresh water and alfalfa hay, wood shavings for bedding, and a bucket of sweet grain.

It is a wonderful feeling for the horses, too. The dapple-grey Arabian called to me when I left the barn to observe the outside activities. He knew so soon that I had come to save him. He KNEW it — even before I did, I think. I named him “Shilo” after Neil Diamond’s song, the one he wrote about his only dependable friend. [For more about this horse, read Shilo.]

I thought about my brand new friendship with Shilo — that rare kind of bonding you have only with an animal — as I leaned in the barn’s doorway and watched him grab a bite of alfalfa and molasses then check to see if I was still there. Outside in the lit night, the irony of it all had shadowed us. It is all we can afford: The Equus Horse Rescue Sanctuary is shared by a group of Charro cowboys.

They drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and sit on the fence; they train their rodeo horses in the arena and practice their lassoing techniques. If the cowboys are at all amused or annoyed with us, it’s hard to tell. They feed carrots to the wounded ponies who had once been chased and injured in one of their rodeos; they offer to hold a filly for a volunteer while she medicates her; they unload a bag of grain from the truck bed for us.

I do not understand the human race … and for now that would have to suffice; inside the barn, bedded and fed and groomed, a dozen horses prepare for a long and enriched life that only a few hours earlier had been doomed to the slaughterhouse. For a few, it would be a good night.