This photo is about the westward ho! pioneers (settlers, military, gold seekers, and more) of the late 19th and early 20th century who slaughtered the buffalo nearly to extinction, shooting them from railroad cars, from horseback, whilst on foot… leaving the meat to rot, taking the skulls, piling them as monuments memorializing the humans’ excesses, rages, acts beneath even the most beleaguered souls.
The photo shows only one of the absurdist piles of offal and skulls that some were so proud about.
In my book Women Who Run With the Wolves, I note that wolves only kill more than they can eat when they have been lived through a rare, severe and longlasting famine. That then they may kill for several days and become what we call ‘meat drunk’ from overeating their kills. But they will not cache the uneaten meat from their kills, as they usually do when prey is availible on a regular basis in their very wide territories. Within a few days this pattern reaction to starvation will aright itself, and the wolves who hunt will go back to taking prey in moderation.
In any age, there also can be a severe, untended to, unarighted and ongoing famine of the human soul. This seems often to cause over-kill just to kill… in many directions, metaphoric and actual.
If anyone asked me, I’d say, for our time, intervene as you can, with voice, attending, money… by engaging with, by joining groups already engaged. Most of all, I think of a phrase in the holy works that belong to major religions, in which is a passage, saying those enslaved are not enslaved by kings, but by the weakness in spirit to even raise their arms against wrong.
I think we are all made of finer stuff. Ever.
Choice to act or not, but rather to be effective or not… seems at the heart of the matter of pushback or pull forward, either one.