A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [41]
I used to understand all that in my head. Now I understand it in my body; I've gained a visceral understanding of how this transition caused us to view the world as a competitive place.
Take a quail. I see coveys of them nearly every day. If I were a hunter-gatherer, or merely hungry, I would probably eat some. But I do not own them, and even if I killed one to eat, it would not be mine. The thought of ownership does not occur to me. The quail are simply my neighbors, and I say hello to them just as I do to the deer I see occasionally, or the hawk that often floats above the house, the trees outside the windows, and the magpies that have for years made great mounding nests in the trees' lower branches. In each of these cases, after we say our brief hellos, we continue with our days, just as happens when I nod and smile to the retired doctor (not the neighbor who drew the cartoon of genocidal Colonel Wright, but another one) who lives across the way. If a coyote eats a quail, as I suspect happens often, or one of the marmots who live among the rocks, I am simultaneously sorry for the end of a life and glad for the coyote. Its not personal. In fact it can and will be me some day. That's life.
The chickens are different. They're mine. I raise them from eggs I collect and put into an incubator, or I buy them at Aslin Finch Feed Store for ninety-seven cents each. I rear them in my bathtub until the weather turns warm enough to let them outside. I dig through dumpsters to find food for them. I sell the eggs. I eat the meat. These chickens belong to me—they do not be long either to the coyotes or to themselves. A coyote who kills a hen is costing me six eggs a week at a dollar fifty a dozen, and when she kills a rooster she's taking meat I could have put into a stew. If I perceive chickens as my private property, it makes sense that I would build a fence around them to prevent coyotes from stealing them. I see now the line of thought and experience that leads ineluctably from this perception of private ownership— the word private coming from the latin privare, to deprive, because wealthy Romans fenced off gardens to deprive others of their use—to the protection of this perceived ownership at first through fences, then through the creation of a theology and politics to justify my perceptions, and finally through a whole system of police, prisons, and the military to enforce my rights when others are so stupid or blind as to not acknowledge my ownership.
I see also a parallel and complementary line of thought that doesn't merely protect my belongings, but proactively and permanently prevents others from stealing them. Instead of building a fence, why don't I, as I mentioned before, just kill the coyotes? It would be easier, and would eliminate the worry. I'd be in chicken heaven, or at least chicken-owner heaven. Of course coyotes are sneaky, so unless I kill them all I'll eventually be forced to invent better ways to kill them. Others, too, may steal the birds. There are hawks, snakes, skunks, raccoons, and rumor has it, a mother bear and cubs can be found. Now that I think about it, even though my retired-doctor neighbor and his family seem very nice, they do sometimes look enviously at the big black hen. I've got to stop them all. Today I own chickens, tomorrow I eradicate coyotes, and the day after I knock off the retired doctor and his family. And it's not only the chickens. I need gasoline to run my truck—I can't dumpster dig without a truck—and gas has to come from somewhere. I heard that Saddam Hussein wanted to cut off access to United States' oil in the Persian Gulf. The dirty bastard. We've got to stop him, too.
Shit. I don't have money to build a nuclear bomb, and there's no room in my refrigerator for that economy-size canister of anthrax. As for the latter, I'll have to get a bigger refrigerator. I'll have to start saving for the warhead. The tree outside my window is awfully big, and I just