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THE INDUSTRY HORSES
3. The Horses And The Helicopter
arid zone animals, wild horses, competing with the cattle
industry, erosion, polluted waterholes & damaged fences
caused by graziers, who blame the horses, the very same
horses that got drunk at the pub, & brawled in the street of
the outback town, & that pulled the triggers that rounded them
up for slaughter, so begins the mad scramble to the deserts or
ground cover, if we can get rid of wild horses we can graze
more cattle, a wild horse is good for nothing, a good steak
sits better in the stomach, when you know that a mare & her
terrified foal were shot down for it, we call it a cleaning up the
landscape steak, a utilizing the environment steak, a
sustainable natural resource steak, the risk of injury &
difficulty in killing horses from a moving vehicle steak, the
gallop flat out through the mulga scrub steak, the ducking &
weaving high speed chase steak, so the race is on, over fallen
timber & rough ground, thick necks, broken legs, crashing
boughs, exploding bones, injured horses kicking to death in the
dust, the sting of horses moving directly into the bullet, that
shot straight past the heart, the lung, the organ, that shot
through the heat of the air, pieces of horses flying like finches,
or horses moved some distance before being dispatched by a
second shot, a third, a fourth, warm dead horses, beneath crow
filled skies, helicopters chopping up clouds & wings, spitting
them out like grass clippings, the weekend job, 2.75 bullets per
horse, & neck shot for the foals, or death by cerebral trauma,
the behind the scenes disposal of outback litter, the trampling
down of the broken stony country, then all at once, the brown
mare stops, the strange calm stillness in her eye, the flash of a
desert, of being born into a history of slaughter, her choice: to
be run into the ground like blood & bone, or to chance being
wild, then wind, then sun, then, like a horse, she turns & takes
off, pursued by the blokes in big helicopters, that love grog &
steak, that love to compete, with the guns of a sporting nation |
