Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Poisoned Salmon

When I was a little girl living in Wylam, McMum used to send me and Bruv for a walk round the allotments when we got on her nerves. The allotments were situated on the banks of the River Tyne, one of the most beautiful rivers in England. Every so often we'd come across a huge salmon thrown up on the riverbank with its insides completely eaten away by chemical discharges from the Kimberley-Clark paper tissue factory at Prudhoe. We'd get taken round this factory on school trips, to marvel at the giant toilet rools four times our height. Being a tremendously rich multinational, Kinberley-Clark would simply re-stock the river with salmon, until the next time; this seemed to happen regularly.
I'm not a vegetarian (having been brought up in the very down-to-earth countryside) but there was something very distressing about the mindless poisoning of beautiful free creatures just so humans could have disposable tissues to wipe their bums upon.

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