Farmers know better than to give livestock names. One farmer I know shoots his dogs when they get old and sick, arguing, as his father did, that it is the quickest, most humane- and cheapest – way for them to die. His wife says it is not easy for her.  He has no problem with it, even though he loves his dogs dearly. Farmers are careful about their emotional relationship to animals. They name few cows, no barn cats, and rarely any sheep.

Animal writers know that they need to name their animals because that what gives them focus and personality, and creates characters out of them. I love doing this, and am good at it, even as I understand the pitfalls. Once I name an animal, I’m off on the journey. I permit myself to study them, grow fond of them, write about them and photograph them.  They take on identities and personalities for me. They drive the stories in my books, photos and my blog. Simon is a powerful example of an animal who makes his way into the hand’s of a writer and photographer.

He gets a name, a personality and a following. His story is true, and I never dreamed he would evolve into the touching symbol he has become. But there it is. If he had landed on a real farm with a farmer who didn’t name him but put him to working hauling word or guarding sheep, noone would have ever heard of him.

 

Even this approach sometimes collides with reality. We name Alice and a hawk came out of the sky and left nothing but a few feathers. We named Winston and he started pecking at Maria and other people. This might well cost him his life one day, and I wouldn’t hesitate for second to do it. In my ethos, animals do not hurt one another or human beings. If they do, they leave, to a new home if possible, to a quick end if not.

I know better than to name sheep. The sheep who summer here are mostly going to market, and I will not see them again, so I am careful about the photos I take and the things I write about them. They have no names. And  there is Bartleby, who we helped birth and who we did give a name, who keeled over and died in the pasture one afternoon this summer. People e-mail me all the time saying they mourn Bartleby and loved him dearly, and this puzzles me, since I did not know him well and didn’t care for him much.  Where does this love come from?  I think people fill in their own blanks when it comes to animals. I know I do.

I do not provide funerals or memorial services for sheep or chickens. They go out in the deep woods to feed the wild creatures, an offering from the farm to the spirits out there. It is not that I am a hard-ass, quite the opposite. I am a mush. I am protecting myself, I know the real life if animals too well, and it is no more perfect than mine.

A month ago I asked people on Facebook if they thought it was okay to feed chicken to chickens. Almost everyone – except for people who lived on a farm and had chickens – said they thought it was horrible, cannibalistic. Maria felt that way too. Last week, she tossed chicken curry and an egg to the chickens without even thinking about it. And they happily wolfed it down. They were not concerned with human ideas of propriety.  Our ideas about animals, evolve, as they ought to, at least if we are open-minded. Of course, much of our culture is not open-minded – not about animals, religion,  politics or medical care. Not about anything much. The very idea of free thinking seems antiquated, some duty Thoreau notion.

I got a Swiss Steer and named him Elvis and that was an awful mistake. 3,000 lb steers are not pets and are not bred to live long and Elvis’s legs started to go and I sent him off to market.  I am asked about him everywhere I go, and I take responsibility for this because I named him and wrote about him as if he were a cute little lapdog. His death horrified some people, who expected him to live out his life like Ferdinand at enormous expense until the end of his days.

There is a schism between people who live on a farm and people who don’t. People who live on a farm are forced to see the real lives of animals. People removed from them often cannot.  I am a writer, not a farmer, but I have lived with goats, sheep, cows, donkeys, dogs and cats. These animals do not live in a no-kill world. They eat poisonous things, trip and fall, get cuts and infections,  are stalked by predators, mysterious diseases and heart attacks. They come and they go.

There is much irony in the “no-kill” ideal, a very new idea in the world. On the book tour, I meet many people who happily watch newscasts where countless humans argue, hate and and  are blown up or slaughtered, but cannot read a book if an chicken or mouse dies in it. This irony is very American – we are tough on people, but are coming to worship animals. Animal rescue is one of the most interesting and active sub-cultures in America. The idea of human rescue has become almost heretical. People stumble all over one another pointing out why we can’t afford it and shouldn’t do it.

In urban areas particularly, the impulse is for a perfect world for animals, a “no-kill” world, a nearly insane but popular idea that has poor and unwanted dogs locked up in crates for years while adoptable and needy dogs perish for lack of a place to go.

This hypocrisy is especially epidemic in animal shelters, where space and money-pressed directors routinely send animals off to die in vet’s offices and special clinics, but seek out contributions in the name of a “no-kill”fantasy world.  Many people tell me their fantasy in life is to buy a ranch and offer haven to animals for the remainder of their lives. I have yet to meet a person who harbors the fantasy of a human rescue ranch. In hard-pressed America, hard choices are being made all of the time. For me, the middle ground, the ideal, is for a good and humane life, as long as it can last. I’m with Thomas Aquinas. Our humanity is judged in part by the way we treat the animals around us. I don’t think he would have gone for the “no-kill” thing.

I feel this tension all of the time on book tours, but almost never where I live, or from a rural area where people understand that animals do not ever live in a “no-kill” world and where life and death live side by side, and are seen often. One is a part of the other for them, as it is for us.

For me,there is no final landing place on these issues, no black-and-white.  I do not believe I am right about things, only at a particular place at a particular time.

At my first reading in Colonie for “Going Home” , a visibly upset woman shouted walked out on my talk because I said I didn’t believe dogs mourned other dogs the way humans mourn people. There are just too many dogs who are happily re-homed each year. I hope she writes her own book.

One of the things I love about writing about animals is that there are so many different ways to see them, love them, grieve for them. Another thing is that no animal would dream of having these kinds of conversations, or worries about them. They  are too busy accepting and living their lives.