Moral obligations to animals, shame, and our reflections on finding an abandoned dog

Written on Sunday, November 3rd

Yulia and I were traveling through Mount Shasta, California early this spring. While we were there we took a ride up the majestic mountain and found ourselves in a fairy tale wonderland.

W

Mount Shasta

The view from Mount Shasta

Yulia, in her unceasing ability to convert beauty to action, said that the whole world once looked this way and that we can make it be that way again. She's right.

We drove up the road that winds up the 14,000 foot mountain. We made it up to Bunny Flat before the road became impassible due to snow. Here is a view from Bunny Flat. There's still a long way to go to the summit!

Bunny Flat

We stopped here to use the public restrooms and discovered an injured bird flying around the entrance to the building. We found it in a miserable state. It could not fly.

Yulia immediately said that we needed to take the bird with us. I was not so sure. I reasoned that it's a wild animal. It may have a family in the area. Blah, blah, blah. The usual excuses.

We were debating what to do when a man walked out of the restroom. The bird was sitting helpless on the ground in front of the doorway. We watched in horror as the man stepped not two inches from crushing this little animal. Both the man and the bird had no idea what almost happened!

That decided it for us. We took the bird and put it in a box. We took it to the base of the mountain where there was an animal shelter. The people at the shelter informed us that they were closed and to come back later. We told them that we had an injured bird with us and that it needed help. Without hesitation they invited us inside. A receptionist did some quick paperwork with us and a couple vets came from the back room into the lobby. Everyone seemed genuinely concerned about this little bird!

They thanked us for bringing it and said that they would return it to Bunny Flat after treating it. The receptionist gave us a big smile, clasped her hands together, and gave us a namaste bow of the head.


Everything worked in this situation. Ordinary people (Yulia and I) had the means (a car) to take this animal to safety. This small mountain town had an institution (an animal shelter) already in place to help the bird.

It was easy to do the right thing.


I am sorry to now write that we were not so helpful to a dog recently. It's not easy for me to write about this. I feel sadness. I feel shame. But it's important. I won't let my pride stop me from writing.

On November 1st Yulia woke me up to tell me that there was a dog in our back yard. I got out of bed and met her outside. Sure enough there was a dog. It had its tail between its legs. It was shivering. It was scared of us.

We reasoned that she came in through the only opening in our fence. The gate in back has been broken since we moved in.

We did not immediately coax her into going through the gate and back to where she presumably came from. She seemed in too sorry a state to simply chase her away. I brought her some cat food and placed it about 15 feet away from her. She did not go for it. I moved it a few feet closer. Still no. So I moved it to almost right under her nose. Nothing.

We left. Ten minutes later we came back to an empty bowl. She was running around beyond our fence. Problem solved, I thought. The food gave her the boost of energy she needed to go home.

Around midday we noticed that she had not left. Rather, she was milling around by our front door. I opened our front gate to let her out onto the street. I called to her. She did not budge. I tried to herd her through the gate. She went sideways instead of straight out the opening.

My neighbor across the street asked me who I was talking to. I showed him the dog and asked if he knew whose it was. He said he had never seen it before. It probably wasn't from around here. He said that it is cute and that he would take it, but he just took in an abandoned dog a few weeks ago.

He encouraged the dog to leave: "Come on out, doggy. Michael and Yulia can't keep you. They go to the city often. You wouldn't want them to leave you alone like that, would you?" Our neighbor was right. We're getting ready to go to Lviv for the next few days, in fact. We have two cats and set them up with plenty of food and a huge bowl of water when we leave. They catch mice and go potty outside. But leaving cats for a few days is one thing. Leaving a dog that we don't know all alone in our house is completely different. It would be irresponsible I think.

So I took some old oatmeal cookies and put them by the road. I figured she would take the bait and then find her way home when on the familiar street. I left the gate open for her and went about my business.

Yulia and I were sitting inside when it started to get dark out. The dog had not left. She ate the cookies and had settled onto our front stoop. I noticed that she was absolutely covered with fleas.

I do not like fleas. Two years ago, when our cats were kittens, they had a bad flea problem. We could not get a handle on it. No matter how many times we bathed them with flea shampoo we could not kick the infestation. Then fleas started appearing everywhere. In the bathroom. In the kitchen. On our bed. Yulia started getting bitten by them too. It was miserable for everybody. There was no one thing that kicked the problem finally. Ointments, shampoo, essential oils, washing the bedding, and several months eventually solved the problem.

So when I saw that this dog had a bad flea problem (she was actually whimpering because of all the little bugs), I gave her some flea ointment for cats.

I didn't have the heart to force her onto the street. It was dark out and getting cold. The dog was shivering and crying. My compassion got the best of me. I gave her some newspapers, a towel, and a box to sleep in and some warm food.

The dog slept all through the night. The next morning she woke up wagging her tail. There was a massive die off of fleas. Her bedding was covered with hundreds of them! They were on our front stoop too and on our shoes and sandals that we keep by the door. She was still scratching and biting at her legs though. They had not all died.

We led her out onto the road and closed the gate behind us. She did not leave, but sat crying in front of our house. We tried ignoring her for several hours. She did not leave. We saw our neighbor, Maria, leading her cows out to graze. I heard the dog bark at them and saw one rear up in fright. There is one stray dog in our village. When she came around, this dog and the stray started viciously barking at each other.

I told Yulia that I didn't think that this would work out. The dog was not going anywhere. If the dog hurt herself or someone else we'd have an even bigger problem. We decided to search the internet for an animal shelter in the area. The only one we could find was in Lviv. Their website says that they basically fix stray animals and then let them go. This wouldn't fix the problem of finding a home for this dog though. And who would drive an hour out from the city to pick up a dog? There are many strays in the villages around Lviv. Why would they come out for this particular one?

I decided to take a walk to the spring. If the dog followed me, I thought, maybe she would recognize her home and go there. Or maybe someone would recognize the dog, and we would find its owner. The dog followed me to the spring and back. She did not leave me. No one recognized her. This just served to break my heart more. The dog followed me like a true companion. I've never seen anyone (or anything) offer so much loyalty for so little!

But we continued to leave her on the street. Yulia and I exchanged uncertain looks with intermittent tears in our eyes the rest of the afternoon and evening.

The story doesn't end well. When it started to get dark out I went to the well to get some water for washing. I heard our neighbor yelling. He was whipping something--I'm not sure if it was an actual whip or a tree branch--at the dog. The dog frantically barked at him and ran in defense. That's the last time I saw the dog.

...

I am left with only uncertainty after this experience.

I don't know if our neighbor actually whipped the dog or if he whipped near the dog. They were on the other side of the fence, and I couldn't see much in the half light. I ran out to talk with him when I heard the commotion, but the neighbor ran after the dog by the time I got to the street. I might still ask him about it, though he might not want to talk about it. He called the dog cute yesterday. He has his own abandoned dog that he took in. He obviously likes the animals, so I imagine that it was hard for him to chase this one away. I'm not sure what prompted him to whip at the dog. Maybe she attacked his dog. Maybe she attacked his granddaughter who was playing out on the street. But talking about it with me might be too emotionally difficult for him. We'll see.

He was wrong to be violent though, and I'm not sure if I want to talk with him after seeing what he did. Sure, it's a means to an end. He got the dog to go when I couldn't. But that does not make it OK.



Written on Friday, November 8th

I was writing the above post last Sunday morning while Yulia was still sleeping. I was planning on writing a homily about animal cruelty. I wanted to know what you, our readers, thought about the situation.Although I consider myself a defender of animal rights, I genuinely did not know the right thing to do. Keeping the dog and ignoring it both seemed to be bad solutions.

But when Yulia woke up she asked me how the dog got back onto our property. I asked her what she was talking about, and she showed me.

The front gate was ajar and the dog was back!

I'll keep the remaining story short. We vacillated back on forth on what to do on Sunday. In the evening a neighbor came and said that he would take the dog on Monday and give it to his sister. His was a bit drunk (he even told us that he had been drinking), so we didn't know if we could trust his word.

We waited around most of Monday and left on the 3:30 bus, with regret, for our planned trip to the city. The dog was still faithfully waiting by our front gate as we drove away on the bus. The neighbor never came by.

The guilt and uncertainty was too much for me. It started raining and pouring on Monday night and I broke down in tears. I told Yulia that I couldn't take it anymore. We decided to take the dog in.

On Tuesday, armed with a collar, leash, flea shampoo, and super healthy dog food, I went back by myself to our house. The dog was no longer at the gate. I didn't feel optimistic about either scenario: either she ran away or the drunk man had taken her. I went into our back yard, teary eyed yet again, when the dog showed herself, wagging tail and all.

Friday--that is, today--she is free of fleas, has a hand made dog house and a belly full of food (and lots of high calorie butter). I constantly reassure her that she will never be cold or hungry again. We decided to name her Tulip. She faithfully sleeps by the front door every night.

Tulip--she might be part German shepherd. What do you think?

Her dog house. We expect her to get big, so we built it with plenty of growing room.

This is one heck of a smart dog! I have been able to teach her how to sit already. She likes to jump on us a lot though. Any advice on how to get a puppy to not jump on people? Can you teach us any tricks to teach her?

Tulip licking her lips. I wonder if she knows that she has a life full of lots of yummy food to look forward to?

Wine making

"Why aren't you guys picking your grapes?" is the most frequent question we get at our house. Despite our neighbors' concerns that we are not harvesting the grapes, we are actually putting them to use.

Yulia and I found some large glass bottles and fermentation tubes in the attic, so we decided to make our own wine.

To make a contraption like the one pictured above takes about a full day's work.

First you pick the grapes and crush them all. I did it by hand. You could also use a press or tread on them with your bare feet if you are dealing with large volumes.

Next you put the crushed grapes, juice and all, into a bottle like the one above. Yulia's dad advised me on how to make wine, and he said that our grapes are not sweet enough. He recommended I add some sugar help feed the yeast. I dissolved several scoops of it in water and added that to the crushed grapes.

Then you let the crushed grapes and sugar sit for about a week or two, swirling the bottle every day to make sure no mold forms.

Once fermentation begins, it is time to strain the seeds and grape skins from the wine. Refill the bottle with the half fermented grape juice.

You then need to seal the bottle so that gas can escape, but not enter. I used two methods to do this. One is pictured above. I wrapped Play Dough around the special tube and sealed the mouth of the jar with it. Then I filled the u-shaped part with water (up to the round sections). You can watch the gases emitted during fermentation bubble through the tube. It's pretty neat, actually! Take a look:

The second method involves sealing a plastic tube with Play Dough. You place the end of the tube in a jar of water. It bubbles as well.

The second option

Yulia and I don't drink much, so we'll be saving it for those special occasions when we have guests...and you know what that means. We are waiting for you! So come on by!

A date with Yulia

Even after two and a half years of marriage, it is still hard for me to get a date with Yulia! Can you believe it? I thought I would have caught the attention of the most beautiful woman in Ukraine by now!

But persistence pays off, and we finally went out for dinner and a stroll in downtown Lviv. For dinner, we went to a place called Галицько-жидівська кнайпа "Під Золотою Розою" (Galician-Jewish restaurant "Under the Golden Rose"). As its name suggests, it is a Jewish restaurant. We went there because we wanted to see something different--there are not many Jewish restaurants in Lviv. We also got the impression that there were lots of healthy things to eat on the menu.

However, our impression about the food was wrong. We didn't find much in terms of vegetarian or vegan food. We had our hearts set on a hummus plate, but they were all out of it. We had to settle for green salads. Not that there is anything wrong with green salads. We eat as many of them as we can on a regular basis. But we came hungry and expected to gobble up lots of different good foods there.

The restaurant's atmosphere made up for the lack of food. Upon arrival, for example, we were greeted by our favorite kind of hostess--a cat! She had dreamy yellow eyes and a luxurious fut coat to match.

She must have known that we are cat people because she decided to join us for dinner!

It's a good thing that it is a Jewish custom to wash your hands before eating because the kitty settled on Yulia's lap. Kitty got lots of attention from Yulia and me.

The restaurant is very clever too. Their menus, though not in Hebrew, are bound on the right side and read back to front (or what we are used to seeing as back to front).

The menu is also curious because it does not list prices. As it says in the above photo, "It is the only restaurant in Ukraine that does not have prices. One can negotiate here! We'll find a common language." The message is only half true. When it came time for our bill, the waiter kindly asked us if we wanted to negotiate a price or if we just wanted the check. We just got the check. We were still hungry, after all!

It's nice to see a Jewish restaurant in Lviv for a number of reasons. Firstly, it serves as a reminder that there was once a synagogue where the restaurant now stands. It shows that there was once a sizable Jewish population here. It also is a reminder of the multicultural history of the city. The brief Nazi occupation of Lviv obviously had something to do with reducing the number of Jews in the city. The subsequent Soviet occupation of the area took care of what the Nazis didn't complete. They transformed Lviv and western Ukraine into a territory occupied mostly by ethnic Ukrainians.

Halychyna (or Galicia) is a territory that encompasses parts of present day western Ukraine and eastern Poland. Like most of Europe before World War Two, it was ethnically mixed.

What Yulia and I liked so much about the Golden Rose restaurant is that it embraces multiculturalism while featuring one group of people. It shows that the restaurant is not exclusive, but inclusive. As their menu states, "Rusyns, Poles, Jews, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Armenians, Roma people, Greeks and Tartars collectively created Halychyna over the centuries." This statement focuses on culture rather than the more arbitrary nationality. If you didn't notice, Ukrainians are not listed there, but Rusyns are. That is because Ukrainian is a term that slowly took the place of Rusyn during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as nationalism and nation-states grew in importance.

Admittedly, there are some aspects of this restaurant that may be a bit stereotypical or misplaced. I don't know much about Jewish restaurants, but I'm not sure if negotiating a price is traditional. I expect this is a vestige of the stereotypical Jewish merchant. I could be wrong, of course. The hummus plate is also something I don't expect is authentic among northern European Jews. Still, I'm willing to overlook these possible inaccuracies because of what I perceive as a sincere interest in promoting Jewish history. It means a lot that a restaurant (and not, say, a museum) of all places is taking on the role of an educational setting.

But back to our date. Yulia and I left the Golden Rose hungry, but were delighted to see an old hippy bus selling vegan cookies and sweets a few steps from the restaurant.

We strolled over to Lviv's main square by city hall and ate our cookies while enjoying the ambient aroma of coffee wafting through the air. We people watched.

We liked the funky types with dreadlocks...

But our favorites were classic: the old man chess players...

Fall Tree Planting (for us, our grandparents, and our children)

A freshly transplanted apricot tree

Yulia and I did some transplanting today. For the past week or so we have been digging up plants from the grandparents' house and, in the case of the sea buckthorn, digging up some wild saplings by Lviv International Airport. We also purchased several plants at the annual fall gardening festival in Lviv.

This is what we planted today:

4 Early Sea Buckthorns
4 Late Sea Buckthorns
2 Male Sea Buckthorns
9 Hazelnuts
2 Walnuts
5 Chestnuts
7 Pine
1 Fir
2 Cornell Cherries
1 Plum
2 Mulberries
2 Cherry Plums
1 Kiwi
1 Apricot
1 Hibiscus
1 Wisteria
3 Cedars

48 Trees, bushes, and flowers planted today!

...And that is by no means everything. We will still be doing some transplanting tomorrow.

We really enjoyed transplanting today because it gave us a chance to do some landscape design. The trees and bushes we planted will really give our property some form once they start to mature and get big. Yulia had the brilliant idea of planting the wisteria by a gate. Wisterias are vines, and we will train this one to cover an arched gateway in our garden. It'll look beautiful. ...And the fragrance! Imagine walking through a gateway with hanging wisteria flowers caressing you as you pass by. Heavenly!

And we can't wait for the harvest. Just look at these sea buckthorn berries we snipped off the wild trees growing by the airport! We'll have quite the abundance of fruit once these trees mature.

We planted three cedar trees today. They are wee little seedlings right now. They will take several decades to fully mature. Maybe Yulia and I won't live to see it, but they will eventually start making cones. The seeds from these cones can be eaten whole or pressed into oil. Have you ever tried cedar oil? It is delicious and especially good for you. They can also be sold for a handsome price. Maybe our children will one day reap the rewards of these majestic trees.

Probably the most important thing we did today was plant a few trees for my deceased grandmothers and grandfather. Today happened to be my grandmother's birthday. She would have been 91 years old.

Right before Yulia and I left for Ukraine, we took some soil from the grave sites of each of my grandparents. Not much, about a hand full or two. We promised them we would use that soil to plant a tree in their honor once we found a place to live for ourselves. They were all born in Ukraine and were forced to leave their homes during World War Two. We thought that we could at least take some soil from their final resting place and return it to their homeland.

They had difficult lives. My grandmother's house was purposefully burned down. Her family had several horses that the loved very much. Tragically, her father died from burn wounds rescuing the horses. She would always break down in tears telling me and my sister that story. I am now doing the same as I retell it.

I can only hope to aspire to be as good as my grandparents. They set a good example. When I feel overwhelmed with how hard life is, I think of them. The least I can do is to try and leave this a better place than it was when I got here. They deserve that.

Two алича's "cherry plums" (they are the only plants with green leaves in the picture) for my lovely grandmother and grandfather.

The mulberry for my darling grandmother.

Shale gas drilling in western Ukraine (Part 2)

Here are some pictures from the protest. Yulia and I went there with her parents (who have been very ardent about the issue).

It was pretty well organized. When we got there, there was already a crowd and someone leading with a microphone. We got to work collecting signatures.

After a while one of the protest leaders got into a debate with a journalist. The leader asked the crowd what religions they were a part of. Everybody answered, and there were all sorts of people there.

We were confused until we found out later that the journalist was asking if we were representatives of a religious sect. Apparently, journalists have convinced themselves that the protest was only attended by members of this religious sect. Interestingly enough, after learning that this protest was attended by all sorts of people, the local news persisted with the story that only members of the sect attended the protest. I wouldn't be surprised if this were conspiratorial in nature (though it could also just be the result of sloppy journalism). If you are on the losing side of an issue and have no good arguments on your side, it is best to distract people from the issue itself. It's a good method. It's even got me talking about religion instead of shale gas.

Later in the protest, one of the leaders went to the Lviv legislature to talk with some representatives, but he was not allowed inside. He then ended the protest by encouraging everyone to spread the facts about shale gas because facts, as he put it, are our best weapon.

The protest when we first got there.

Bottles filled with water poisoned from shale gas drilling

Yulia's mom collecting signatures

Dead chickens being used as a prop at the protest.

Shale gas drilling in western Ukraine

Today Yulia and I attended a protest in Lviv against shale gas drilling in western Ukraine. Since the proposed drilling would affect Yulia and I where we live, we thought we'd talk a little about what shale gas drilling is and why we are against it.

Last year, the Lviv Oblast Rada (Lviv province's legislature) voted unanimously to not allow gas companies to drill for shale gas in this area. A year later, this was almost completely reversed. All of the representatives, save two members of the Svoboda party, voted to allow shale gas drilling. They have decided to allow the Shell and Chevron corporations to explore the Olenska Shale in western Ukraine, a deposit beneath a densely populated area. It covers a great deal of Lviv oblast, along with Ternopil and Ivano Frankivsk. Yulia and I live in the affected area.

Shale gas is a deposit of natural gas that is trapped within a shale formation underground. It is more difficult to extract than regular natural gas. Holes have to be drilled vertically and then horizontally into the shales. A chemical-water mix is pumped into these bores to fracture (or "frack") the ground. The natural gas that is locked in the shale in small pockets is released and, therefore, made extractable.

Shale gas drilling is much more capital intensive than regular natural gas extraction. It requires large amounts of water and chemicals to be trucked to the drilling site. The amount of gas retrieved from these shales is considerably less than the amount retrieved from conventional drilling. Until recently, shale gas was not profitable enough to justify investing in it. With rising prices and dwindling conventional reserves, it has now become profitable for gas companies to justify drilling shale gas.

Those are the facts as far as I understand them. This is why Yulia and I have come to the conclusion that the shale gas fracturing method is bad:

The drilling of shale gas near where we live means that the ground water we use for drinking will be poisoned by the chemicals used in the fracturing process. The irony is that we moved here for the abundance of clean drinking water. This area is dotted with a plethora of natural springs. But in places where shale gas drilling has occurred, locals have reported that pets and livestock have lost their hair. The water has a strong odor and is flammable in certain instances. The gas companies themselves have advised the locals not to drink their own well water. In short, the water itself is poisonous.

This is simple enough to understand, and it seems that our local legislature understood this last year. What happened since last year that made them change their minds? It seems fishy, to put it lightly.

Yulia and I attended the protest in Lviv today to remind our representatives that their constituency does not support shale gas drilling. Typically, Yulia and I do not attend protests, but this issue is simply too personal. We would also like to meet others who are interested in the issue. We have been collecting signatures to help show our representatives that their constituents do not support this issue.

 Let us be clear. This is not a political act. We do not care about political parties or individual politicians. This is not about them. It is about having clean drinking water.

Yulia and I are so interested in this issue because it is simple and straightforward. We do not want our drinking water to be poisoned. It is not a distant or theoretical issue.

We were bemused to read yesterday to read an editorial written by The Times of London. In their opinion piece, the newspaper claims that opponents of shale gas fracking do not understand the plight of poor people. Shale gas drilling will benefit them, they say. And this is what the authors have to say about water pollution: "Contamination of the water supply is not strictly impossible, in the sense that science does not rule absolutely preclude any scenario that meets the conditions of logic." Did you get that? Because we didn't. It seems that they got tripped up by their own poor use of language. Reading this sentence is like watching a figure skater attempt a tripple flip and seeing them fall on their butt. The sentence makes complete sense until the double negative in the introductory clause. So all we were able to understand is that "contamination of the ground water" is something, something. Curiously, that is the only statement the authors make about ground water poisoning.

If this statement says anything, it shows how rich people are hurting poor people for unclear reasons.They tell themselves that they are doing something that is good and necessary. They even delude themselves into thinking that they are helping poor people. But they are not, and they cannot explain why what they are doing is safe. The people making the important decisions are sitting in cities like London reading papers like The Times. These are cities that have made their fortunes by taking advantage of poor people in foreign countries. 

The Times's editorial is not related to shale gas drilling in western Ukraine. But the companies that will be doing the drilling here are foreign--Shell and Chevron. What do they have at stake in this process? Do they have friends that live here? Families that live here? Do the people that work for these companies live here? 

I didn't think so. Enough is enough. Let us care for our own land.

Cutting off their noses to spite their faces

Boris Danik's recent piece, "What matters for the EU in Association Agreement with Ukraine," got me thinking about what Yulia and I are doing here in a small Ukrainian village and how it connects with the bigger picture--Ukraine's future as a country.

For those who are not in the loop, Ukraine and the European Union (EU) are scheduled to sign an economic Association Agreement in Vilnius, Lithuania this November. The agreement is a big deal for many different stakeholders.

For the EU, it means adding forty-some million people and Europe's second biggest country (after Russia) to their economic sphere of influence. This will help create a stronger ally on the EU's eastern border, tempering the influence of Russia, Europe's other large economic entity.

For Ukraine, the Association Agreement creates a more formal path to future EU membership. It also gets exclusive trading rights to the EU, one of the world's largest economies.

Russia has been nerve wracked by the prospect of Ukraine signing the Association Agreement. It has created its own economic union called the Customs Union (Belarus and Kazakhstan are the other members of this trade union). Russia wants Ukraine to join the Customs Union. However, Ukraine cannot join if it signs the Association Agreement with the EU.

Danik explains why the EU is interested in signing an economic association agreement with Ukraine. He lists many reasons for their interest. However, the one that I want to discuss involves Ukraine's rich agricultural land. Danik discusses tacit concern in governments over climate change and the damage it will cause to agriculture. He speculates that many governments, including the EU, want access to agricultural land to feed rising populations in their countries. He goes on:

Food shortages are already entering into the calculations of economic planners. Not surprisingly, Ukraine’s fabulous grain-producing capacity changes everything important for Europe in the [next] hundred years or longer and, given some savvy in Kyiv, makes Ukraine a real player and a valuable member in any geopolitical configuration, in one format or another.

This makes me apprehensive. Ukraine's government has already shown that it may be willing to sign away huge portions of its land to foreign governments. Last week a Chinese newspaper claimed that Ukraine may be leasing 3 million hectares (that is, 5% of the entire country--or the size of Belgium or Massachusetts!) to the Chinese government. Other news outlets caught wind of the the story, and it spread like wildfire. It was later revealed that the story was inaccurate, though this may be questionable. 

Whatever the case with China, it has got me thinking. Foreign occupations, particularly ones that have exploited Ukrainian agriculture, have not turned out so well for Ukrainians themselves. Yulia and I have been watching videos from a project called "Share the Story," which commemorates the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor (also known as the Artificial Famine). In the early 1930s, the Soviet government purposefully starved up to 10 million Ukrainians. The Soviet government targeted ethnic Ukrainians in an attempt to exterminate as many of them as possible (this is also known as genocide). The irony is that the victims were starving while living on land that was producing grain feeding the rest of the world. The "Share the Story" website states that at the height of the Holodomor, 1.7 million tons of grain were dumped onto Western markets.

While I do not think the EU is capable of similarly monstrous actions, it does give me pause.Yulia and I are observing the evacuation of the Ukrainian countryside. Villagers tend to own a lot of farm land, and they are forfeiting this land to local governments when they leave. Yulia and I happen to be interested in buying the land that is being left behind, but it is all but impossible for ordinary people to buy it due to a byzantine bureaucracy. It seems that local governments only understand how to sell these properties to agribusiness.

We have tried buying land directly from villagers, but it has not been easy. Yulia and I were looking for land for two years before we moved into this house. With the rate at which villagers are fleeing to the cities and the plethora of available houses, one would think that buying real estate would be easy and inexpensive. That is not always the case. 

Many people we talked to to asked for exorbitantly high prices for their land. One lady was asking for $36,000 for a collapsed house in a remote area. We know the market to an extent, and similar places go for anywhere between $1,000-5,000. Another elderly man told a friend of ours that he would never sell his house so that a rich person could just "put up some kind of a villa on his land." 

Many villagers are cutting off their noses to spite the faces. They want to show that they will not be taken advantage of by what they perceive as rich city people. In reality they will hold on to their land so tightly that they will never sell it. After they die their land will become government property at no cost to the government, and their families will remain a few thousand dollars poorer. We have seen this exact thing happen. In one area where young people such as Yulia and I were trying to buy land, there was a beautiful spot up on a hill above a natural spring with a run down house. It should have been a cinch to buy. The owner wasn't doing anything with the land and lived in the city. But this particular owner was an older man who refused to sell it to any of us. As I understand, he was quite the curmudgeon and staunchly refused anybody who talked to him. We had all but given up when we learned that he had died and that his surviving grandchildren wanted to sell the place. Yulia and I got in touch with them, and they were quite serious about selling it at a reasonable price. They were quite amiable, in fact. We met with them and were on track to buy the place. They told us they just had to do some paperwork with the village hall and that they would be in contact with us. When they did not call us back, we called them, and they explained that they had lost ownership of the land when their grandfather died. The grandfather did not do some kind of crucial paperwork, and the local government now owned the land. 

Yulia and I see this happening left and right. It seems that it is happening enough that the land is able to be consolidated and sold to agribusinesses for pennies and a flask of vodka to indifferent village mayors. This is troubling. We see what we are doing here at our home as a possible solution to this problem. We think the countryside should be repopulated by people with a fervent interest in the health of their land (and themselves). Firstly, it would be harder for foreign entities or agribusiness to take the land for themselves and potentially exploit ordinary Ukrainians as they do it. Second, if people took an interest in growing their own food, or even took an interest in eating healthier, it would negate the need for planting monocultures of grain in oceanic proportions. People who grow their own food do not need to heavily rely on buying food for themselves. Those who don't grow their own food, but eat healthfully would have no use for the monocultures of wheat, soy, rapeseed, and corn that would be harvested and processed into junk food. A healthy person may eat a little wheat or soy, but would presumably also eat a whole variety of other foods.

We think our recommendations are not only helpful for Ukrainians. People everywhere should be taking back ownership of their land. In this way, the EU (or Russia or China, for that matter) would not have to turn to Ukraine for its grain.

We do not think our recommendations are that hard to accomplish or far fetched. After all, Yulia and I are former urbanites who used to eat a diet based on exploitative agriculture.We made the change, and we think others could do it too.