IN THE WINTER OF OUR LIVES, IN THE TIME OF OUR WEAKNESS

It has taken me a long time to really nail down just what it is about the MARD Institute with it’s SIMARD MD that so offends me. Let me get there in a roundabout manner.

A good portion of my life has been spent on a small farm overlooking the Strawberry Creek valley just a couple miles upstream from the Saskatchewan river just across the river from Stony Plain. Here the valley is close to a kilometre across offering views of the creek, extensive willow flats, and occasional cliffs and treed bluffs along the valley sides.
Just gorgeous with wide peaceful views.

But beneath that view there is a daily dance of life, death and constant struggle and never more noticeable than in winter. Coyotes, foxes, lynx, even a cougar is reported this year, plus owls, raven and magpies all compete for parts of the limited food base–mice, rabbits and deer. Cougars and owls are purists with cougars killing and eating just deer, owls just rabbits, mice and other birds. Coyotes are the opportunists eating almost everything but what they far prefer are deer.

For coyotes, deer are hard to get. Healthy ones remain mobile in even deep snow forcing even packed up coyotes to invest too much energy tiring them out enough to kill. But old and weak ones? Fair game.

But even here it can take too much energy for coyotes in a pack to wear down a herd enough that weak deer are left behind. So what the coyotes have done is develop strategy. From January on they daily pack up in early evening with a lot of howling and yipping. Then they split up and hunt mice in shallow snow areas beneath trees.

Then the long term investment starts. It’s macabre and I have watched it in action. Individual coyotes will walk, not run, up to a herd and sit. Just watching. Stronger herd members will come out and face off the coyote. They are fifty to a hundred meters apart. After a few minutes the herd will retreat fifty meters or so and some will resume grazing. The coyote will again walk up closer and sit, waiting. Push, push, push. Slowly the herd weakens. There is less time to forage, more energy exhausted moving, moving, moving. Push, push, push, days, weeks.

Eventually one deer falls behind. Then the howling starts and the pack assembles. By morning there are just scraps. A rib cage, an occasional foot or individual bones, scraps of fur. Gone. A wide patch of packed and bloody snow.

THIS is what the MARD INSTITUTE and their test the SIMARD MD reminds me of. It is deeply offensive. Separating out the weakest of us and driving them towards a feeding frenzy by DriveAble.

MARD may claim they are concerned about medically impaired drivers of all ages. Their SIMARD MD test says otherwise.
It is used almost exclusively on just the seventy five and up people. In some clinics, all drivers seventy five and up.

Doctors who enable this should be deeply ashamed.

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July 10, 2018