Animal Review
Fanzine of Herbivorous Youth
by Avner

Covered Market

Animals of Yarnton village | Solid state

A reader lately remarked that Animal Review is “colored with death,” referring to its many items dealing with dead animals. It seems to be true. Dead animals are much more common in everyday life than live ones. Also, you can get a good look at dead animal, while living animals tend to run and hide. Take bunnies: I’ve seen several while walking in the fields or surveying my estate at Blenheim. They are cute and cuddly, and they are fast. You can’t really get a good look, not to mention touching them. Whereas the bunny rabbits hung in the covered market in Oxford are there to be admired at leisure, their lovely brown-gray fur begging to be petted, and it’s only the bloody bags that covers their heads, like those on executed war prisoners, that keep you away. Creatures of the aquatic kingdom in the next shop are no less disturbing, but in the case of crabs, giant tiger prawns, lobsters and scallops, the effect is probably similar whether dead or alive. Butchered pigs hanging from a hook are not very appetizing but you get used to it, as you get used to butchered chickens or lambs back home. It's just part of the scenery. This morning, however – a particularly bright and brilliant November day – I entered the covered market to buy some fancy tea and immediately saw two big, unidentified animals hung in the same familiar posture, only they were neither pigs nor sheep. Bigger than pigs but smaller than a cow, they had beautiful, downy grayish fur spangled with white freckles. The stumps of their severed heads were curved in a sharp angle. The legs were missing. After brief consideration I concluded these were deer. Or gazelles. Or rather this was venison – a word I used to be very proud of knowing. It was organic venison, I might add, a magic word added to any foodstuff to make it more appealing. I  gazed at the dead animals for a while, wondering who comes by to shop for venison, and why can't they sell it packed and clean and unrecognizable. But display is part of the attraction in the covered market, I suppose. I didn’t get my tea there.

Animals of Yarnton village

There are no animals in the village of Yarnton other than sheep and squirrels. And a few dogs. And two horses pasturing peacefully east of the manor, and when it rains someone covers them with a horse-coat. I’m not taking into account animals smaller than birds (there are birds here, of course) such as bees, flies (very many) and earthworms. But the truth is I may have missed many animals because ever since arriving in Yarnton, about a month ago, I stayed in my little cottage, toiling diligently from dawn to dusk upon the task I came here to accomplish, only leaving the house to get my mail – well, this is not literally true, but I’m allowed some poetic license. I was especially bothered by the lack of cats. I have seen exactly two cats to date: a striped one, passing through my yard never to be seen again; and another cat near the canals leading to Oxford. She was a smallish black queen, apparently living on one of the boathouses mooring along the canal. The boat was locked and the owners away, and it was one of the old, rusty, not well-maintained boats. The black cat was looking for company and affection and I petted her for a while. She purred and happily devoted herself to my touch, but refused to be lifted and carried in my arms. When I moved on she followed me for a short distance and returned to sit near her boat, waiting for the next passer-by, or her owners returning home. Not far from the cat there was a commemorative plaque on a tiller of a riverboat, painted in many bright colors and floral, psychedelic ornaments, with three names – Sara, Finn, and a third one I forgot . A bearded man with fiery eyes sitting near a group of half-ruined shacks, but definitely not abandoned – they were also freshly painted with colorful seventies-style graffiti – explained that the monument was erected in honor of two women and a man who died in a fire that broke out on their boat six years ago. It was ten it the morning and he was sipping beer from a large green can and reading a design magazine. “They died of fumes inhalation. In a fire, this is usually the cause of death, not the heat or the flames. They couldn’t escape because apparently they were asleep when the fire started.” He spoke clearly and slowly, as one would speak to a foreigner or a child. He said the community of boat people he is part of includes doctors, architects and engineers – there was a trace of apologetic aggressiveness in his words, as if he was trying hard to make clear they were not just a gang of post-hippies growing cannabis in pots on their boats and enjoying, like “dude” Lebowski, the occasional acid flashback – they are a real, contributing, harmless community; but everything has changed now, he lamented, it's all registered, licensed and regulated. The British Waterways Authority inspects every boat and there’s a multitude of laws they must abide by. I did not ask him about the cat. When I expressed my wonder about the lack of cats on some other occasion, someone told me she thinks the English exterminate any stray cat. “The English?” I objected. How can this be possible? The English with their “animals' hospital,” and old people leaving all their money to their cats, the inventors of the RSPCA; it's impossible. They probably just find a warm loving home for each stray cat. The English will not commit some mass annihilation of innocent animals, unless – I remembered as I was speaking – it is completely inevitable, a severe threat to public health, as in the case of foot and mouth disease – “They are awfully afraid of rabies,” my companion said. 

Solid-state logic 

Not only cats, and animals in general, are scarce in Yarnton, which is a modest, smaller version of Kfar Shemaryahu. There are times during the day when there is not a soul in sight in the streets. On my bike, courtesy of the CJHS, I rode in the general direction of Woodstock. I went up to Bladon, then through the fields and meadows back to the main road near Begbroke, which is apparently another Yarnton, but with an academic center not dedicated to the humanities but rather to solid-state logic. Within minutes of riding in almost any direction you can find yourself in the middle of green open spaces, with no sign of civilization as far as the eye can see, except for the buzzing of airplanes. Long stretches of meadows, fields, patches of woods, low grassy hills, and no trace of humans or human marks; one can walk for hours in the footpaths among the fields without seeing empty beer cans, Bamba bags blowing in the winds, heaps of used diapers. Something pink and papery floating around is not, as immediately suspected, a piece of used tissue, but a rose petal. 

Hiking alone in an unspoiled rural area may seem utterly trivial; however, this prospect - of being completely alone in the midst of a green, pleasant, lovely landscape, of being surrounded by affable, non-hostile nature - is not an option open to Israeli citizens. And it seems to be a component of some importance to good mental health and solid stability, traits we like to attribute to the English. Like vitamins and other compounds, you may only need minute doses, but a long-term deficiency may cause severe syndromes, a kind of scurvy of the soul. Perhaps all this “Israeliness,” about which so many Israelis speak with loathing and bitter contempt, is the end result of this lack of open green acres, clean and empty of human waste and human presence. The desert will not do. Even the ubiquitous cats cannot compensate for it.