Otter's Rock

Parents of 12-year-old Vegan girl who has degenerative condition may face charges.

Anyone who allows their child to be harmed because of their philosophical (or religious!) beliefs should be charged--and found guilty. Now, usually when a child is harmed by their parents' beliefs, it's emotional or mental, and you can argue that the parents didn't know they were harming the child, emotions and the mind being relatively difficult to accurately measure/understand, particularly with people we're close to. (Might not be true, but you can at least argue it.) A diet that causes malnutrition severe enough to give a twelve year old the spine of an eighty-year old? THAT IS KIND OF OBVIOUS, AND TAKES A LONG TIME TO DEVELOP. Not to mention the incredible number of broken bones this kid has suffered, with various other problems due to malnutrition. There's no way they could not have known what they were doing to their daughter.

Adults can live on a vegan diet (no animal products at all, including eggs and dairy products) if they're very careful about it, although they still can suffer problems from malnutrition, depending on their health in general and what their eating habits are. But it is simply not possible to provide a child with all the nutrients he/she needs on a vegan diet. I mean, children have died from being put on a vegan diet too young. Granted, there are many children who don't have serious problems being on a vegan diet, but is that a risk you really want to take with a child's life and health? When adding in eggs and milk will drastically reduce the risk? You don't even have to feed the child meat! And if you decide to try to raise your child as a vegan, you darned sure better be on the lookout for any problems caused by malnutrition.

We just checked out of Mt. Bachelor Village (in Central Oregon, just outside of Bend). Mom and Dad were here for a Professional Photographers of Oregon conference. Verdict: it's an okay place for a professional conference, but sucks as a resort because it's small and there's not much to do besides swim in the pool--they don't even have paths or trails to walk around the place, if you don't drive you have to walk on the road. If you want to go to a resort in Central Oregon, I'd suggest either Inn at the Seventh Mountain or Sun River instead of this place.

Most Annoying Thing: all the wide expanses of green lawn. People think Oregon is rainy, but that's only the coast and the Willamette Valley (the Northwest corner of the state). The rest of the state is one huge desert. You don't hear much about it because most of the people in Oregon live in the Valley or along the coast. (Although Bend is growing fast, and has been for a few years.) I do not consider myself an environmentalist, mostly because most "environmentalists" in Oregon are nuts, or at least they're the ones who seem to be in control of the environmentalist groups. (Don't get me started on the Spotted Owl idiocy or the problems in the way they're regulating the timber industry and all the public forests.) However, I am a huge fan of common sense, and of being good stewards to the creation that God has given us.

Huge green lawns in a desert is NOT GOOD STEWARDSHIP and it is also STUPID. (Mt. Bachelor Village has lots of huge green lawns.) The water could be put to much better use. The water table in the area has been decreasing at an alarming rate and everyone knows it because there are already too many people living here for sustainable water use at current levels of usage, and it's getting worse because of all the people moving into the area. They're going to be in a world of hurt in a few years because there aren't many big rivers in the Oregon desert, so once the water table is used up they're SOL. Bend is almost certainly too far south to be able to draw from the Columbia and its tributaries, and it's too far east to draw from the Willamette. (Not to mention they'd have to get the water over/through the Cascade Mountains, to draw from the Willamette.