Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve is spectacularly beautiful area minutes from Hastings Old Town. This is take two of a recent Saturday afternoon walk the Grumpy Vegan did in the park. Click on each one for a bigger view.
Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve–a view unchanged perhaps for centuries.
Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve–the path leads down and, in the distance, leads up to the other side of the cliff.
Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve–down the steep stepped path into the glen.
The Grumpy Vegan hasn’t written much about Herring gulls this year. Number of reasons why. Primary one is that there’s been a significant reduction in the size of the Herring gull population in Hastings Old Town more so than in the previous years been here. Not sure why. One other noticeable difference is the number of magpies around. Now, they’ve mainly gone elsewhere; however, these birds are notorious for eating the eggs of other birds. Clearly, magpies need to go vegan! Anyway, whether these two points are related or not and to what extent, well, the Grumpy Vegan leaves that to the others more knowledgeable.
Went recently to the RSPCA Mallydams Wood wildlife rehabilitation centre, education centre and woodland nature reserve to listen to a talk on gulls. Really interesting. One thing of particular note is that since World War Two and the urbanisation of the population and move away from growing your own food and allotment life to supermarket shopping and packaging and the resulting need for landfills, the gull population grew from those clustered around ports and seaside towns and villages, like Hastings Old Town, to urban areas. Once again, our consumerist lifestyle causes problems! And one factor in all of this is the post-WW2 trend toward factory farming and not letting farmed animals live outside and helping to eat up our unwanted food. Of course, go vegan; but if you’re going to eat meat, eggs and dairy you owe it to the animals to make sure that food you’re eating comes from healthy, organic animals raised outside sustainably and humanely.
Anyway, back to the baby gulls. As they mature they tend to fall off the roofs where they’ve been nesting. This is always a fraught time for everyone: parent gulls, baby gulls and the rest of us who care about them. About a month ago we rescued one baby Herring gull and took her to Mallydams. Only the other day, one baby gull came crashing down into our back garden like a fallen angel. She was scooped up and put onto the green roof on top of our garden shed. “Who are you looking at?” she squawked. Hopefully, she made it to Swan Lake, well, boating pond, really, on the seafront which functions as a gull creche at this time of the year.
Here’s the Grumpy Vegan’s initial impression of what it is like to live among Herring gulls.
Sightings of badgers and foxes also continue in the Old Town. As well as tourists, pirates and foreign English language students.
Walking east from chez nous la grumpy vegan and depending upon how quickly the climb up the East Hill takes and in about 15 minutes you’re in the Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve. Recently, on a glorious Saturday afternoon, the Grumpy Vegan took a long circular walk in the park, which was, er, a glorious experience. This nearby countryside is spectacularly beautiful. Cliff tops. Open greens. Bracken. Plunging walks. Wooded sheltered idylls. In short, it’s a great place to go to escape. Here’s the first of two posts with photographs attempting to capture its, er, glory. (Click on each — once and then again — to get a bigger view.)
Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve–looking east toward Fairlight.
Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve–the track across the cliff tops looking toward Hastings Old Town.
Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve–the winding path through an undulating woody glen.
Today’s pick for the occasional series in Website of the Week is Buckles, which describes itself as the site for the “discussion of Circus History all over the world.”
So, if you’re into flamboyant costumes straining at the seams of large and elderly men and women, bizarre human behaviour where unimaginable things are done with one’s foot behind one’s back and the nudge-nudge-wink-wink of questionable business practices, well, Buckles has it all.
And, of course, animal cruelty and exploitation. Often times, baldly stated.
Take, for example, this post about the Great Wallace Shows 1898. Buckles writes under the title, Harry Reed and “Prince”,
Written on the back [photograph]: “Prince came to Peru in 1888 from a New York dealer. He killed Elephant Boss Joe Anderson at Racine, Wis. a bicycle rider rode between him and Joe & elephant struck at rider but hit Joe & followed him up & killed him. Bull strangled that evening by ropes pulled by canvasmen.”
So, there you have it. Bluntly stated. Prince killed. So Prince was killed. Strangulation by circus labourers. I read accounts of two teams of elephants pulling in opposite directions strangling another elephant. Other elephants have been shot, poisoned and one, Mary, was hung by a railway crane. I Loved Rogues: The life of an elephant tramp by George “Slim” Lewis and Byron Fish (Superior, 1978) is a disturbing but fascinating account of how circuses used and abused elephants.
One of the most annoying (and telling) things about Buckles is how he always puts the names of the elephants in quotation marks. Of course, the names of the elephants were changed, particularly if they became difficult to handle (e.g., Must, the periodic condition when elephants become empowered by chemical changes in their biochemistry), so that the troublesome elephant could be sold on with another name to another circus thereby being freed of any of their “negative” history.
But those damn quotation marks are even more annoying than that. They signify the commercial indifference to these glorious creatures as disposable non-entities. Elephants are celebrated as part of the circus life, when it suits, but when it doesn’t, reach for the gun, the rope and the poison.
This past Friday evening the Hastings Vegan Dining Club met with the largest number of members ever! Twenty-one! We all sit down to a delicious meal in Hastings’ very own vegan bed and breakfast, Bay Tree House. Penny and Trevor, the proprietors, and their two daughters made us all feel very welcome. After a delicious piping-hot tomato soup, we devoured a TexMex-themed meal of refried beans, salsa, salad, chips and dips. Then, we had the most scrumptious of desserts made from home-grown greengages. This was a creamy tofu greengage tart served with greengage jelly and fresh red watermelon. For the first time, we had our own entertainment from Steve and his partner, Sally, who sang songs, including one of their own performed for the first time, and played the accordion. Next up for the Hastings Vegan Dining Club is a picnic on the East Hill on Sunday afternoon, August 21. There’ll be an alternative venue if the weather is uncooperative. See you there!
Home-green greengage creamy tofu pastry tart served with red watermelon.
We all love Renee because she loves her vegan food even more than anyone else!
Kim Stallwood is an independent scholar and author on animal rights. His forthcoming book, Animal Dharma, explores what it means to care deeply about animals. Starting in 1976, he has held leadership positions with some of the world’s foremost organisations in the UK and US, including CIWF, BUAV, PETA, The Animals’ Agenda, Animals and Society Institute and Minding Animals International. A vegetarian since 1974 when as a student he worked in a chicken slaughterhouse. A vegan since 1976. His evil twin is the Grumpy Vegan.
New Book!
Kim Stallwood's forthcoming book explores what it means to care deeply about animals and discovers how we can live peacefully with ourselves and others by proposing four key values: truth, compassion, nonviolence and interbeing.
