In a recent public appearance, US presidential candidate Donald Trump claims immigration policies are failing because in a certain Ohio town, he'd heard, immigrant families are kidnapping and killing their white neighbours' cats and dogs to eat them. A whole lot of his supporters are flocking to social media to "prove" that this really is happening all over the US, including this guy, reposting what an anonymous snooping neighbour reports:
But this is a more general issue, society is moving away from the countryside. Here just two decade or so ago, many kids even in the cities, would have a grandma that lives on a little homestead in the country with a cow and chickens who they'd visit or stayed with. Today this is less frequent. Many kids grow up in a concrete desert and the meat comes pink and bloodless in little plastic pack (and if there were so much as a millimetres long fragment of the quill of a feather in the poultry, the customer would be back in the shop with a complaint about contamination). My son-in-law had never been up close to any livestock bigger than a hamster until I took the family megalith-gawping in the UK and he was aghast to learn he was to walk in the same field with curious ("dangerous" as he saw it) cows.
Teaching archaeology to students who have very little idea of how crops grow, what ploughing looks like, how livestock behaves, never met a farmer was an unnerving experience for me, a slightly different generation with different experiences, and brought up in the countryside to boot. How will archaeology teachers cope in the future.
Oh, by the way, the spitroast was a sheep and the Bosnian guy's neighbour owes him a apology.
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