Red and I went out into the pasture today to get the sheep in the pole barn for Jim McCrae, the shearer. The sheep ran and hid behind Simon, but this did them no good. Red sent right under Simon’s legs to get them and run them into the Pole Barn. There is no getting around Red when he is working.
Shearing is a ballet of balance. Jim McCrae leads a life of balance. He runs a photo shop in Rutland, Vt., catering to film users and old cameras. He has a small farm with sheep and border collies. He teaches sheep herding. He shears sheep twice a year. He comes quietly, puts his board on the ground, plugs in his clippers, he slips on his wool slippers, talks calmly to the sheep, flips them expertly. He trims their feet and checks for cuts or sores. His dog Rae rides in the car with him. He handles the sheep with ease and calm, this ancient ritual is a ballet of sorts.
Minnie came through her surgery with flying colors, says Dr. Fariello, “it couldn’t have gone better, she is doing well.” Dr. Fariello said Minnie came through the long operation beautifully, she said the stump won’t even look bad once her fur grows back. She is now a three-legged cat. The episode with Minnie brought me temporarily into contact with a lot of the fear and suspicion that swirls around vets these days, just as it does around human doctors. Facebook is seething with resentments sometimes.
As we see every day, America is a very angry country and I believe much of the anger comes off of the Internet, where there is so much poor and misleading information being passed around as truth and people mostly talk to themselves and hear what they wish to her. With the collapse of American journalism as a trusted source of information, and an explosion in online experts on everything, people really have no idea what to believe, and given a choice, they drift towards resentment, conspiracy and a not completely unjustified mistrust of corporate-fueled greed. Corporate medicine is moving into the veterinary world big time, and costs and profits are going up.
I personally don’t know any rich vets and have never really heard of one, except in chat rooms and websites online where the greedy and uncaring vet has become a staple of the animal world, as angry a world as Tea Party politics. I think most vets are in the middle of a lot of forces they can’t control. Vets go to school for years, carry enormous loans, generally love animals and rarely make a lot of money. Their businesses are complex to manage, have huge overheads and are caught up in the epidemic emotionalizing of animals that has swept the country in recent years. Whatever they do is either too much or not enough. There is so much anger and emotion in the animal world, and precious little perspective.
Maria and I came face to face with a profound issue of animal ethics with Minnie this week: how much do we want to spend to help a barn cat heal? My farmer friends rolled their eyes and laughed when I said Minnie’s amputation could get close to $2,000, every one of them said they would have put their dog or cat down first in a minute, they simply did not have the money and would not spend it on a barn cat. “She was lucky she wasn’t my cat,” said a good friend, a man who loves people and animals.
I sympathize with them, I feel this dilemma myself. Like most of the people reading this, we don’t have $2,000 lying around right now, it was not an expense we were expecting or need and had it gone much higher we would have chosen to euthanize Minnie. At various moments in the last few days I gave it some thought. But this is not the vet’s fault, Minnie will be at the clinic for four days on constant medication, she required expensive anesthetics and a three-hour surgical procedure that involved a vet and two trained techs. An amputation is not a simple procedure, there is no simple or universal way to make a decision like that, it is individual and personal, and I do not fault anyone who chooses not to do it.
People suggested asking for donations, and that is not acceptable to me. My farm is not a charity or good cause, it is my responsibility to maintain and pay for it, I am happy to be paid for my work, not for my life. In my head, I think I would have stopped at $3,000 or higher, that was the figure I had in my mind, I didn’t really get to work that out with Maria, it didn’t come to that.
Perspective is so important when it comes to living with animals, and perspective is being lost as animals are emotionalized – even worshiped, as superior, celestial and saintly beings, love babies and surrogate children. I realized today that I have a lot of feeling for Minnie, Maria has even more. As I have advised in my writing and my books, I had an open and honest conversation with Dr. Fariello about money, she explained what the costs were and would be, I told her how I would be able to pay for the surgery. We were both very open and comfortable with one another. I do not feel in any way she was looking to make a lot of money off of Minnie’s troubles, I have never felt that with a vet. I have no resentment about anything she has done.
Like human medical practices, I do think vets are sometimes too quick to prescribe pills and vaccinations for too many things, I don’t always accept accept that advice any more than I feel I have to do everything my doctor or nurse practitioner suggests. But I feel sometimes that the world around me is awash in suspicion and anger, and I do not want to swim in that raging water, it will drown all of us eventually. More and more I am drawing a boundary around my life – I will not poison it with anger, fear or suspicion.
The truth is, I don’t know how much love costs. There is not app for that. It is one of those ethical issues to which there is not a clear answer, the individual soul has to guide each of us. Poor Minnie was a few hundred dollars away from losing her life, and I can’t swear to anyone else that this is the decision they should have made. Animals do not live in a perfect, no-kill world, that is not a sustainable ideal for me.
We simply make the best and most feeling and clear-headed decision that we can, balancing our love for our animals with our need to take care of ourselves. For me, that is the ethical path. In the meantime, when Dr. Fariello told me that three-legged cats were inspiring, I lit up and things became very clear. Another great animal story is coming to the farm.
Zelda was not all that gracious about being shorn, she tried to run over Jim McRae and nearly knocked Red over but he patiently corner her, flipped her on her back and got some nice wool for Maria.
Jim McRae showed up around noon to shear our sheep – Zelda was the first, she battled valiantly but was taken down. Jim knows what he is doing. Jim is a photographer, shearer and border collie lover and trainer from Vermont and it is always satisfying to watch his artistry. Red and I are going to visit him at his farm in November and work together with the dogs and sheep. Jim flips the sheep on their butts – this paralyzes them – and trims them quickly and efficiently. Maria gathered up the wool to take up to the Vermont Knitting Mill in Brandon and she will sell the yarn in a few months.
