I felt for Maria this morning when we came across our limp ram. The white lambs are special to me, and special to her. Maria is new to this life-and-death stuff on the farm, it is draining for her, but she is loving and strong, she is a brick, we come together in the most powerful way to do what needs to be done. We both fall apart a bit later.
When she saw Jake, I knew I had to pick up the camera for a bit, so much emotion, I am a journalist at heart, someone has to take the photo, even when it is uncomfortable, and I know she is a private person and it often makes her uncomfortable. She held Jake for nearly an hour, he seemed very drawn to her, at ease in her arms, it seemed to bring him strength. It was a healing love that I witnessed, a powerful thing, another way to talk to animals.
The day ended on a far brighter note than it began, we found Jake lying right near this spot when we came out to do the chores this morning. Many barn visits later, lots of bottle feedings, injections and remedies later, Jake was up and walking around this evening, Deb shadowing him closely. Ma, a good mother, doesn’t seem too interested in Jake today. He is not nursing, she has paid little attention to him. Most of the time when we came out to the barn, Jake was holed up in a corner shivering.
He is still weak, and somewhat disoriented, he is vastly better than he was this morning. Tomorrow, more penicillin, another vitamin booster, more lamb’s milk in a bottle. Maria and I are committed to doing everything in our power within reason and with perspective to heal Jake, we think he has a good shot. Thanks again for the many good words of encouragement and support, they do matter, we do hear them and feel the energy of your good faith. It lifts us up in times of trouble.
Maria and I are, as always in sync. We both thought Jake was dying, we both agreed there was no point in calling a vet, we both rallied from our surprise to treat him aggressively and lovingly. A good day all in all, I am eager to share more of my photos tomorrow. A good note to go to sleep on, we are both wrecked.
When something like Jake’s sickness happens, I find myself fighting two battles – one is for the life of my animals, the other is the unthinking intrusions from rude people whose parents did not teach them manners and who run amok on social media. I suppose many of our parents weren’t able to teach us the new etiquette of social media and blogs, so I will have to try.
For those many people who sent us prayers, good thoughts, support and encouragement, trust and good wishes, I thank you very much. You were helpful. This post is not for you, you already have good manners. For the many others who were thoughtless enough to scold, second-guess and badger Maria and I in a time of trouble – a low thing to do – this post is for you. I hope it is helpful.
“Please call the vet,” pleaded Donna. “This breaks my heart,” wrote Karen, “please call the vet..he is so special.” Why not call the vet, asks Barbara, “if the vet says there is nothing to be done, that’s fine, but if he can help save the lamb’s life, why not?” John agreed with Stephanie. “Why would you not take advantage of the ability to save a life. I truly do not understand.”
John, I hope this post will help you come to clearness.
It is important for people with pets to understand the lives of people who live with animals. I have both, I am on the fault lines, it is important to talk about this, we are struggling to determine whether animals can live in our world any longer.
So here are the Bedlam Farm Rules Of Real Animal Crises For Real Animals And Social Media Etiquette, things your parents forgot to teach some of you. Perhaps you can teach your kids what you do not know.
1. If It’s Not Your Money, Don’t Tell Other People How To Spend It
–First of all, you don’t just call a large animal vet to chat anymore than you “just” call a human doctor to get a diagnosis on the phone for free. “Just” is one of those special and alarming trip words that often signals the sender has no idea what they are talking about. That is patronizing, we are not all just follk up here sitting on our butts waiting for the phone to ring. Unlike people on Facebook, large animal vets are on the road, they are not sitting in their offices waiting for calls about my lambs. Unlike people online they don’t make diagnoses or offer decisions over the phone or from looking at photos. If you want their advice, you call their offices and make an appointment, they don’t earn a living giving free phone chats.
If you call them for a lamb that is suddenly, ill, and want them to come quickly, then that it is an emergency call, they are awakened at home or pulled off their scheduled visits. Expect to pay a lot, at least $150 for the emergency plus $45 for the visit, plus medicines, repeated visits, syringes, more if there are procedures or it takes a lot of time. Everything a vet does or says is added to the bill. Jake is already a $1,000 lamb, Maria gets $23 for a skein of yarn. It will be a year or two before she sells any of his. Last year we spent $1,700 to amputate a barn cats leg. Spending money on animals makes people on Facebook feel all happy and warm, it does not buy a ticket to heaven, mostly to credit card debt.
And I need to be honest, lambs are not the number one priority for vets around here. Horses fall and break their legs, cows die giving birth and catch awful diseases, farmer’s lives are often on the line. A sick lamb does not get sirens going.
2. Why Do You Think We Don’t Know What You Are Telling Us?
I’ve called vets perhaps a score of times for sick lambs in my time on my farms. On every single occasion, the vets say they can’t be sure, it might be something they ate, a fever, genetics. They can’t really know. They are quite honest and open about it, they carry no magical diagnostic tools in their trucks, and the illnesses afflicting animals like sheep are many and varied.You need to understand that in the real world of the pasture, it is most common for them not to know.
The leave syringes, bottles of penicillin, and suggest a shot a day. Sick lambs rarely live, they say, and then they leave. They are right, they rarely do live, there is little to be done for them. Save your money next time, they say, try these things. In the future, they say, give them a shot, offer them lamb’s milk, maybe a vitamin booster. I’ve done this a dozen times, I don’t need advice from remote people who like my animals. I’ve saved about eight of those lambs, lost four.
– Our vet bill for last month, the lambing period, was more than $1,000, and it is not yet complete. Some visits will come in next months bill. That’s a lot of money for four lambs that will not ever earn their keep. I’m not sure how much money all of you certain advice-givers have, but we don’t have a lot of extra money to spend, nor do most people with animals on farms. Animals cost a lot of money – fences, brushhogging, hay, feed, salt blocks, electric fencing, water systems, shearing, trimming, illnesses. I don’t know how you run your lives – it is not my business – but I imagine most of you don’t do business in a way that guarantees enormous losses without limit. You do not work for less money than you can live on. Neither do we.
I set a rule online once: people can tell me what to do if they will take charge of the animals and pay for all of the bills. It usually silences the critics and advice givers like a steel door slamming shut in a bank vault.
3. Just Because You Can Send A Message On Facebook Doesn’t Mean You Should.
I know Jake is cute, I take the photos. But being “cute” is not a reason for him to survive at all costs by any means. We have cute animals and animals that are not so cute, and we care for all of them in the best way possible. It is often too easy to send a message on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe take a few deep breaths before hitting the send button. Or better yet, don’t give me advice.
I understand that many of you think you are being “nice” and loving animals when you send thoughtless messages, but to me those comments above are both rude and insensitive. I don’t need to be encouraged to care for my animals. I make my own decisions, in this case in complete consultation with Maria and often with many others. Our decisions are not arguments for you to agree with or disagree with. I do not care what you think. You are, in fact, being intrusive.
I make my decisions based on years of experience, many conversations with vets, much research, the useful information of friends and fellow animal owners, and my two decades of observation. I do not make my decisions based on the pleas of people on Facebook.
4. Mind Your Own Business
A blog or Facebook page is not an invitation for you to presume to know better than me what I ought to do. The decisions we make are not your business to judge. I do not surrender my freedom to you or to the Internet, I do not owe you explanations for what I do, I do not take a poll before making the decisions I need to make. If you don’t like them, go elsewhere to read someone else’s blog and books, perhaps he or she will be happy for you to tell him what to do. I am not. Jake has, from the first, gotten the very best possible care, that is why he is alive during a difficult birth and days of struggle. It is why he is alive this afternoon and doing better. He might well be dead in the morning, I hope not.
5. Respect Boundaries, Maybe They Will Respect Yours. They Are Important
If you really love animals, here is some advice for you: respect the boundaries and feelings of the people who own them, It is not your right or business to tell me or Maria what to do with our animals or our lives, how much money to spend, who to call for help. Do not give advice to people who have not asked for it, and do not want it. It’s a creepy thing to do, even if you don’t mean it that way.
Apart from animal welfare, boundaries are important for human beings. They respect dignity, privacy and identity. Don’t try and take those from me, it will not go well for you. It will not work.
6. Don’t Be A Low Form Of Life.
I’m sure the many people telling me what to do believe they mean well and are just trying to do well – so many atrocities are committed in the name of loving animals I can’t keep track of them. But I should be honest with you, I think it is a low form of liffe to harass, second-guess or judge someone who is struggling with a difficult problem or crisis. To try and make them feel bad when they are feeling bad and are worried. If you seek humane treatment of animals, offer the same to the people who own them. They often need it more. Good people of good faith try to offer encouragement and support, not criticism and second-guessing. Just think about it, if you don’t agree, then my blog is not the place for you, you can find a lot of happier homes on Facebook.
I share my life, I am not offering it to you for your approval, I do not seek your advice, heed it, or want it. I am not running for office, I don’t live by the mob rule on the Internet. Today was difficult enough without this barrage of offensive and unthinking messages, bad advice, amateur diagnoses and emotional intrusions.
7. We Need A Wise And More Mystical Understanding Of Animals: They Fall Down, Stumble And Are Eaten
If the people who own pets do not come to understand the natural world and the true lives of animals, there will be no animals but pets. I share this so that others might learn from it and benefit from our experiences, not to be lectured by people without boundaries. All animals are not pets, they are not furbabies and child surrogates, some live in a different world, they are a different nation. They get sick, are eaten, they fall and die.
Farms are not rescue facilities, nursing homes or assisted care housing. There are boundaries and limits to what the person who lives with animals can do, if the people who live in cities and suburbs and the people who only live with pets do not come to understand this, then all of the domesticated animals in our world – think of the carriage horses – will live only on farms and in the preserves of the rich.
8. You Do Not Love My Animals More Than Me, You Do Not Know More About Them Than Me (Or Maria).
I have no apologies to make for not calling the vet today, and John, I hope this helps you understand. I am quite proud of the way we have treated our lamb Jake and our sheep. I know some of you think you love my animals more than I do, but you don’t. You don’t know more about them than I do, either.
Jake is doing well, I think he has a good chance of survival. We worked very hard today to save him. If he doesn’t make it, I feel nothing but good about our efforts to save him. It was intelligent, pre-planned, humane and in perspective. That’s how I’ve managed to survive on farms for nearly 15 years.
9. Do The Best You Can For As Long As You Can.The standard for people who live with animals – for me – is not survival by all means at all costs, but this: I do the best I can for as long as I can.
10. If People Do Not Ask For Advice, Do Not Give It. Just Look Away.
Unwanted advice is the scourge of social media and the Internet. It is rude to give advice to people that are not seeking it. I bet your parents did tell you that, mine did. Fools do not take advice, smart people can figure things out on their own. In the polarized world of the “left” and the “right” most Americans have stopped listening. If I need advice, I will tell you. I ask for help all of the time. But don’t hold your breath.
11. We Are Thinking Of You.
If you truly wish to be helpful, rather than self-serving and self-righteous, there is only one message to send someone struggling to help a sick or dying animal, and you can see it all over the comments on my Facebook pages: “Good luck, we are thinking of you and wish you well.”
We are working together to form new kinds of social communities, new boundaries, a new sense of etiquette. Manners matter, online and off. I consider my online sites my living room on the Internet. I expect people to behave on Facebook the way they would behave in my home. Most of the time, they do. Boundaries are important. These are mine.
Hattie McCarren, an African-American single mother in New Orleans who cares for four children and six grandchildren – she is 63 now – did not intend to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached. When the hurricane bore down on the city and officials belatedly realized how severe the storm would be, they issued a mandatory evacuation order and Hattie hurriedly piled her extended family into a battered old mini-van and left her dog Gus, a Lab/Shepherd mix behind. She expected to return in a day or so, she left food for him and water on the second floor.
Dogs were not allowed in the evacuation shelters.
It was almost a month before Hattie returned, and there was no sign of Gus. Many pet owners left their animals, fully intending to return. People without resources – people like Hattie – were forced onto buses or the trucks of volunteers and barred from bringing any animals. Tens of thousands of domesticated pets were abandoned in New Orleans. In the weeks following Katrina, hundreds of rescue and animal rights volunteers poured into the city, searching for these animals, feeding and rescuing them and ultimately, putting many thousands up for adoption.
It took Hattie two years to find her much loved dog Gus and two more to get him back. The same people who rushed to save her dog refused to return him to her. She not only lost her home, she was plunged into the angry and arrogant world of animal rights
I talked to Hattie this weekend, I found her story and that of so many others online, and through the powerful NPR documentary MINE, which documents the story of thousands of people who experienced the same nightmare. These were mostly poor New Orleans residents who were victimized first by Katrina, and then again by people claiming to be acting in the interests of the rights of animals. The shocked producers of the documentary said it often seemed that some elements of the rescue movement did not care much about people, just animals. That is a familiar observation to anyone who follows the New York carriage horses and their story.
“I didn’t have much money,” Hattie told me, “but I never stopped looking for Gus, we spent hundreds of dollars looking for him, people in the neighborhood got together, we hired this young lawyer to help us out, lot of us were looking for our dogs and cats, hoping and praying they was alive.” She found him through an animal registry set up by the Red Cross, he had his name and rabies ID when found.
Then she said, to her shock, she learned she had to go to court to get Gus back. She had been tagged as an animal abuser.
Hattie is deeply religious, she has had a dog all of her life. “I gave thanks to the Lord when we found Gus,” she said, “it was a miracle, it was such a happy day for all of us. I was ready to cook grits, Gus loved his grits in the morning, and some fresh chicken liver too. But it was too soon for me to be happy, the fight was just starting.”
Hattie’s story, and many hundreds like it draw attention to the new reality of animal rights: in a growing number of cases, the carriage horses prominent among them, the animal rights and rescue cultures have evolved into a government-tolerated kind of cultural militia answerable only to themselves, and with a self-appointed police, judge and jury ethos that has gone gone out of control. It functions beyond law, reason or humanity. It is, in a growing number of cases, a rogue culture, not a benign force for helping animals.
I talked to Hattie’s lawyer in New Orleans. “It was surreal,” he said,”these people had no right to seize someone else’s property, turn it over to someone else, and refused to return it. That is just not the law anywhere in America.” This is a lesson the mayor of New York might soon be learning for himself.
In Hattie’s case and many others that are being documented, animal rights organizations, with the help of naive and money-hungry politicians are trampling on the human and civil rights of animal owners and lovers and with people who earn their living working with animals or farming with them. I am encountering and receiving stories like Hattie’s every single day from all over the country, I can barely process them.
When Hattie finally located Gus, he was living in a home outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the rescue volunteers who had found him wandering the streets of New Orleans took him and put him up for adoption. When Gus was taken to a vet, it was discovered that he had heart worm, not uncommon in the South. The rescue group told Hattie that because Gus had heart worm, he had clearly been abused, she was guilty of neglect. They refused to return him to her, they said she was not fit to own a dog.
They said if she applied for another dog, they would refuse to give her one.
It took Hattie and her lawyer – and more contributions from family and friends – nearly another two years to get Gus back. Many others were not so lucky. “People around the country opened their homes to Katrina dogs and cats, giving them loving homes and bonding with them,” reported the documentary. “It was convenient for adoptive families to imagine that the animals had been abandoned by their owners, or that their owners had been neglectful.” Some people interviewed even went to far as to say Katrina was the best thing that could have happened to these dogs and cats. This is also familiar language to the New York carriage horse drivers, several animal rights officials have been quoted as saying that the horses would be better off dead than pulling carriages in New York.
As many people are coming to see and know, there is an elitist, sometimes even racist, strain in the attitudes and decisions of some animal rescuers and animal rights workers – they consider themselves to be progressive. Increasingly, they are establishing criteria for owning and keeping animals – dogs, cats, horses, chickens and sheep – that favor the wealthy and penalize working class people. They are establishing new and unexamined criteria for abuse, adoption and cruelty without any process of law or any kind of negotiation or dialogue with animal owners and lovers.
I have received scores of messages from people refused adoptions – even of older dogs who have languished in shelters for months and years – because their property is not large enough, far enough from traffic, equipped with big fences, or they can’t commit to expensive medical practices and procedures. In some cases, the elderly are refused adoptions because it isn’t clear how long they might live or how far they can walk each day.
Do people like Hattie have the right to adopt and live with dogs if they are held responsible for their care and welfare?
These increasingly Draconian decisions – Cook County, Illinois (Chicago) has passed legislation forbidden people from buying dogs from breeders – splits animal ownership and access along class and economic lines. It doesn’t help the millions of dogs languishing in “no-kill” shelters for years sometimes, either. Shelter dogs are the only way many people can have animals in their lives, and the only way many dogs can find homes when wealthy people don’t adopt them.
People are often told they can’t adopt one of the millions of needy animals in shelters because they work (James Epstein, a publishing assistant, in Boston was denied a dog because he works and lives alone. He should have lied, he said.) Preemptive and expensive medicines that were once considered optional choices and are now mandatory, no longer choices but indicators of cruelty and abuse. The people most affected are people without access to politicians, expensive websites and fund-raising campaigns and who have a difficult time standing up to the well-organized, lavishly funded coalition of organizations who make all kinds of decisions without any kind of accountability.
“I could not understand how these people in Michigan could try and take Gus away from me” said Hattie, happy to have Gus finally back in her life, thanks to a judge. She was afraid to send me a photograph of Gus, she said, because she thought the animal rights people would come and take him away again. Hattie reminds me that need a movement for animals that people support, not fear. And that helps people, not persecutes them.
“They told me they worked for animal rights – how could they tell me that I was not fit to raise my dog? They made me feel so bad. And then, to not get him back because he had the heart worm. I don’t have no hundreds of dollars for heart worm pills, but if I’d know he had it I would have raised the money somehow. I did when he came back. He is my dog, nobody had the right to take my home and my dog from me. I won’t lie down for that.”
The rescue and animal rights movements are both grounded in good intentions and great need. They have moved far away from their original mandates and good intentions, they have become something no one imagined and few people quite grasp. They break into farms and research facilities, intimidate and threaten students who study poultry farming, attack people who disagree with them, harass them online, pressure movie producers into killing animals rather than subjecting their companies to relentless attacks, they hound circuses and county fairs, people whose ponies ride kids around farmer’s markets. They seek everywhere to banish animals who work and deprive their owners of subsistence, it seems increasingly clear that they are killing many more animals than they are helping.
When the public is consulted, it seems they have a radically different agenda than the animal rights groups. More than 62 per cent of New York City residents want the horses to stay in New York.
The mystical carriage horses have awakened a new kind of social movement. They are awakening people to the need to reclaim the idea of animal rights and offer animals greater roles in the world than living on rescue preserves, where they will eat hay and drop manure for the rest of their lives. Or simply vanish from the world.
More and more animals like horses are being abandoned, sent to slaughter or simply not acquired in America because there are not enough rescue facilities on the earth for all the animals who will need them if they have no connection with people, no work to do, and the regulations and restrictions for keep them make it unsustainable for many people, especially the middle-class and the poor.
Money, as always, has become a significant factor in the care and future of animals. Groups like PETA, the A.S.P.C.A. and the H.S.U.S. are coming increasingly under fire for the enormous salaries of their executives, the money they are pouring into political coffers, their manipulation of images and emotions to collect donations.
Animal rights have become one of the most effective money-laundering operations in American life, the money often thrown away to campaign against elephants in circuses, or develop things like those ridiculous electric vintage cars for Central Park that would have easily paid to save a thousand horses from slaughter or for a great outdoor space or grazing area for the carriage horses in New York City.
Who, after all, is against rescuing animals? Or opposed to the rights of animals? How many animal lovers are able or willing to resist the hundreds of thousands of money-making images of abused, starving, suffering dogs, cats and carriage horses that flood social media every day and raise enormous amounts of money to pay for rescue and animal rights executive salaries, high-tech websites and blogs, and to donate to lawmakers happy to ban breeders, horses, circus animals, farm animals, pets, pony rides and other work and interaction that actually keeps animals alive and in our world.
Stories like Hattie’s remind us that the real rights of animals are deeply entwined with the real rights of human beings. One cannot exist without the other. Animals can only survive and prosper when they are connected to human beings who understand them and their lives. Animals will never have rights if the rights of the people who own them are not protected as well. There is no right for animals greater than the most basic: to exist alongside of us, to share the joys and travails of the world.
No secret and privately-funded organization ought to get to unilaterally decide who gets to have an animal and who doesn’t, or to exclude loving and worthy people because they don’t have lots of money. They do not get to arbitrarily and outside of the law decide – in collusion with mayors and millionaires – that they will redefine abuse to fit the impulse of the movement, or the whims of celebrities and wealthy people looking for causes.
For me, Hattie is a worthy symbol of this extra-legal social movement in the same way Rosa Parks became a powerful symbol of the civil rights movement. Make no mistake about it, civil rights are as much an issue with animals as they were and are with people. The civil rights of the New York Carriage Horse drivers and owners are being violated almost every day of their lives, in many different ways.
Hattie’s rights were also trampled upon, and she had the courage and the will to stand up and say just what the carriage horse drivers are saying, and in the very same words: enough, you can’t take my animal away from me without cause, you cannot tell me how to live.
A few minutes ago, we had a heartening visit to the pasture, Jake got up, walked around, looked alert, then he seemed to wear out and went by the stone wall to rest. The good signs are that he is drinking the bottle milk and responding to the shots we have given him, the troubling news is that he is not nursing – Deb is and doing well – and that he looks disoriented. All of this is consistent with a fever or having eaten something mildly poisonous – there are lots of things that can make lambs sick.
The other lambs are all fine, and Jake was born thin and frail, so the truth is we just don’t know. The vets have a saying – sick sheep suddenly die – and this is even more true of lambs. But I am more optimistic this afternoon than I was this morning. This afternoon I’ll give him another vitamin booster and later tonight, more penicillin. If it is a fever, this will fight it off. Thanks for the good wishes. I think the odds are even now, much higher than I would have given them this morning. This lamb has a message, he wants to live.
