There are around 75 slaughter animals, Angus oxen with a very black coat, which flew away from a green field a short distance from my house. No one saw them leave, according to initial reports. Police opened an investigation.
At the time of their disappearance, were these oxen flying with all four irons in the air, like in a Chagall painting or a South American novel? In any news story, there are holes where reality is lost a little. No one is ever sure which piece of truth gets lost.
How do you want to make an entire herd of oxen disappear, shouting scissors, under the noses of passers-by? The stolen animals were not hidden at the bottom of a remote row, at the end of an endless prairie in the Far West, where the eye can no longer see. They were grazing in their pasture, along a busy road that leads to Sherbrooke. Yet child’s play, it seems, to make so many ruminants disappear in no time.
Do you remember the handful of cows that took over the fields in Saint-Sévère? The story fascinated the whole of Quebec, even going around the world. It had taken quite considerable combined effort to try to capture them. In vain.
There, imagine, 75 animals which were brought under control in the time it takes to say it, in the open field, as if nothing had happened. A theft worth more than $200,000, according to the rough estimates of my farmer friends who have a lot of experience.
Have you ever tried to take an ox in your arms and leave, all smiles, without bending the knee, casually, putting it on your shoulder, like a bag of potatoes? They are strong, those who did it.
He who steals an egg steals an ox, says the proverb. Between the dozen eggs and a flock, let’s admit that there is still a margin.
At the time when animals were branded so that we knew who their rightful owners were, cattle thieves altered the owners’ marks to resell them. Today, it is simply a matter of changing the label that hangs on each ear. What happened to these animals? A few animals roaming free were seen about ten kilometers away, near the old covered bridge. For the rest, at the time of writing, the affair remains a mystery.
“The news item creates a diversion,” wrote the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It is also a powerful social indicator. He talks about the tensions that play out in society. It says something about social unrest.
At the beginning of the last century, Félix Fénéon published curious summaries of current events. Claude Bouchard and Pierre Demers, in a sort of praise of the news item, have just launched in their own way News in 3 lines, a book published by Brimbelle Éditions, a micro-brand in Jonquière. Across the Atlantic, in a book by Christophe Boltanski who has just been published under the title of The farmer killed by her cowwe depicts a whole world of news, exploring the corners of small stories in order to draw out larger elements.
News stories, from time immemorial, tell of the fears and problems that trouble the daily life of a population. They do not attract attention for nothing, even if their reports, sometimes poorly analyzed for lack of broader considerations, often contribute to distancing the population from solutions to the ills they pose.
What does this story of stolen oxen tell us? Perhaps it illustrates, beyond the small story, the great reign of the jungle which continues to impose itself in the world of agriculture. No country without farmers, we repeat. But we must admit that many farmers are at their wits’ end, as the spring demonstrations showed, in Quebec and abroad. The vast bucolic spaces make us too easily forget that they are the scene of silent dramas which concern the whole of society.
What have we learned from the COVID crisis? Overnight, we realized that the supply chain of our foodstuffs depended on a world that was too distant, too uncertain. What has been done since to regain the freedom that food sovereignty ensures? The “blue basket”? In truth, we are no better equipped than before. In a way, these are whole beefs that continue to pass under our noses.
In Vices and truths, a podcast from the radio of our taxes which has just been put online, the journalist Sophie Langlois, granddaughter of the former police chief of the City of Montreal at the end of the war, looks back on years not so distant places where institutionalized corruption reigned. This corruption grew fatter in the face of a meager and powerless State. Which is reminiscent, in some ways, of today’s situation.
At the end of the 1940s, lawyer Pacifique Plante, known as Pax, former deputy director of the Montreal police, made a lot of news about him for wanting to clean up public life from a series of embezzlements that he had carefully documented. . The public was passionate about stories of brothels, gambling houses, alcohol trafficking, and villainous crimes. Why return to it today, as does this radio piece entitled Vices and truths ?
Beyond the little story which brings Sophie Langlois back on the trail of a poorly digested family past, we see how what leads to twisting the spirit of justice and equity has serious long-term consequences throughout the Company.
Pax Plante wanted to put an end to the reign of “the underworld”. This was without taking into account the fact that she constantly changes her clothes, even when she keeps her beefy appearance.