Rosie, the other night Frieda and the other dogs were barking, and I thought there was something out in the road. This happened so many times in our time together, and so I said what I had always said, “Rosie, let’s get to work,” but you were not there. I could not bring Frieda, as she is too aggressive. Izzy would have not known what to do, and Lenore…well, Lenore is not a warrior. I went out by myself, with the flashlight, and found nothing. A few days later, Maria found a starving, dying dog out in the woods. You would have found him right away, led me right to him. I know it.
Sometimes, when I go out to the pasture, I wonder where you are. Are you over that bridge, waiting for me to come to you? I think not. I hope not.
I think you are in your own heaven, not mine. When I look at this photo I took of you more than a year ago, in the morning mist, I think that this is where you are, and that you have sent me this image to show me where you have gone. This is your heaven, endless green and gold fields, legs that never tire, work that is never done, sheep and pasture beyond the horizon, beyond our sense of time and place. It makes me very happy to think of you there, where you belong.
I don’t know if I can love a chicken. I know loving people who love ferrets, rats, rabbits, mice and snakes, so I know it’s possible to love a chicken. Generally I have avoided this. I love dogs and donkeys, and sometimes cats, but I don’t love sheep and don’t love chickens.
Meg is growing on me thought. She was in the feeder this morning, then followed me in the barn, and when she jumped up on a hay bale, she got into a brawl with my Canon 70-200 mm lens, pecking at it before I swatted her off of the hay bales and chased her out of the barns, yelling and flapping my arms like..well,a chicken.
Meg is different, for sure. She is aware of everything, and she loves Maria of course, running and waddling to her whenever she shows up. Meg is curious about me, and pecked at my ankle this morning. She is an inquisitive hen. I do not love Meg, I don’t think, and I’m not sure it’s even possible.
A good friend of mine called me up on the phone this morning – a rare sound these days – and asked me if I had seen the news. No, I said, I do not watch the news much anymore. I find that the news finds me if I need to know something. He clearly wanted to tell me something – he loves to keep Fox News on all day, or CNN, I can always hear angry ranting in the background, and he has a bad stomach – but I said, “you know what? I don’t need to hear the news. I have to go outside and give a carrot to a donkey.” Maria was already there.
When I got back, I called my friend and I said, “hey did you hear the news?” And he said, no, what is the news? We love donkeys, I said, and Simon is doing well. And I said good-bye and hung up and went back to work on my E-Book original, “The Story Of Rose.” I loved her, also. But that’s another story.
I’ve learned to be conscious of owning my own stories, and also to be careful about how I present them. They sometimes escape and take on a life of their own. I write differently about animals than I once did. I was astonished after deciding to euthanize Orson that hundreds – thousands of people – believed they loved him more than I did and also that they were in a better position than me to make decisions about him. There are entire websites still devoted to pointing out how uncaring and exploitive a human I was for putting him down. We all know that in America true dialogue is rare – most people just state their positions and get angry about them.
We sometimes seem to be losing the notion that free people make the best decisions for themselves, and we don’t always know better.
When I sent Elvis, my 3,000 lb steer to slaughter, something similiar to the Orson controversy occurred. At almost every stop on the book tour, I shock people who ask me how Elvis is by telling them he went to feed homeless people in Glens Falls, N.Y. I get messages almost every day scolding me for not re-homing him or wondering why such a cute and endearing creature had to leave the farm. Because I did not write about him as long or lovingly as I did Orson, the response was muted.
I create these stories, so I am responsible for them. If you live on a farm with farm animals, these decisions of life and death – I’ve had to shoot sick lambs, see chickens picked off by hawks, and struggle with a 3,000 lb steer – become so commonplace it is easy to forget the perspective of people who live differently. Up here, we all know that steers are not pets, and are not cute. They are not bred to live long, and like some pigs, their legs give out after a couple of years because they don’t live long enough to have strong and lasting joints. If they are not put down, they can suffer horrible deaths out in the field, because they fall over and can’t get up and have to shot where they lay.
But people have romanticized and emotionalized animals so much – I am often responsible for this – that there is often little reality or comprehension about what they are really like. I loved Elvis, but taking a 3,000 pound steer as a pet was reckless, disturbing. He was not controllable, he was an enormous expense and he did, in fact, injure me and several other people just by taking a deep breath or twitching. I never permitted children near him, as he could so easily have crushed them if he had been spooked or disturbed.
You cannot blame people for accepting and emotionally reacting to the images and stories you offer them. Writers like me cannot have it both ways. You can’t create the idea of an adorable Swiss Steer and then not expect people to be upset when it turns out the real world catches up to the story. One rather smug person e-mailed me this week saying she will never understand why I didn’t find a home for Elvis. There is not a sane farmer in New York State who would take an aging 3,000 lb steer with collapsing legs in for rescue, or who could or should afford such a thing. Steers are not re-homed on petfinder.org like puppies. You could save 500 dogs for what it took to feed Elvis in a month. I told her perhaps the best way of looking at it is to respect the decisions of other people. I didn’t question her decisions about her pets – not my business – and perhaps she might assume I make the best decisions I can.
The other side of the story is this: as a writer of stories, I take responsibility for them, and make sure to present an accurate and honest portrait of real life with real animals. Writers often succumb to drama and emotionalizing because so many people like it. I have been careful with Simon to avoid the continuous projection of him as a piteous rescue creature. Much as I love him, he is a farm animal, not a Disney character. Life with animals is loving and touching, but not only that and not always that. It is often all too real. And real animals do not live in a no-kill paradise. That is what many humans would like to create and project for them. So I need to be careful with my stories, so that people are not hurt by reality.
