Animaholic

At the moment,  I have 6 dogs, 4 cows,  2 sheep and a goat in the immediate vicinity of the house, if not actually in the house (2 dogs). Around here, in the deep country, this is not out of the ordinary.
There are also the 16 horses which is an extravagant number.  I am in the 1% when it comes to horse ownership.
That is not to mention the other roughly 3000 cows on the actual cattle ranch.
We are all here because of the grass.  The grass that grows in the open fields, that for 100 years, produced pure white sugar and, when that became economically invalid, were too remote, too depleted, too steep, too rocky for anyone to want for anything else.  So we, the humans, made fences and ran water-lines and brought cattle to graze, and horses and dogs to herd them.
What is my relationship to these animals?  Predator? Slave-owner? Prison warden? Executive Director? Servant? God?  A little of each, depending on the day.
And what is their relationship to me?
All of them either work for/with me or are going to be eaten someday, by somebody.  We all bleed into each other, quite literally. The dogs bite the goat when I'm not careful and I must tend her wounds.  I castrate the calf and cut myself by accident.  We both bleed on the same knife.  I defend their world, this little bios of grassland that we have made together, all of us,  with every bit of stratagem, strength, and endurance I possess.  So that we can all keep bleeding into each other and into the landscape, for now, because its the most beautiful, vital thing I know.
Some humans argue that eating meat is kind of sin - that it is wasteful and cruel - and that all of this land should be converted to cropland or, if it is not suitable for that, left to go wild.  There is some merit to this argument, but it is too simplistic, too rational, too detached, too civilized.  Down that path, we will be growing all of our food in tanks and we will live in a world-city.  Down that path, other animals will be a distant memory, and all of the ways that we can live together will be lost.  All the ways in which we change each others minds and bodies will be lost.  We humans will shed no blood and we will be the worse for it.
It is very difficult to talk about this because our culture - Western civilization - is both too proud and too squeamish.  We are extremely violent but we are afraid of blood.  We are obsessed with food but don't like to get dirty.  We say we love nature but fear flies, mosquitos, maggots, diseases, rodents, and mud.  Not to mention any kind of excrement. Western civilization is about being clean, elegant, articulate, economically efficient and ruthless, preferably without having to see any blood.   That's why it's hard to talk about the unclean stuff.  That's why I need animals, so we can be unclean together.