One Animal Among Many: Gaia, Goats and Garlic

Susan Brown is a B.C. horticulturist, permaculture designer, and early
childhood education instructor.

Waltner-Toews is a veterinary doctor and veterinary epidemiologist. He
is also a poet, short-story writer, participant in international
social-environmental causes, and a person with a very well-considered
worldview. Many of the short essays in this book first appeared in his
column in Harrowsmith magazine.

“Gaia,” “Goats,” and “Garlic” refer us to three loosely
related sets of essays concerned with livestock ecology, agricultural
ecology, and the earth-organism, Gaia, of which we are all parts.
Subjects are emphatically interrelated, often in unexpected ways.
Distemper, worms, botflies, calf scours, summer flu (Salmonella), and
the ailments of horse’s foot all become fascinating, humbling, and
relevant strands of the dynamic ecological web. Newborn livestock,
sudden death in the barnyard, regional small abattoirs, the future of
animal agriculture, and the internal rumblings of ruminants develop
intrinsic interest under Waltner-Toews’s pen. Consistently, discussion
moves back and forth between the general and the specific, in the manner
of the most useful philosophizing.

I have received more clarification on several practical home and
barnyard problems from these entertaining, thought-stretching essays
than from many more-ordinary factual sources.

The imaginative and playful writer’s style illuminates images to a
full-life pathos. Illustrations are missing but not missed. Surprise
juxtapositions of seemingly disparate topics keep the reader alert and
smiling and underline the recurrent theme of a networking cosmos that
deals in wholes.

His droll straight talk, at other times, exposes our modern
societies’ follies but does not assign blame or guilt. There is
significant original analysis of issues surrounding how and from where
we might feed ourselves—and time to consider them. The essays are each
of a size that can be taken in at a sitting and ruminated on over time.

Waltner-Toews is a person with whom I would like to take a walk around
the place, stopping, as he suggests in the preface, “to chat over the
fence.” Next best thing is to read the book.