I took Maria to the airport in Albany, we left at 3 a.m. and got home and released the two lambs from their stalls. They are out in the world for good, the donkeys are locked up in the side pasture, they are good and ticked. I opened up the north pasture and the moms – Suzy and Socks – took Liam and Pumpkin out to grass. It was a sweet sight, worth everything, I am sorry Maria was not here to see it, but I have a hunch she may be here when the next lambs come, I don’t see Zelda and Ma as looking like they are ready
Maria is winging her way to Montgomery, Alabama, and then to the remote Gee’s Bend quilting collective. She is as excited as I have ever seen here, it was hard dropping her off at the airport, but this trip will help make both of us whole and ratify our love. I can’t wait for her to call and tell me she is there.
Liam is four days old, today he left the stall for good and went out into the world. In his short life, he is already a beloved and controversial lamb, he has been bitten by a donkey, had his tail docked and bloodied, and has helped me to better understand the great controversy that is surrounding the New York Carriage Horses. Animals are like that, they can teach us so much if we just can keep our mouths shut and listen. Hard for human beings to do.
Liam is controversial because a number of my readers and people online are surprised, shocked, or in some cases, outraged that I let Liam go out into a pasture with ferocious and aggressive donkeys. “How could you let a one day old lamb go out and be around an “aggressive male animal,” asked one Facebook diagnostician. Another wrote “shame on you for letting a lamb near a donkey, this is the worst kind of abuse, I’m shocked at you!”
Another said she was appalled at me, “why didn’t you keep him in stall with his mother for a month or so, until he is big and strong!” Several more were furious that I docked his tail with a heated tail-docker. “You should have found a more humane method,” said Charles, writing from Boston.
I confess I felt like a New York Carriage Horse driver facing another angry mob of people who call themselves animal rights activists, but are not really. The conversation reminds me of the animal rights lament about the horses not having dinner together or having enough time to socialize.
I need to be honest. I am familiar with this. When I put a dog down for biting three people; when I let aging sheep go to slaughter, when we put down an aging blind pony the donkeys were rejecting on the eve of another winter; when I killed a lamb who was dying; when I shot a rooster who had attacked Maria.
They are a minority, they are few, but they are loud and angry, they make more noise than people who know something or are just curious. Most of the people who read my blog and blog understand something about animals, they are rarely loud or angry. As in New York, they distort reality. When I first started researching the carriage horse story, I thought there were thousands of animal rights protesters, they made so much noise, had so much money and got so much media attention. Then I found out there are only a handful of them and most of them live in apartments in Brooklyn and Queens and won’t go near a horse.
And as in New York, they are not helping animals, they are helping to drive them out of our world and to deprive them of the work, space, connection and opportunity they need to survive and be healthy.
Americans either have pets or they have animals, and many of the people who have pets – especially those who live in cities and suburbs – have completely lost touch with the true nature of animals and believe it is possible – a moral obligation – for them to have perfect, no-kill, no-mishap lives, even as human beings struggle, die, are killed in accidents, get sick and in trouble all around us. There is not a great conflict between people with pets and people with animals, the horses are right in the middle of it. Sometimes, so am I. People increasingly understand animals only in the context of being rescued or abused, not in the context of living real lives with real people.
The emotionalizing of animals, and our profound disconnection with them has led most people to be completely ignorant of what they are really like, or what it is like to live with them. Thus, many are disappearing as their human owners are less willful and committed than I am, or the New York carriage trade owners and drivers are. The animal rights groups in New York really believe – so does the mayor – that it is cruel for working animals to work, and abusive to house them in cities and stables where they have lived for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
I must confess I sometimes think of Jesus’s little donkey, one of the first recorded rescue animals in ancient times, who he rode into Jerusalem and whose stable was a tree in the back yard.
Here on the farm, and in Liam’s first days, I see the same thing as the carriage trade sees, as New Yorkers are coming to see – leaps to conclusions, factual misstatements, gross misinformation, accusations of abuse and brutality, fervent protests and the claim that animals can no longer live with us in farms or in cities or communities. If you are seeking a better grasp of what is happening in New York, and what is happening to animals in our increasingly personified and unrealistic world, you can follow the story of little Liam, appropriately named for Liam Neeson, the Irish actor who is seeking to save the carriage horses in New York from the people who want to exile or kill them to save them from their very good homes and lives.
Liam was not of course, one day old when he got outside, he was three years old. The donkey who nipped him is a guard animal, he has been around ewes and lambs and rams for years, he protects them, he has never harmed them. Animals are not 100 per cent predictable, no one can say what they will always do in any given situation. Liam is so white and unusual in color I suspect the donkey did not recognize him as a sheep. I am quite certain he will, under supervision. The donkeys will protect him, not harm him, that is their work, they do it well, that is why they are here.
Tail docking is quick, clean and humane. There are no nerves in a lamb’s tail in the first few days of life, the heat cauterizes the wound, the docking keeps the anal area from infection. A minute later, the lamb is running around looking for milk.
It is not healthy or humane to keep ewes and lambs in stalls for long periods of time. They need fresh air, mobility, exercise and survival and flock habits and skills. Stalls get filthy, are hard to clean, the air is bad inside of barns, the ewes are frantic to get out and join the flock. Beyond winter, there is absolutely no need for lambs to stay in stalls once they are cleaned and bonded with their mothers. People do not ask or wonder or bother to research, they seem to be acting out personal fantasies or victimization scenarios that occur far outside the lives of animals.
When a human being is killed in an accident, get cancer, collapses on the street or is shot – 10,000 Americans die of gunshot wounds each year, 15,000 New Yorkers are taken to hospitals each year after collisions with vehicles – it is considered normal, natural, part of the randomness of life. There are rarely protests, hardly ever any media coverage or public outrage, politicians have little to say.
When an animal falls down or is bitten by a donkey, it lights up the Internet, becomes an instant media hysteria, draws the outraged and the just. The New York carriage horse is raging out of control because the people seeking to ban the horses know nothing about them or how they ought to live, or what is abusive and what isn’t, just as the people e-mailing me about Liam have clearly never lived on a farm, had sheep or donkeys.
I heard an interview with a high official of NYClass, the group spearheading the carriage ban,and she reminded me so much of the some of the e-mail messages I get when something goes awry on my farm. The horses ought to be banned, she said, because they don’t eat together, they don’t get to socialize with one another, they don’t get to live in the wild and spend their lives roaming freely and eating grass. Horses belong in nature, she said, not in New York, where they are not safe.
Wow, I thought, every single thing she said is either really dumb or really wrong, and these are the people who get to decide the fate of 22 healthy draft horses? The horses are with other horses day and night, they don’t need to shoot pool, if you put scores of giant horses together at feeding time, they would probably kill each other and knock the stables down, there is no wild and hardly any rescue farms with that much grass (which is often unhealthy for equines for many reasons.), four horses have been killed in 30 years and more than 3 million rides. People in New York should be doing as well.
This is the nature of this campaign against the horses, it is built on air and straw, it has nothing but ideology to stand on.
As a result of this epidemic emotionalizing and viral righteousness, normal life for animals is drawing ludicrous accusations and criticism, the people who own animals are being held to an impossible standards, and animals are vanishing from our midst, everywhere we are. It is becoming impossible to separate and define real abuse from the many invocations of abuse. It is critical that people like me – and the New York Carriage Trade owners – stand our ground. I love my animals and care for them well. I want them in my life, not banished to rescue farms.
They will suffer mishaps and misfortune, just like me. It is called life.
If you wish to live with animals, it is important not to be discouraged or deterred by people who see animals as pets, surrogate humans or furbabies, who believe it is our responsibility to give them perfect lives, better than that afforded any human being that I know. No one should have to take the abuse handed out almost daily to the New York Carriage Drivers. We need to learn to love not only the animals in our world but the decreasing numbers of people willing to keep them and work with them.
“Why won’t you answer my questions about Liam’s care!!!!!!!!!!?,” an outraged Floridian with seven Pugs in her Facebook photo e-mailed me last night, along with 10 exclamation points.
“Because i am too busy caring for them,” I said. And then I did the wisest thing I’ve done all day and the most fun. I banned her from my Facebook Page. She would not be happy there.
I am already grateful for little Liam, he has already gone to work for me, giving me things to write about, teaching me more about the real lives of real animals. I suspect he will be around her a good long while.
My philosophy with herding dogs is to let them see and be part of everything that happens with the animals under their control. Rose was present for every birth, vet visit, shearing, Red is the same way. He is a gentlemen and he and Suzy have always worked very well together, she trusts him and grazes very close to him, and I wanted him to see the lamb so that he would not be surprised and get too close or move too quickly. Good herding dogs sense that lambs cannot be herded like regular sheep.
Red is quite trustworthy, but I still wanted to be careful. In the large pasture by the side of the house, I had him walk up and lie down. Suzy walked up with Liam to within dozen yards of Red and the two of them stopped and checked him out, Liam was nursing in between looks and Suzy was at ease. I’ll do this a few more times with Liam and each lamb.
