Carrot Oppression and the Othering of Unwanted Species

Some time ago, over lunch, Emma, with whom I have been vagabonding for almost three years, mentioned casually that she had just seen a big truck entirely full of carrots go by. I immediately became curious to know how carrots are picked to make a whole truckload of them possible. I confess to never having thought of this before, which, at this point, I feel mortified about, as will become clearer momentarily. Emma looked it up and came back with this video. As I looked at it, I immediately understood, in a deep and visceral sense that I can’t fully make sense of, that there’s no way that carrots want to live in these long, dreadful, orderly, equal, symmetrical, and lifeless rows. And I burst out crying, which surprised me and then didn’t.

A conversation then ensued among the four of us currently vagabonding together. Three of us are meat eaters, and one of us is mostly vegan. We are at full peace with each other, including having had conversations about it, though never all the way.

Through my tears, I expressed to them what I have expressed a number of times to others and have never expressed in writing. The way life evolved on this planet means that there is no food without killing something else that is alive. My tiny knowledge of indigenous cultures includes the information that there is full awareness of this immense challenge built into how they function. Every taking of a life is done within relationship, not instrumentally. This is done whether it’s an animal or a plant, even just harvesting parts of a plant to keep the rest of it alive. This is done for whatever purpose the interference with another being’s life happens, whether for food or for weaving baskets. As I understood it, no life would be interfered with in any way without asking for and receiving permission.

To create some line and say that all the life to this side of the line is OK to kill and all the life that’s to the other side of the line is not, is actively painful for me. I’ve had conversations with many vegans and heard multiple explanations about the “why” of such a decision. All of them make sense up to a point, and none of them escape the Western hubris of thinking we know and then deciding for others, for life itself, what will happen. I mourn the loss of the humility of treating all life as sacred.

My upbringing and my food choices

That I am where I am with these topics is a minor miracle given my life circumstances. I was born in 1956, in an Israel where Jews were still in early recovery from the trauma of the Holocaust. The image of the Jews going to the camps “like sheep to the slaughterhouse” was held with disdain and pity, not with compassionate understanding of what actually happened. The cultural ethos of nonreligious Jews I was immersed in was to be as different as possible from the Jews of the Diaspora. This meant, among much else, that our “religion” was scientific materialism. It was an intense version of secularism and atheism that looked down on anything else. I would now see it as an almost caricature version of 18th century European thought.

Coming out of this mindset, the idea that it is possible to relate to and communicate with a nonhuman being was, for many years, simply ridiculous nonsense. More than thirty years after the brick wall surrounding my capacity to experience anything else started cracking, the endless skepticism that was my main approach still shows up within me, though I no longer hold it in any way as “truth.”

I myself was vegan for several years, twice. I was also mostly vegetarian for a few more years. I now eat meat. I have a complex position and a lot of humility about it. I am clear I could be entirely off in everything I believe along any of the three dimensions along which such choices are made: health, planet sustainability, and ethics.

With the exception of sugar and white flour, which I believe all approaches to food that claim any remote connection to health and consciousness universally condemn, there are ferocious debates: soy is healthy or soy is possibly carcinogenic if not fermented; whole grains and beans are the best for human consumption or they are carbohydrates to only be eaten in very small amounts; avoiding fat, especially animal fat, is essential for heart health or animal fat is a source of health benefits for which there is no substitute; eat three meals spaced out through the day or keep the longest possible fast every day, up to twenty hours a day, and for whole days from time to time. Facing this barrage of controversy and the inescapable requirement to make decisions about what I eat, I now decide based on a very particular principle of surrender. What I see, repeatedly, is that advocates of each of the positions within each of the debates usually have massive amounts of data and evidence to buttress their position, and their datasets contradict each other. I know no way out of saying: I don’t know; I can’t know; I don’t believe anyone really knows; and we all need to decide what we take in. And so I adopted, gradually, the path of intuition. I listen to signals I get from within, and I check what makes sense to me and what doesn’t when I read what is put forth as information.

For example, in the last few weeks, the signal is clear within me to eat less meat. Perhaps it’s a response to not having adequate access to meat from sources I feel at peace about. Perhaps it’s because the cycle of meat eating is winding down and something else will arise. Perhaps I simply need to eat less overall. I am listening, and I am shifting, and this is how I have reached where I am now.

Prior to leaving the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of 2019, I was peaceful about my food choices: mostly local, fresh vegetables, mostly from the local farmers market, where I had relationships with the vendors; lots of nuts and seeds; and a steady amount of food from animal sources, mostly local, fresh, and pasture raised. Vagabonding since then, I haven’t found a way to replicate this. I eat organic whenever it’s available where we are, which hasn’t been much. (In fact, while I often had the thought that I was living in the obscenely-privileged-fresh-local-organic capital of the global North, I didn’t really know how difficult it would be to get anything like it in the parts of Europe where I have been so far: England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and France.) When we are anywhere for long enough, we have looked at alternate methods for getting food, such as local deliveries from farms. I imagine, maybe hope, that there is more than we have been able to discover. And, still, my current eating habits are keeping me in constant inner tension about health, about how all the living beings that end up on my plate are treated, and about the human and environmental impacts of the commercial methods of getting them ready to eat and then shipping them to where I would buy them. We are consciously learning about some of these things and reducing the range of things we will eat. For example, we are no longer buying cashews and Brazil nuts, despite their health benefits and satisfying taste, because of the methods of picking them and the long distances they would travel to reach us. Like I said before, this is also part of why my meat consumption has plummeted since we got to Portugal. Although vegetables have been the main staple in my food for years, at present they comprise even more of what I am eating nowadays. Which, for me, is no consolation in terms of how the plants are grown and treated, for the most part. Which is where this connects me back to carrots.

Spiders

Before getting back into talking about carrots, I have a related story to tell about spiders. This is a story that stretches me in exactly that place I mentioned earlier, where the skepticism of scientific materialism is activated as I imagine people reading what comes next and thinking I have gone off the deep end. Still, it all happened, and I am committed to truth telling truth, publicly, even when it’s very uncomfortable, when I get a clear signal that it’s clearly mine to do. As you will see later, the signal came.

We had the grace of living, twice, for three months each time, near a little forest in Ireland, which is otherwise 99% deforested. One day, while walking in the forest, Emma delicately touched a spider web to try and get the spider to come out. It didn’t come and a silk broke. In response, I was quite upset. I want, so much, for spiders to be free of human interference. I mourn how much we have closed in on all things wild, including every new baby who is born.

Emma said it was painful for her to hear it being experienced as “interfering,” because for her it is play and interaction. I told her that there was something about how she did it that was human-centric and did not see the needs of the spider. She stood strong in responding from within her lifelong deep connection with the beyond-the-human world. She expressed her own longing for people to play and interact with the non-human world. She said that what I said didn’t make sense to her from within her connection with life. And while she didn’t accept the presence of rules and restrictions, she was, and had always been, keenly attuned to feedback from within the non-human world. She would rather that we humans played and interacted with the non-human world and had impacts that we then learn from rather than live in separation out of fear of having impact. She was also affirming that she could see there was something to what I was saying and that learning how to have more fine-tuned delicacy in that world was something she wanted. And, if there was something for her to learn, she wanted to learn it from the spiders.

This conversation was exquisite, with deep truth telling, deep standing up, each of us, for what mattered to us, and a solid integration at the end. There was nothing more left to do. I opened myself up to the mystery inherent in what Emma shared. Little did either of us know how quickly we would get information.

Later that day we were both looking at a spider that had caught another spider in its web and was eating it, mesmerized by the immense delicacy of the spider’s motions. Emma, in particular, has a significant relationship with bugs of all kinds, and spiders in particular (though spiders aren’t technically bugs at all). I watched her watching the spiders, and then I left the room for a moment.

While I was gone, Emma touched the dead spider, and the eating spider then immediately reacted and jumped back. It seemed to her to curl its body and to look at her, and she felt a clear expression of anger towards her. Was it actually happening? She wasn’t completely sure. What she knew clearly within her was that her actions had had impacts that the spider was upset about. It stood where it was for a while and the anger she was picking up was gradually subsiding. Then the spider started to move about its web again, and eventually threw what it had been eating out of its web. That was when I came back in.

Emma then told me what had happened, and it was immediately clear to me that this all happened, mysteriously, in response to what had happened the previous day. This connected me to a well of grief. In a non-linear and clearly non-material way, I sensed what I had done the day before, somehow, as if it registered as support for the specific spider and for what I called, for lack of a better term, “spider world”; as if what I had done gave the spiders a way to come forward and express.

I later wrote to a First Nations woman I know to ask about this experience. Here’s what I wrote: “The felt sense, conclusion, intuition, message, whatever word would apply, was that spiders (the word that came is ‘spider world’) in particular, and non-human life more generally, have given up on trying to communicate with humans and have retreated from us because of the enormous impacts of what we have done to life overall, and because we have lost our capacity to hear them. There was enormous sadness in that and such deep reverence for life. I am wondering if this resonates with anything that you and others in your field are already engaging with?”

What she wrote in her response was deeply affirming: “The spiders are the weavers of worlds, spiritually. We have stories about the animals losing hope in us.”

This also connected with what Emma said at the time, which was that the experience we had had made sense of how people of the past knew to mix this plant with that plant to create something like ayahuasca or medicine, something that some individuals and whole cultures speak of in ordinary language: that the plants taught them. What Emma put together, in that moment, is that this communication channel was, at some points and to some individuals and groups of people still, completely open. This is the world of flow. We have messed with it, and the communication channel is now far less open.

The carrot dream

With all this as context, I can now pick up the main story, which is, after all, about carrots, not spiders or even me. It starts with the night after the carrot truck drove by and I wept about carrot oppression, which was about six months later though, oddly, in the same house in Ireland in which the four of us lived, twice, for three months each time. During that night Emma had a dream. In the dream, she was in an Airbnb, a true-to-life symbol of our vagabonding. She had peeled loads of carrots. Then a centipede crawled from the peelings. In the dream, Emma knew it to be a “carrot centipede.” It was so compelling, that she actually looked it up and discovered there is no such thing. It was in the sink, and it looked at her angrily. This is where the spider story comes in, because Emma recognized that anger as being the same as the spider’s anger. Then she saw a mouse and a cockroach on the floor, scurrying away. This was the extent of the dream, captured in her hand-drawn image.

If you haven’t guessed, the mouse and cockroach are the “unwanted species” from the title. I will come back to that bit later. First, though, the carrots.

As Emma shared the dream with me, I immediately understood why it was a carrot centipede, a creature which doesn’t exist, rather than a carrot, that looked at her angrily. It was the closest in shape to a carrot and the most elemental life form that could activate our human capacity for empathy. While I was able to feel the carrots as not wanting to live in the fields, they are too far from humans for me to imagine and have any reference point for their experience. A carrot centipede, on the other hand, moves, has a face and eyes (though the one in the image doesn’t), and can interact and display emotion, anger in this case. We can relate more easily and fully. It’s far from us, and it’s still easier than relating to a carrot.

It was when I heard this dream that I knew I was given this piece to write. I haven’t wanted to write about these topics because the discussions about food choices and animal rights are so contentious I wanted to stay out of them if it wasn’t clearly enough within purpose for me. I neither automatically avoid controversies nor automatically gravitate towards them. I do it when there is a reason. It has taken me a long time to grasp the reason, and I only got it in this moment, while writing. I am writing this piece because it’s a painful and, I believe and hope, illuminating entryway into seeing patriarchal hubris.

And I may be particularly well placed to write it because I have taken on, as a working assumption, the idea that everything has volition. I put no lines there: viruses, electrons, planets, cups, and computers alongside the more obvious examples. I have been playing with this assumption since 2019 as a way to stretch my own capacity, not because I think it’s true in some normal scientific way. Nor do I think it’s false. I have no sense it would ever be proven or disproven. Anything we would ever evaluate based on available criteria would always yield the same result, with humans at the top and with the ranking hierarchy that makes plants non-sentient beings. This picture completely misses the point that we really and truly can’t know or sense what a volition that doesn’t involve brains could be. Taking on this working assumption means shifting our categories of thinking, not how we function within them. Doing it with humility and with integrity changes how we then approach everything. And, indeed, it has, for me. Which then made all the stuff that has been popping up all over the place about trees and plants more generally much easier to take in and sink into mystery, reverence, and grief with. Which then makes it all the more real to imagine the idea that carrots are, indeed, oppressed, as are we, all of us, and all that has been domesticated as well as all forms of life that are still, so to speak, wild.

Moral reasoning and patriarchal hubris

Because I see lack of humility as absolutely core to how patriarchy functions, I want to present an annotated quote from a site called “Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach” that advocates for veganism as the only moral approach “based only on animal sentience and no other cognitive characteristic.” Reading that site while grappling with writing this piece helps me understand what was previously surprising to me, which was a very intense anger directed at me by a vegan person when, in 2018, I included in the “Celebrations and Mournings” section of my newsletter “… an interview with Stephen Harrod Buhner who has dedicated decades to learning from and with plants. It opened a whole new world to me about life and what little we know.” I now understand more clearly that, from a certain vegan perspective (though absolutely not all!), imputing intelligence to plants is deeply disturbing and is seen as 100% incorrect.

As I looked through the site, it seemed to me that a tremendous amount of thought and what I would interpret as love was put into it. Like vegans, I, too, am distressed to physical agony by how animals are treated when they are alive. Unlike vegans, I don’t have any more issue with how animals are treated than with how plants are treated, even though most of the time I don’t have the empathic visceral reaction to what is done to plants that I have to what is done to animals. The authors of the site see this absence of empathic capacity as part of their explanation: “Everyone recognizes that there is an important difference between the plant and the dog that make kicking the dog a morally more serious act than stepping on a flower.” I, on the other hand, consider this absence as a limitation of mine, which is very common in modern humans. In the last few years, thanks in part to Emma’s presence, in part to consciously cultivating both humility and a path of attuning to life, and in part to grace, I’ve had more experiences like the one that led to this piece. I feel grateful for those experiences, and ever more in awe of life for unfolding in a way that leaves me, at least, no way to escape from grappling with what and how to kill by drawing a line.

With all that, the issue I have with the site isn’t really about drawing a line per se. My issue is, rather, with the philosophical foundations of their argument. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone who says that they cannot imagine attributing sentience to plants. My issue is with the type of reasoning, which is the kind of reasoning that Western philosophy has been making since the Greeks: “Animal rights are no more a matter of opinion than is any other moral matter.” Hidden within this claim is the either/or of moral philosophy: we either accept absolute and universal claims to truth and morality or we give up and accept a relativism in which anything goes. And, since we are not going to want that, we must accept that there are logical ways, outside of who we are and what we feel, think, and need, that can prove a moral point. We must accept that we can know such things. I find this point scary, regardless of who makes it and about what. I see it as deeply rooted in separation and as an expression of the hubris encoded within patriarchy, the reaction to loss of trust in life that led to patriarchy in the first place. This hubris, time and time and time again, has led to war. I want us to find ways of addressing deep and profound differences between us, however intense they are, in other ways.

I wrote about this in relation to the pandemic and the rifts that our responses to the Coronavirus have intensified. It’s in a piece called “Apart and Together: Mending the Tear,” where I proposed a third path I now call “integrative epistemology” (the term suggested to me by my colleague and friend Mariam Gafforio and which I now prefer to the original term I used at the time, “relational epistemology.”) Rather than arguing about anything, integrative epistemology humbly calls on us to see that what we know is only what we know together through solving practical problems together.

Here, then, is the quote, a full two paragraphs so that it’s not out of context. It’s in the section “A Frequently Asked Question: What About Plants?” In reading it, I invite you, the reader, to ask yourself, at the end of just about every sentence, this simple question: “How do you know that?”

Plants are qualitatively different from humans and sentient nonhumans in that plants are certainly alive but they are not sentient. Plants do not have interests. There is nothing that a plant desires, or wants, or prefers because there is no mind there to engage in these cognitive activities. When we say that a plant “needs” or “wants” water, we are no more making a statement about the mental status of the plant than we are when we say that a car engine “needs” or “wants” oil. It may be in my interest to put oil in my car. But it is not in my car’s interest; my car has no interests.

A plant may react to sunlight and other stimuli but that does not mean the plant is sentient. If I run an electrical current through a wire attached to a bell, the bell rings. But that does not mean that the bell is sentient. Plants do not have nervous systems, benzodiazepine receptors, or any of the characteristics that we identify with sentience. And this all makes scientific sense. Why would plants evolve the ability to be sentient when they cannot do anything in reaction to an act that damages them? If you touch a flame to a plant, the plant cannot run away; it stays right where it is and burns. If you touch a flame to a dog, the dog does exactly what you would do — cries in pain and tries to get away from the flame. Sentience is a characteristic that has evolved in certain beings to enable them to survive by escaping from a noxious stimulus. Sentience would serve no purpose for a plant; plants cannot “escape.”

In addition to not being able to know any of the above, I am also aware of both indigenous perspectives as well as present-day researchers who actively dispute some of these claims. For example, any creature that cannot move needs to develop other mechanisms for engaging with threats to its survival, which plants, according to these sources, have indeed developed: the capacity to synthesize nuanced phytochemicals in response to different other organisms and situations, to the point of being seen by some as “chemical factories.” Other researchers have investigated the root system of plants in general and trees in particular, seeing them like interdependent, giant nervous systems. I, personally, don’t have the research credentials to make a claim. I find the things I have read enough to settle into humility. I don’t know. I can’t know. I only know that I don’t want to have a line.

Let there be no line

I carry within me searing pain about there being a line demarcating what is and what isn’t OK to kill. I want us to fully take in what I consider to be a deep and inescapable moral dilemma: there is no life without killing. My intense introduction to this dilemma was in 1997, when I was facing the difficult question of how to respond to a life-threatening cancer. The oncologists I was consulting with were pressuring me to start chemotherapy yesterday, because my tumor (Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) was pressing on my esophagus and making it difficult for me to swallow, as well as on the vein that returns blood from the upper part of the body. They were quite worried about my well-being and, obviously, my life.

I, on the other hand, followed a different plan. At the time, I was quite involved in the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, and the first of the five precepts was quite on my mind:

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compassion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life.

I was being asked to kill, there was no question about it. I was being asked to kill cells produced within me; cells that, like all living things, wanted to live. I couldn’t and didn’t want to look at the cancer as “other” and I didn’t want to go to war against it. Despite the doctors’ worry, I wasn’t going to put chemotherapy into me until I had worked out the moral dilemma.

As part of this exploration, I discovered two clear principles that supported me in choosing to do it. One was the deep recognition that informs this whole piece: there is no life without killing. Not just death. Killing. We kill that which becomes food, and we kill that which threatens our own life. This happens, 24/7, as the immune system incessantly senses which cells may pose a threat, whether these cells are part of us biologically or ones that come into us as microbes or viruses, and initiates processes that destroy those cells. This was a life-changing event for me, followed weeks later by such deep temporary aversion to certain foods, caused by chemotherapy, that I would not have been able to have enough food in me if I didn’t resume eating animal foods, ending several years of being almost completely vegan.

The second discovery was recognizing that cancer is an unsustainable life form. There wasn’t anything I could do to give these cells ongoing life, because the cancer was going to die. There was no question about that; only about whether all of me would die with the cancer, or it would die and the rest of me would survive.

Five weeks later, I accepted my doctors’ recommendations and began a course of intensive chemotherapy. I complemented it with massive amounts of other approaches, enough to not know what did and what didn’t support my journey. I don’t mind not knowing; I am not a controlled experiment. My odds, at the start, were 50:50. I am here, twenty-five years later, still alive, cancer free, and changed.

Beyond instruments or obstacles

I come back to the question of the line. I don’t want to have a line not because I want to have license to do what I please with all living beings. I don’t want to have a line because I don’t want to have that license with any living beings. Wherever we put that line, we implicitly say that anything on this side of the line can be treated as a thing: an instrument to meeting our needs, or an obstacle to meeting our needs. Plants show up in both categories. The weeds, which are plants that grow where we don’t want them to grow, not any particular family of plants, are clearly obstacles. The ones we want to eat or look at and enjoy are clearly instruments. And sometimes the lines blur. As I was researching this article, I discovered that up to 70% of carrots in the UK are dumped because they don’t pass the aesthetic criteria for being brought to supermarkets. (And any time that food is dumped rather than being distributed to people in need I experience so much grief I don’t know what to do with myself, and that’s not the point of this article.)

The Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology in Switzerland deliberated for four years the question on the dignity of plants. One of its members, Florianne Koechlin, wrote an article about their work, called “The Dignity of Plants.” At present, as she points out: “Anything and everything can be done with plants today; there is no ethical consideration, no awareness of any problem.” This is, precisely, what it means to treat something as a thing, to other it.

My concern with the Animal Rights Abolitionist Approach and others like them is that they are trying to care for animals by othering plants. Here is another example, from Florence Burgat, who, in an interview called “Ethics for the non-human world: is a plant equal to an animal?” speaks of “the indifferent life of plants.” The othering of plants didn’t start with this wave. We have been othering plants for a long time. I still worry about digging us more deeply into that as a moral argument for caring for animals.

Here is also where the unwanted species come into the picture. Othering, which is the making of living beings into things, is deeply baked into patriarchal functioning in its separation from life. We have also othered the cockroaches, the mice, as well as all the weeds of the world and endless other species. They are the obstacles to having the clean, perfect, harmonious life we somehow believe we could have if only they disappeared. We have made them our enemies. Collectively, we put enormous amounts of energy and other resources into fighting them — be it with insecticides, with antibiotics, or with traps. We have lost our collective willingness to share this precious planet with creatures whose lives and choices we experience as a threat. We have lost our sense of being only one part of the grand web of life. We have come to believe that the entire biosphere is here to serve us.

It’s then no surprise to me that this is also how we so often relate to each other. As Koechlin says in the last sentence in her article, “The way we deal with plants influences our relationships to the living world, to plants, to animals, and to ourselves too.”

Some years ago, a woman of African descent at a retreat was expressing some exasperation with an animal rights activist for expressing significant upset about how animals were being treated. After hearing her for a while, I reflected on how outraged she would be if anyone were to imply that the pain of people of color wasn’t equal to the pain of white people, and then invited her to see how similar her own claim was: that the pain of animals was not as important as the pain of people in general, and certainly of people of color. We have created a complex chain of non-equivalence, a hierarchy of dignity, of who counts as fully alive, of who is an instrument and who is an obstacle, of whose life matters.

The animal rights activists are aiming to shift the line, to add animals to the category of those who deserve care, leaving plants on the side of the exploitable. That animal rights activist, whose care for the well-being of animals I was upholding and advocating for, was later one of the people who expressed upset with me for posting the article about the intelligence of plants, asserting the line separating plants from animals, the former edible, the latter to be protected and cared for.

I, on the other hand, don’t want to argue where the line is or should be. Moving where the line is would only shift who is and who isn’t othered; who is or isn’t fair game to exploit; who is or isn’t kin. I want us all to be kin.

Even Koechlin, despite asking us to rethink how we engage with plants, is still within this categorization. For her, “the good, or interests of a plant should be weighed up against the interests of humans.” This is a far cry from the exquisite and delicate weaving of relationships within which all life flourishes that Robin Wall Kimmerer makes so vivid in Braiding Sweetgrass.

What I want is for us to relate to all life as sacred, the way I understand our ancestors did, people who embedded themselves in the interdependent web of life, who developed complex relationships of reverence with plants and animals, seeing all of them as teachers and us, humans, as a young species learning to care for all life.

As far as I know, there has been no indigenous culture that has been vegan, and hardly any that have been fully vegetarian. The people who have most demonstrated capacity for reverence have not had a line and have known that all life is sacred and that all must eat and all must kill. I want to learn from them about how to relate to the life of what we end up killing and how to kill when we do. How do we be all kin, all part of the web of living, and still kill? How do we bring reverence to the killing and to the eating?

I don’t want to pretend I know much about this. I, too, am the product of the thinking that’s destroying the biosphere, as much as I want it to be otherwise. I am grossed out or afraid of many bugs. I have done many senseless killings. I eat mindlessly more often than I wish, whether it be plants, animals, or fungi. I have taken tiny steps to shift this within me, and I know it’s a lifelong journey to reclaim the ancient knowledge. Until then, if ever I get any closer, I want to surrender to what is only mine to do: to listen, very carefully, to my own quiet inner voice, to whatever wisdom I can find there. This is my only link to that knowledge, buried deep within me, and still there, in the cells, since before we were human.

PHOTO CREDITS

Harvesting carrots, by Franke — Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M, on Flickr

Carrot Mayhem Milking Slade Lane, by Michael Trolove, on Wikimedia Commons.

All hand-drawn pictures are by Emma Quayle