Peter Espeut
MY WIFE and I moved from Kingston to Clarendon in March this year, and we don't miss the heat and the traffic jams one bit! There is a lot to be said for rural life, but more on that in future columns.
The greatest hazard in the rural areas seems to be stray animals. We had our warning. My office is in Lionel Town, and just before we moved to Clarendon, a policeman from the Lionel Town station was killed one night when he crashed into a cow head-on on the main road. Cows in Clarendon seem to like to stand in the road in the middle of the night; I have seen many. Maybe it is the pieces of loose sugar cane which fall from cane carts and trailers onto the road which they like to eat.
But the cows wander everywhere, even where no cane carts pass. Apparently ownerless and definitely driverless, they stray into fields and yards, eating from flower beds and vegetable gardens alike. And the few victims who motorists were unable to miss, lie in the road to rot, until someone piles on a few tires and strikes a match.
Drivers in Clarendon negotiating corners day or night really do have to look carefully for stray animals: pigs, goats or cows. My wife who hails from Trinidad is not used to stray animals on the road, and has appointed herself my lookout, and usually she has lots of work to do!
In fairness, I must say that in Barbican where we lived before moving west, we also had stray cows to contend with. And I have been following the news, and I hear similar complaints from residents of Manchester, St. Catherine, and almost every parish in Jamaica.
Small stock are not as much of a problem as cows. There is a good reason, I suppose. Householders and farmers are entitled to kill offending stray pigs and goats, and many do. I remember one day, while I was interviewing a farmer in his field in the John Crow Mountains of St. Thomas, a pig came along and started to eat his cabbages. Quick as a flash he pulled a piece of bamboo, used his 'lass to sharpen the end, and like an Olympian javelin thrower, he lanced the pig through the side! The pig squealed for a while, and then subsided. He knew whose pig it was (one of his neighbours) and after his successful effort with his spear he muttered, "Ah tell 'er not to let 'er pig get 'way in mi field!" When she heard her pig was dead, she paraded up and down in the district for a while, "'I never have fe do it!" But the matter ended there. She too was a farmer, and suffered from her neighbours.
But our laws do not allow aggrieved farmers or householders to kill cows. In the old days, when these laws were first enacted, small stock was owned by former slaves, but cows were more likely owned by backra massa'. So he could kill your pigs and goats, but you couldn't kill his cows. Do we still need this class-based distinction?
So we cannot kill the cows. The law requires us to put them in a truck and transport them to the nearest (or the furthest, depending on how angry you are) animal pound. To get his cows back, the owner has to take his truck and find which pound his animals have been taken to, and fetch them back after paying the required pound fee, usually related to the amount spent to feed the cows. Usually quite small. Every parish is supposed to operate an animal pound. My research suggests that only St. Elizabeth currently does so. (There used to be a pound in Chapelton, but it was closed many years ago). There are, of course, private pounds.
Cheap meat
I understand that part of the reason that so many cows are wandering around these days, is because of the low price for beef, due in part to the easy importation of cheap meat from overseas. It is said that many beef farmers have given up cattle rearing, and have turned their animals loose, to wander around and fend for themselves.
It is even said that things are so bad that even if the cows were impounded, many owners wouldn't even bother to try to redeem them. This may or may not be true, but it is no excuse.
Another suggestion is that poor people now more than ever are investing in livestock "the poor man's CD or LRS". But they do not have enough land to pasture them all, so they pasture them in the public (and sometimes private) domain.
Stray animals are a menace, a threat to life and limb. Should persons who have no pasture be allowed to own livestock? I have always marvelled at the large number of 'landless farmers' reported in Jamaica's agricultural censuses. These are the people who are a nuisance to the rest of us, by grazing their stock on the roadsides and on other people's land. To say this, is not to fight against poor people; I want to assist the poor as much as anyone; but being poor should not be a license to endanger the lives and property of other people.
This, after all, is not a hard one to solve, as far as our national problems go. Furthermore, it is not, in my view, a problem for central government. Come now, Parish Councillors! Earn your newly awarded salaries! Let us re-open the animal pounds, and get the herds of cows off the street. This is not asking any more than was successfully done in the bad old colonial days.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and executive director of an environment and development NGO.
