On a farm, you don’t really live in the season that is current, you have to start thinking about the next one, or the next two. In upstate New York, where I live, the big season to think about is always winter, no matter what time of year it is. Winter is the big one, the one you have to always think about, be prepared for.
Spring is the time to order hay for the winter, you don’t want to be calling around in October frantically looking to fill the woodshed. It is the time to call Greg Burch, our wood man and tell him to start bringing seven or eight cords around by October. We will let the wood sit in the sun a while, then Maria and I will stack it in the shed.
What we don’t get to, we will ask Tyler to help us do. The first cord and a half arrived today, about $260. The cord to the right was delivered in March, and is about ready to be stacked. I am thinking about 175 square bales of hay for the winter, we will have a pony, two donkeys, eight sheep.
This week, I called the heating oil company and asked them to come and clean and check our furnace. We’ve arranged for the wood stove cleaners to come in July and clean the stoves and the chimneys. We’re asking our electrician for estimates on putting a couple of baseboard heaters in our bedroom, we turned into ice cubes up there this winter. We also want to try and figure out precisely why our frost-free line froze at the end of the winter, we might need to insulate it.
We also need to check the slate on the roof – lots of snow there all winter, and patch up some peeling paint spots.
So this is a long list, and we probably can’t afford to do all of these things, we’ll take it one at a time and see how it goes. Wood and hay are essential, obviously. It was good to see the first delivery of wood arrive today. In the Spring, I am most often thinking about winter.
Moon McGeoch is one of the nicest neighbors I have ever had, he also has the best name of any neighbor I have ever had. It is pronounced Moon (as in moon) Mah-Gooch. Moon is a musician and friend, he often comes out to talk when Red and I walk by his house, which I often photograph and which lies on the southern boundary of our farm.
Being a musician these days is not easy, and Moon and I share our stories of the creative life.
Moon plays gigs around Cambridge and in Saratoga, and he is celebrating right now because he and some people he plays with might soon link up to do a concert with Chris Poland of Megadeth. He and Moon went to school together when they were kids, and they recently played together in Rochester.
It was also Moon’s birthday last week, we treated him to some cookies from the Round House. Meet Moon.
Maria and I were at the first Bedlam Farm when I suggested giving some of our extra eggs to the chickens, the farmers all told me they love it and it is healthy for them. They even eat the shells. Maria was horrified, she thought it was cannibalism. We argued about it for days, I said it was good and natural food for them, it made her uncomfortable.
Things change, now she includes fresh eggs in the menu of gourmet food our chickens eat every morning, Maria usually offers it up on a special tray or bowl. Some people tell me they think it’s unnatural, especially when they are eating their own eggs, but it seems pretty natural to me. Perhaps living on a farm can de-sensitize one.
I’m making some new and interesting friends at the court hearings for Joshua Rockwood – Oathkeepers, motorcycle riders, teachers, farmers, Libertarians, animal control officers, farriers, liberals, conservatives, housewives, artists, horse rescue people, dog and pet lovers. We have all come to Glenville, N.Y., to support Joshua Rockwood and follow his court appearances. We like each other, we are becoming something of a community.
I experienced this in New York City, in the new social awakening surrounding the embattled carriage horses, all kinds of creatives, oddballs, freedom and animal lovers, people from all ends of the political spectrum. We are all very different in many ways, but we do share at least one thing: as lovers of animals and passionate individualists, we are opening our eyes to the new and jarring reality of the animal world: the good guys have become the bad guys in many ways, and they are pulling politicians, the police and local legislators along with them.
People who claim to love animals are doing this that people who love animals don’t do: they are abusing and mistreating human beings in great numbers, targeting the weak and the poor, wreaking havoc on the lives of already struggling farmers and animal lovers, and they are rapidly driving animals out of our world and to extinction. They are also creating a new kind of conflict that causes government to overreach, that threatens cherished notions of privacy and property and the way of life of many people.
We think of people who rescue animals and speak of their rights and turn in their neighbors for cruelty and abuse as the good guys, and many of them are. But it was a great shock to me – I have always been a supporter of animal rights – to come to see, gradually and over time and past my own visceral resistance – that many of them (not all, for sure) are becoming the bad guys. This has caused a great confusion in the animal world. The animals are, as usual, in the middle.
The people who say they are speaking for the rights of animals, are, in fact, destroying traditions that go back thousands of years, separating people from animals, criminalizing the work of animals, trivializing the relationships between human beings and domestic animals and drawing attention and resources away from the very real nature and meaning of abuse.
And here’s the really bad news: the bad guys of the animal world are teaming up with the police, animal control officers, legislators and town councilmen to make it ever more difficult, even dangerous to have animals in our lives. Stopping animal abuse has become a hysteria, the latest witch-hunt, the social mob action we will be regretting next.
The very idea that our relationship with animals is private, even sacred so long as we care for them well, is being eroded. The idea of abuse and cruelty is being arbitrarily redefined, not by voters or the courts, but by the new Stalinist militia that has stolen the very idea of animal rights and rejects democratic process. The people we might turn to for help and support – political leaders, the courts, rescue farms, animal welfare agencies – are too often becoming the very people we fear the most and end up in conflict with, if we have the money and can get that far.
The people we turn to for protection – our political leaders, are awash in lobbyists and contributions, chasing after the mob.
The animal rights movement has gone to war against farmers and against the poor, good breeders, working people, the elderly, and the millions of people who live, work and are entertained and uplifted by animals – those stupid tricks you keep reading about – and when they appear, they come hiding behind gun-toting police, waving all kinds of new laws and regulations that redefine abuse, criminalize farming and work with animals, and in the most elitist way, degrade people’s work with animals as the stupidest of tricks.
A sorry message to the countless people animals have uplifted and entertained for thousands of years. A sorrier message to our children, who will one day ask us where the animals have gone, and why we let them vanish?
(My border collie Red, a therapy dog, makes people laugh in hospitals. Is this, I wonder, one of those stupid tricks?)
To understand what is happening to animals in our time, it is important to first understand this. Abuse does not exist in the stables of the New York Carriage Horses, not in modern times. It does not exist in the tents and wagons of Ringling Bros. circus, according to court after court. It does not exist in the pony rides of Tawni Angel, soon to lose her ponies and sustenance in Santa Monica, Calif. It does not exist on the farm of Joshua Rockwood, a young farmer in Glenville, N.Y. fighting for his life because the brutal winter of the Northeast challenged him and disrupted his life. He faces 13 charges of animal cruelty and neglect, ranging from having an unheated barn to horses wit overgrown hooves to having water streams and bowls that froze in – 27 temperatures.
Joshua’s crime is to have the passion and idealism to be a farmer joining the local foods movement, and to be caught in one of the coldest winters in American history. An animal rights movement or local government with its heads on straight would have shown up at his farm and asked how they could help him care for his animals in such a winter, rather than calling in the police and trying to destroy him and his reputation.
This young local foods movement farmer was reported to the police by a secret informer, his three horses were seized and taken from, and he has already gotten the first bill for their care, which he must pay to get them back, or even if he doesn’t get them back: $7,500 for 30 days.
Orwellian is an adjective that describes a situation or idea that the writer George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm,) identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It refers to an attitude and policy of intimidation and draconian control of issues by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of events. It describes the targeting of the “unperson,” someone who is publicly denounced on modern media, whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, who is arrested by police with great authority, and who is thus disgraced and discredited. The dehumanizing of people, wrote Orwell, is a common practice of repressive governments.
It is also a common practice in the new animal rights movement, just ask the carriage horse drivers or Joshua Rockwood, a passionate farmer one day, an accused criminal with his mug shot on TV the next.
I am not a Libertarian, nor am I a member of the left or the right. I don’t care much for labels. My grandparents barely escaped Russia with their lives, freedom is not an abstract thing to me. I believe my relationship with the animals I live with – I have been writing about them for years – is no one’s business as long as I do not cause them grievous injury or death. Abuse is not an opinion on Facebook, it is a crime in every state in the nation. And a tenet of the Orwellian world is that no one has any privacy, everyone minds everyone else’s business, and the world is riddled with secret informers.
Animal lovers love to rescue animals in need, we love to ferret out abuse, we love to send money to organizations that put up photos online of tortured dogs and dying horses, no matter that the images could come from anywhere and be about anything. We are a naive and trusting and generally loving lot. We have been betrayed. The people who claim to speak for the rights of animals are, in fact, exterminating them, they are also running roughshod over the rights of people. Government exists to protect freedom and property, not to take both away from people in the name of protecting animals.
Slowly, and over time, it has become apparent that the good guys are the ones who actually live with animals, find work for them to do, help get them through brutal winters and stay alive, help keep them in our world. People like the ones who run Blue Star Equiculture. They remind us what good guys are like, and what they ought to be. Like the carriage drivers, the farmers like Joshua Rockwood, the handlers in the circuses, the people who offer pony rides to children, the animal lovers who love and protect their animals, even in hard times, the homeless people sleeping with their dogs, the elderly seeking a loving companion on the edge of life, the hard working people without tall fences, the people with sheep for their border collies, love horses in their lives, and sled dogs, and donkeys to guard their sheep.
A life with animals is a way of life, from the carriage horses to the circus elephants and their handlers to my border collie herding sheep. It is under siege and Joshua Rockwood has become a brave but reluctant symbol and soldier in what used to be one of the most loving and satisfying experiences on the earth, but which is becoming another war zone ruled by zealots, bureaucrats, politicians and ideologues and the angry and disconnected. Animals are no longer supposed to be a comfort to human beings, or a source of work and companionship. They are becoming another hammer to beat often innocent people over the head.
So those of us who love animals are called to awaken in this curious and inverted world. The people we thought are the good guys are increasingly not. The people being cast as the bad guys are, I find, increasingly not. For those of us who love animals and seek to keep them in our world, this is not a political issue, it is new kind of consciousness, a new awakening.
The Native-Americans are right. We will either learn to live in harmony, or we will perish together.
Red was in position under the apple tree when Liam made a mad dash towards Maria and the donkeys, hoping to steal one of the carrots she was handing out. Red came flying in, headed him off, turned him and chased him back to the feeder. I think Liam will never give up trying, and Red is determined never to let him succeed. Liam got a nip in the butt for his troubles, no carrot.
