When I write about something that is emotional or complex, I usually get a lot of messages focusing on one question. So I try and respond to it. In the case of Simon, the question seems to be similiar to the very thoughtful posting on Facebook by Gina Helm: “..what I cannot understand is why the farmer could not have called for animal rescue to come and get Simon before he was so neglected?” Others have asked it differently. Why didn’t the farmer put Simon down, even get someone to shoot him, a fate preferable to his long neglect and inhumane treatment. Why, people wonder, would I sympathize with anyone so cruel and thoughtless, even lazy?

I’ll try and approach this very good question this way.

First off, rural life is in a terrible struggle in America. So many farms are struggling and falling to an economic and political system that is destroying them. Many are fighting for their lives, exhausted, broke and weary. Unlike the city there is no single “animal rescue” nearby to come running and it may well be that the farmer was terrified to invite anyone onto his property. I have reason to think he was embarrassed, even ashamed. He  is not a typical farmer, but a subsistence farmer. Hard life. Such life can be exhausting, grinding, dispiriting. For a farmer to call in an outside authority to remove one of his animals is a profound, life-altering move and admission. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of one doing it, although most would shoot an animal rather than see it suffer.

Secondly. I don’t know why the farmer didn’t take some action. I don’t think he does either. In a way, that’s the point. If he was strong and clear enough to take action, he probably wouldn’t have allowed Simon to languish in that condition.

But compassion is compassion. You either offer it or you don’t. And it seems to me it can’t only apply to nice people, an oxymoron if ever there was one. I don’t know how to parcel it out to animals, not to people. It is simple to say, well this man deserves nothing, stop whining about him. I think it is not so simple.

Animal rescue, like many other powerful social currents, is a monologue, not a dialogue. Many people are convinced they know what animals think and feel. But animals cannot speak for themselves, so the truth is, the conversation is quite one-sided and we don’t know. Because we can project anything we want into their consciousness, we do. And this stirs our emotions in the most powerful ways.

We humans are arrogant. We think that because we love our dogs and cats – and donkeys – that they must be like us and think like us, and this emotionalizing has become so epidemic and overwhelming that I doubt it will ever change. If enough people believe something long enough, it becomes true. And perhaps it is true.

People and animals will have to live with it.

Two things we will never really know. Why the farmer did what he did, how Simon feels about it, if he thinks about it all.

In that, perhaps, the circle completes itself.