My Blog

Outside in

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Nothing of note today at the farm.

The day started cloudy, but in the afternoon, the clouds broke after 2 days of rain for the sanctuary’s June Jamboree. The main white tent is still up. With nothing under it, the poles look like bones. Bales of straw used for seating are stacked on the porch of the med center to dry. The farm meanders back to normal.

I go to clean the white bird coop, which is written on today’s list with “ew!” next to it.

All the birds clear out except Hannah and Gingersnap, who dig through every pile I sweep together, as chickens do, looking for bugs or bits of seed. You learn to pick up piles right away before a bird scatters them. To chickens, a pile of dirty shavings is a treasure chest waiting to be scratched open with their feet, and they see no reason to wait.

When I’m done with the white bird coop, I take the hoof cleaning box—a pink plastic bin with a syringe, a hoof pick and two kinds of hoof heal—into the pig barn, hoping to treat Lodo and Stubby’s cracked hooves. But Stubby is submerged in the mud pond and Lodo is laying so close to Louie I can’t manouever my way to his feet.

So I put the pink bin back and take a brush out to Orion the goat. He’s lost weight and stands off from the others, not grazing. The clover in the goat field has flowered with all the rain, white scattered among yellow and purple and green that the sunlight turns lime around the edges.

I brush Orion and flakes of skin drift off his back and chest. I feel the bones of his ribs and spine. When I stop, he turns his head to look back at me. The sun is hot now and I kneel next to him in the clover.

Lil Jay had flaking skin too, back when he was sick and staying in the med center. But he recovered and his coat is lush and thick. I try to remember what we gave him—flaxseed oil?—but I can’t. There are so many treatments given and even more discussed. I read online about black oil sunflower seeds being good for a goat’s coat, but I need to do more research.

Dawnell opens the gate to the pig feeding area and it’s time to get their dinner. She fills a bowl for Pete as I come in. Dawnell lures Patsy and Judy into the isolation pen with a couple pieces of bread. They’re on a diet, though they don’t know it. Except Patsy might—she shies away from going in. “She’s afraid of Andy,” I call to Dawnell. Andy is on a diet in the iso pen too, but he’s the alpha male and bullies Patsy and Judy, who are bullies themselves, whenever they can be.

I call them The Troublemakers, but this morning I thanked them and the other pigs for being so patient during the whole of June Jamboree. “You did an amazing job of representing,” I tell them and they lay in the straw, not moving.

June Jamboree has been two days of inviting the outside in. Of introductions between people and pigs and all of the rest of the residents. People touching the rubbery heads of turkeys and hearing the story of how Felix lost his leg or how the Hampshire pigs got here from a planned BBQ in Colorado and how Louise lost the tip of her ear to frostbite when she was alone and frozen to the ground on a sheep farm or how Albie was found sick in a graveyard in Brooklyn.

We tell the stories with words and the animals tell the endings without them. The outside comes in to the sanctuary and hands touch pig bellies for the first time. The words are changed when kids are there. “Market weight” is my euphemism for slaughter. There’s a new traveling slaughterhouse for family farms upstate that advertises itself as “harvesting” animals. But we all know what we mean.

June Jamboree is people coming to visit. Here are our hearts on display, sleeping in straw, dirt on their snouts. Here is Cromwell with his ears pinned back they way he always does when he sleeps. Here they are, our hearts, grazing in the field by the red sculpture, with flaking skin that needs to be brushed, with an amputated leg, standing under the mountain and chewing cud, or pecking the metal trim of the med center because it sounds like a metal trough or running with the red birds to the gate when someone approaches, in hopes of a mash.

We tell their stories because those are the facts and the facts are usually ugly, especially next to the breathing beings in front of us. But the facts you can quote and cite and tell. When what we mean to say is, can you see what’s here, feel what I feel, what I know to be true and have so few words for, just how it felt that time I laid against Dylan in the winter in the barn or felt Patsy the sheep’s nose on mine or held Victor’s head to my heart as he took his last breath, Victor of the magnificent horns and the insatiable love of treats and the way he’d look you right in the eye as if everything in the world was laid out as a banquet for both of you.

There is too much to tell and no words anyway, so I say, “Do you want to rub a pig’s belly” and invite people in and hold open the gate from outside to in for another introduction of child’s hand to 900-pound pig named Stubby. Stubby of the thousand days of cleaning his hoof and watching him eat or sleep or limp to dinner or lay in mud the way pigs do, blurring the lines between animal and earth, between mud and flesh, between in and out.

I start the story, but Stubby tells it.

And today, when the white tent has shrunk to empty bones and the bouncy castle is deflated rubber on the lawn and the outsiders have gone back out, the story is still unfolding itself and the tellers are telling, even in the middle of eating, with their snouts snuffling through mashed up carrots and green beans and lettuce. And we’re here to listen and on a few days, now and then, to fumble toward a translation.

Who we are

Fri, 1 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

It snowed a little, just a few flakes coming down and a gray-blue sky.
No one died today, so it was a good day.
No one got really sick.
One of the roosters was breathing funny, wheezing. It might be Marek’s Disease, the illness we’ve been dealing with in all of the barred rock roosters. They’re from a rescue in the city, an illegal slaughterhouse. The ASPCA said they were all hens but they turned out to be 70 roosters. Maybe 20 or so have died from Marek’s since they got here. If birds aren’t inoculated as chicks, they can get it early on. An illegal operation in the city wouldn’t spend the money on shots.
The disease attacks the birds’ organs, forming lesions throughout their bodies. Lesions on tendons affect their legs till they can’t walk. When someone sees a rooster in the coop getting picked on or limping, they bring them in to the med center. The roosters have been here for about two months but it was just last week that we finally had time to name them and give them yellow bands with numbers for their legs. The just-named Robert hid by me, tucking in under my jacket as I knelt on the ground, putting on bands, dusting each rooster for mites. He was cowering from Michael, #22, who was bullying him. This mass of black and white birds started to have personalities we could spot, now that they had names, even though there were too many new names to remember. They have a whole society of themselves but we don’t understand it much. It seems to be mostly about a pecking order and who dominates the coop door and who lets who eat.
It was hard to think of about 60 names in a couple of hours.
We do what we can to see who they are but the number of birds is overwhelming.
It’s not like the pigs. We have 9 older pigs, plus Patsy and Judy who are around 2 and then the 4 younger ones who came as piglets last Valentine’s Day. I know all of their names, although in the straw sometimes I mistake Lodo for Cromwell—they each have long noses and now that Lodo has lost weight, they’re similar.
I’ve spent so much time with them, watching them, feeding them, massaging them if they look stiff, putting hoof heal on cracked hooves and vitamin E oil on cracked skin.
I do a form of physical therapy for Andy, a pig who’s back end is shaky, especially in the cold. He’s the dominant pig, even more than Stubby, the biggest pig. When Andy lays by the door, even Patsy doesn’t want to walk past him. When Andy gets irritated its serious. He got mad at Cromwell by the waterer once when I was cleaning the middle section of the pen which is their bathroom at night. Andy bit at him and Cromwell screamed. I whacked Andy on the back with the plastic rake, not hard, but his feelings were hurt and I had to apologize.
Andy lays still for every massage session. I pull on his back left leg slightly to let it release from the hip. He stretches out.
There is a luxury in knowing them one by one, when who they are becomes something we can see. It’s like scales dropping from our eyes. They haven’t changed, but we have. We can see.
Andy comes out in the snow as I’m scraping poo and shavings off towels into the bucket of the tractor. He lifts his head and grunts at me, sniffing to see if I have any treats for him. I watch his back legs to see if he’s shaking, if I need to do a session with him tonight.
I see what he needs. Or I think I do. He lets me think I do.
He lets me think I have magic hands tied to the light of the stars. He lets me think that the power of love exists in my palms and that love can change everything, even the nerves in his back left leg damaged by a shot the vet gave him when he first arrived.
I kneel by him at the end of the day, when all of the roosters who seem weak are in the med center and we’ve rubbed linament oil into Ralphie the steer’s back and started to learn one more rooster name and have given Lil’ Jay the goat who stays in the med center because he’s old and has lost weight, one more treat and recorded it on a sheet by his stall so we don’t give him too many. We’ve lice-dusted the main flock and found one hen with a mass in her belly and a rooster with one of his spurs curved round and grown into his leg. All of the notes are made and med sheet items checked off. Finally I can sit in the straw with Sophie the pig first, massaging her always-stiff back and hips, and then Andy, lying still in the straw, letting me know, without moving at all, that what I feel in my heart emanating from a pig stretched out under a heat lamp, with a dirty hot pack on his left thigh is true. And sometimes the doubts fade away with the night deepening outside the barn.

Thanksgiving

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

It’s Thanksgiving Day and I get to the farm late, 12:30, and get the update from Sheila on Cromwell the pig and Soze and Lil Jay, the goats. These are the three with the most problems at the moment. Cromwell’s temperature has been low for a couple of days. The vet doesn’t know what’s going on and there’s talk of sending him to Cornell.
Cromwell is in the isolation pen in the pig barn. I sit by him and rub his long nose. He’s the pig who always snores when he sleeps and pins back his ears like he’s flying. I run my hands over his ears, pinned back. His eyes are closed but he’s not snoring so I know he’s awake. He trembles slightly every so often. It’s not cold in the barn and he has plenty of hay. It’s late November, but warm. There’s a heavy mist around the mountain, so heavy you can’t see the outline rising past the farm. Night starts to come fast now. I’ve been away for three weeks and it’s like the world has shifted toward from the gold of fall to winter, even with the warmth.
I rake leaves in the rooster yard while Sheila finishes cleaning the last section of the coop, the section for Paco and his friends. Paco used to try to kill any human entering his space, but he was sick for awhile and we brought him into the med center to heal. He made peace with us and doesn’t attack anymore.
There’s part of me that misses his attack phase. I’d distract him with my boot then pick him up and tell him that we were the help and he really should be nicer to us. I don’t know if being picked up was an assault on his dignity.
It’s getting dark as I rake leaves into piles. The leaves are heavy and wet, laced with pine needles. I wonder if it’s a useless job. The coming snow will mulch it all into dirt by spring, but there’s a part of me that wants every chicken yard raked and the new duck yard too, even now on the edge of winter in the Catskills.
When I walk past the pig field that’s full of rocks, I think about volunteers clearing the whole field so it doesn’t look like the surface of the moon. Or would that be a waste of time? In the summer, we cleared a section around the feeding area so the pigs could walk to meals unimpeded by rocks. New rocks seemed to appear out of the ground. So then we cleared those rocks out, rocks upon rocks.
Sheila is cleaning the rooster coop as I rake. Earlier she dusted them all for mites, which is more sensible and more important than rocks which don’t affect anyone’s health.
I rake one more section of the rooster yard as night falls. The wheelbarrow is full again and I give up. There are more sections to do, but some things never get done on the farm. We just hope it’s the unimportant things. The ones taken care of by the snow and the earth.
Sheila takes Cromwell’s temperature and it’s low again. She puts more straw in his pen and he shifts it around with his mouth and feet, the way pigs do. His heater is on and he’s not shivering, so his low temperature is another mystery. Outside, the moon has risen and the fog has shifted to just a ring around the belly of the mountain. The tree-covered top is dark against the sky.
“You don’t see that in Ohio,” Dawnell says to me.
“Or Brooklyn.” I reply.
There are mysteries in this dance between animals and people, leaves and snow, mist and mountain, that you can only watch and wonder at.
I give Cromwell two hard-boiled eggs and he eats them. He hasn’t been eating so this is good. I’m hoping the eggs help his blood, but I don’t know. He won’t eat tomatoes or anything acidic, so I wonder if his stomach is bothering him. I run my hand over his belly but he doesn’t flinch.
He’s our Cromwell of a million sleeping sleeps, flying snoring through dreams with his ears pinned back by the wind.
I thought there would be a million sleeps more. I always do.
But there’s this night, even though he’s not sleeping yet. His long Cromwell nose is in the straw, his ears the way his ears must be. Dawnell and I push the door to the pig area closed. Stubby and Zack, two of the biggest pigs, are laying outside against it, blocking it open. Dawnell pushes, I pull and the door inches toward closed and everyone else is inside. In the dark, the heaters in the chicken and duck coops are glowing. Cromwell has another night to fly wherever he flies and we have one more night to say thank you.

coming together

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I come to the farm with a new canine massage book and I can’t wait to try some things on Andy and Sophie, but the floor in the med center needs to be washed and there’s dust on everything. I finish a second go with the mop on the infirmary floor. I’ve given Connie and the four birds from a vacant lot outside the Louis Armstrong Museum extra mash and cleaned their waters.

I finally go to the pig barn and kneel next to Andy. Sophie’s got her nose under his back legs and is blocking my doing any motion extending with them. I massage down his ears three times, rolling the tips of his ears in my fingers. According to the book, it’s supposed to relaxed the parasympathetic nervous system, the one that does the flight or fight response, the one that gets frozen in post traumatic stress disorder. Andy yawns. I do what the massage book calls “effleurage” down his spine, across his bad leg. I try a rocking movement with one hand on his neck and one on his sacrum.

Sacrum means sacred bone, according to my yoga teacher, it’s supposed to be the seat of the soul. Andy’s sacrum is off balance, his hips are too, one higher, one lower. I ask Andy what touches he wants now that there are more in the vocabulary of my hands, hands learning to speak, Helen Keller-like except I can hear Andy or my hands can sometimes. My brain is chattering but occasionally falls silent. I go to Sophie and put my hands on her spine, on her sacrum. I do the effleurage thing down the sides of her hips which are so stiff. She walks by throwing one straight back leg forward, then the other. When she falls, she falls down with her back legs splayed. It’s got to affect her spine.

She sat up when I came in, looking for a treat. This is a different form of love, I tell her. You don’t eat it, just absorb it. Then it’s six and closing time. There’s a sliver of moon just under Venus, bright in the still-blue sky over the house. A couple of months ago, the moon rose full and yellow-white from the other side of the sky over the barn. Now it’s like Venus has called and the moon answered. Hands or spine or moon or venus, love calls from the sacred heart to the sacred sacrum at the base of the spine.

All the animals nestle in to sleep, their heat lamps glow in the growing dark. Cromwell is next to Sophie, nose to nose in the straw under the lamp and I wonder if she tells any stories of the hands and what they said and how they told of the moon and venus and a long drive through Manhattan and the West Side Highway and New Jersey and a stop at Trader Joe’s for human treats and a floor that won’t get clean and how glad they are to have made it to their friends in the straw.

Albie and me

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I don’t know if anyone has studied massage for farm animals. I’m just convinced that there are more subtle ways to help the animals than just what Con the tall vet with the green overalls brings and the short assistant with the long hair in a ponytail down to her waist and the four-wheel drive truck that opens on the side to bottle and medical supplies can bring. Though they bring a lot.

But Albie is missing his left front leg, so his right leg and shoulder hold him up. He throws his body forward to walk using his white stump to add momentum, but that shoulder droops down. I wonder about his spine. I brush him across his back. He likes being brushed on his face. He closes his eyes. He likes being brushed on his horns, which I say to him is ridiculous, but I run the brush over them. He likes being scratched at the warm base of his horns where horn meets hair. I wonder if he can still smell Olivia on the brush.

It’s Olivia’s brush, Olivia the white goat who died. Who always laid next to him, who walked with him to the middle grass between the two cow pastures to graze in the cool of the evening after a hot summer day, the two white goats gleaming against the green as the light faded. Olivia who knew Albie when he first came to the farm, with his injured foot.

Jenny thinks the injury was from people hog-tying him to take him to slaughter, cutting off blood to the hoof so it began to die. The process of death started there in his left hoof. He had orff, a goat disease that is curable, like a bad cold, but they can’t slaughter animals for food who have it. Well, they can, but there are regulations. So they dumped him in Queens, then the ASPCA got him, then they drove their small white van to us, with a small white baby goat.

Jenny took him to Cornell, we did soaking and wrapping and pills and homeopathy and antibiotics and still his hoof died. Some things die when terrible things happen. I want to believe in healing but healing takes strange forms. Albie went to Cornell and a surgeon removed part of his leg. He would have taken all of it but Jenny wanted as much left as possible so we could fit him with a prosthetic leg. After five or so prototype legs and various strapping systems, Albie still doesn’t have a leg that really works, although the prosthetist has some new ideas and came out this week to make another mold of his stump.

Meanwhile I brush his face and horns and spine and sit and remember his foster goat mom Olivia, who looked at me with so much in her eyes that my heart just had to open, which is the worst thing in the world when they die and still I hold onto it even the scent of her lingering in her brush, a scent I can’t smell but maybe Albie can, like he feels the bristles of the brush against his horns.

The four new ones

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

It’s just after Valentine’s Day, with Venus shining like a satellite in the sky over the farm, right over the chicken coops, the main flock and the white birds. All of the white birds are girls right now, hens, Philip and Sir Chicken died last year. When we let the white birds out into the yard, Bruit, the barred rock rooster, comes out to stand around them, doing the rooster protection thing as they peck at the ground, looking for seeds or worms.

Who knows what Edie, the red hen Bruit lives with in the pig barn thinks. She roosts on a fence in the barn at night and he nests in a pile of straw we make for him in the feed area or a nook of the pig gestation crate that’s there to show what humans can do. It’s made of metal bars with a rubber hose for watering and the bars to hold mother pigs stationary, still.

Our four new piglets run and back at each other in the isolation pen, rolling in the straw, snorting. They push their snouts into boots or arms when we come in. I sit down and they chew on my jacket, my jeans, anything they can, then they stop and they all go to eat or they all go to a toy or they all start running. At night they sleep in a pile, not next to each other like our grown-up pigs who tuck their legs and snouts under each other and into the straw.

I hope it’s warm enough for them. I hope it’s warm enough for our grown-up pigs. No one is shivering tonight even though the wind is strong and the snow is falling and the pigs have taken all of the straw I piled in the corner where there’s a big crack between the floor and the wall of the barn. I put it there to stop the cold air but the pigs make their beds their own way and they’ve moved it, considering straw that isn’t used for a bed is a waste.

And now they sleep. Cromwell, who always pins his ears back while he sleeps is snoring. He looks like he’s flying with his ears back, flying through the night. The wind howls around us, sleeping pigs, turkeys under heat lamps, Bruit the rooster nesting and Edie the hen roosting next to the gestation crate, right over the turkey’s plugged-in water bucket because it’s interesting to her to always poop in their water and so she does. And that’s the way it is.

farm in snow

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Tonight, walking to close up the birds in the back shed, the snow falls on the pine tree that’s shaped like a pine cone. The sky is blue-gray, the snow comes down and lands on my coat in little round balls. The birds in the back shed are fine, bored maybe, cooped in all day with the snow. I take their waterer to the water pump and refill it, then bring it back and set it on the heater. They’ve already knocked down all of the fresh straw I put for them on the table and shelves. Hens stand on the shelves and look at me. I close the door and say, have a good night, we love you, sleep well.

Can any of the other chickens hear me? Does the snow take the message or the wind? Birds gather on the top of another pine. They land and snow drops from the branches. The lights in the med center are on. I remember the night I stayed over at the farm and looked up in the middle of the night from my bed out the window to the white bird coop with the heat lamps glowing red through the coop windows. I thought, my friends are sleeping too, they’re warm and safe.

Tonight it’s early, the snow falls fast. I make tracks in the snow to close up the roosters, take their bowls of mashed-up eggs, dump out their food from their metal trays. I close up their side doors, check on Paco, who hasn’t been feeling well. How we know this is that he doesn’t try to kill us. He’s always been the alpha male attack rooster and now I miss those days, those attacks. In the summer I would pick him up mid-attack and tell not to hurt the help. The humans are there to serve and clean and deserve to not have him fly at them, claws first. Our shins have a right to peace, too, just like the roosters. Tonight no one attacks or fights. It’s a snow night and everything in the world is holding its breath, watching.

Making it up

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I come to the farm and make up work. I make up physical therapy for Andy, the pig who came here a year ago, was neutered as a 3-year-old adult and was in terrible pain when his wounds got infected. The vet gave him pain med injections and possibly stuck a needle into his sciatic nerve. Which he said would heal. But a year or more later, his back legs shake when he stands or walks, especially the back left one. He has trouble walking and last week Amber heard him screaming as he was trying to lay down. I heard him whimpering, trying to lay down and get his back legs under him. He folded his front legs first but couldn’t get his back legs to work. Then he’d stand again, move to another spot, try again and repeat this all while whimpering.

I went to Google, typed in sciatic nerve homeopathy. I found some treatment. I learned that heat works well, is comforting. I stopped at the natural food store, got homeopathy, some pills for sciatic problems and a flower essence, Gorse, that seemed right. I heated up a buckwheat cushion and put it on Andy’s leg, massaging after it was warm. I put castor oil with wintergreen on his leg. The wintergreen was supposed to be deeply penetrating but it had the effect of pig catnip on Judy and Patsy, the pink pig girls who immediately came over and rolled and rubbed themselves on Andy’s backside. That was the end of my massage, but they seemed to be doing some kind of massage on their own, putting their snouts into the castor oil on Andy’s leg.

After that, I just used the heated pad until I burned it in the microwave and ruined it. But then I found a buckwheat heatable armband Jenny had bought for employees and I used that. I found it worked kind of like a hot stone massage. I could put some weight into it and move it down his spine and over his hip. One night he was laying with his good leg exposed, although even his good leg isn’t that good, and shakes quite a bit too. I used the warm armband across the leg and he stretched it out all the way to his three toes, stretching out and letting go.

The next time he was on his other side, with his bad leg out. It came to me to hold his leg and slowly move it around, as if he was slowly swimming, the way his leg was made to function. I’d move it back and then forward, bending each joint, then stretching it out, the way my massage therapist used to do with my arms to release tension in the joint socket. I massage his knee and ankle and then in between his toes on the pad of his foot.

I don’t know reflexology and maybe no one knows pig reflexology, but I thought if I just touched all of the points, something might work. I wish I knew about proper healing techniques. I work with my hands, my eyes closed, listening with my fingers. I don’t always trust what my brain says, I just let my hands go. They move slowly, asking questions I don’t even know to ask. The hands have a mind of their own and they seem to get answers so I try to stay out of the way. Don’t interfere. Just watch, see what they do. I don’t know that anything helps or works. I lose the meaning of those words. I just sit with Andy on the straw and dust and offer what love and tiny white homeopathic pills I have.

One day I see him up and in the pig yard at mealtime. He seems to be bending his knee, his bad back left knee. Did he do that before? It looks different. Didn’t he used to walk with his legs stiff and straight? Am I imagining this? I don’t know. His legs still trembles. And I think it might always do that. I sit with him and push the microwaved armband down his spine, from his shoulders to his wrinkled tail. The brain connects to the foot, is what the armband says to the spine. This is how you speak to the foot and the leg. And then it’s time to finish closing up the farm for the night, throwing down bales of hay for the next morning’s feeding. I see Soze the goat in her purple coat. I haven’t put linimint oil on her stiff front knee today. I make a note for tomorrow.

Known, named

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:27:14 -0400

The power went out last night and didn’t come on till early morning, so the animals were without heaters. Something that doesn’t affect the sheep at all, or the steer, but is life and death for the birds. All of the white birds have filled in with pin feathers as fall has gotten colder. Their feathers started to grow in—like plastic tubes coming straight out of their skin; then the tubes disintegrate and the new white feathers poof out. And underneath, their winter underwear of pin feathers fill in. Birds that were muddy or dust bathers or had egg on their head or bedraggled bald spots look white and pillowy again. But they huddle together under their heat lamps. We pick up Cloud, who can’t walk well and bring her outside to eat. Then we pick her up and set her on clean straw in the coop to get out of the wind. Today Sheila cleaned the white bird coop and sprayed the floor with Bac-Out, an antibacterial. Nick wiped the floor with clean towels, skating on them, towel after towel till it smelled almost good. It’s never completely good. A bird will walk in and shoot out a nasty green poo, steaming in the cold. They’ve been bred to gain weight in a couple of months and then be killed. So they are eating machines. They’re on a strict diet, which helps keep their bodies from over-straining their limbs. Already, Mighty, who was a small white baby this summer, has had her swollen hock affect her walk—almost like Cloud. I used to go worm-hunting with Mighty. “Mighty-Mighty!” and she’d hop over. I’d turn rocks over and reveal bugs and worms. She’s fast. I think the protein was good for her. She’s not as immobile as Cloud, who is one of the “old birds.” One of the first at the sanctuary, from the first white bird rescue from Brooklyn when hundreds of birds were left in plastic crates outside after a religious holiday called Kapoeiro, left to die.
Tonight, the power is on, the heaters are working, but it’s still cold in the pig barn. The wind howls outside, no snow falling, just snow on the tops of the mountains surrounding the sanctuary. This morning the cars coming from the north on 28 had six inches of snow on the roof and the hood. It’s cold in the pig barn and Stubby is trembling. We cover him with a blanket and still trembling. All of the other pigs are sleeping next to each other, but Stubby is in isolation due to having half his hoof amputated because of a bone infection. Like the white birds, he’s bred to be too big for his body. He balances 1200 pounds on hooves that look like ballerina toes en pointe.
Sheila takes his temperature, it’s low, but not so low as to freak out about. We cover him in two moving blankets and a bedspread, with layers of straw in-between. Olivia watches in her purple fleece coat, ever curious.
Yesterday afternoon, it snowed before the power went out. The birds in the back shed were cold and it was determined they needed another heater, one was not enough. Romeo the rooster wasn’t roosting, but nesting in a pile of hens. In the day they spread out through the garden and scratch for bugs and dustbath. I’ve given them mashed hard boiled eggs a few times. They come from a place where they were so protein-deprived their feathers fell out. Now little dark plastic straws are growing from their wings. They come running in a red-bird gang when I walk out with a pot of eggs.
Yesterday morning I went to a slaughterhouse in Brooklyn before I drove upstate. A worker took birds out from a cage by a leg, turned them upside down and set them on a hanging scale together. They were a weight, not an individual weight. Then he brought them to the back room. There were maybe 200 birds in cages. I can’t think of 200 names.
Birds with blood on their feathers, cuts on their backs, limps. Birds huddled together on wire mesh. There’s a legal case from Watergate citing Known, Unnamed, Co-conspirators. These beings are unknown, unnamed, unseen—not co-conspirators. But weighed.
Weight doesn’t measure lice, diahrrea, disease, sores, blood, misery, fear.
The man behind the glass where people pay, yelled and threatened when I took pictures of the birds. He ducked when I turned the camera toward him. ‘Get out of my store!” he slid open the glass partition between him and me, him and the birds, “You can’t take pictures! You’re not a customer!”
You’re not the enemy, I think. I don’t know who the enemy is. I take a final picture of some tiny white birds, smaller than Mighty when she first came. The owner comes down the stairs from his office. I try to explain, “These animals matter to us. We don’t want them to be hurt, to suffer.” He smiles, not worried. He gestures with his arm from the top of the stairs, “Go ahead.”
Nothing to hide.
I ask to be let down into the basement where the baby goats, lambs and calves are, waiting for slaughter. The nice worker in rubber apron and waterproof boots, asks me to delete any pictures of him. He says, “Please come back another time; he doesn’t want you to go down there.” The man behind the glass opens it to yell, “She’s a low life!” It’s such a poor excuse for an insult, I start to feel sorry for him. I point the camera and he ducks. The owner emerges from his office and walks halfway down the stairs. I tell him, “We care about these animals.” He smiles. I wonder who the “we” is, but he doesn’t ask and I leave.
I hope they don’t see me get into my car and write down the license plate. “Must park further away,” I think.
It’s raining as I drive away from the slaughterhouse to the West Side Highway. Rain blasts past my windshield up the Thruway, behind trucks. The rain turns to snow on 212, past Woodstock, on the curving road up into the mountains, past Bearsville and Shady and Lake Hill. White sheets blow past the red and yellow trees.
I’m late, it’s closing time—closing is early in the last bit of fall—and there are heaters that are needed that aren’t working. We struggle with a flashlight and extension cords and duct tape and get a few heaters on, just when the power goes out. Suddenly, there’s not a light in the whole neighborhood except a few in the house when the generator kicks in to power the automatic waterers in the barns and steer field. This means none of our carefully placed heaters will work. Nothing to be done about it, so I walk out to my car. There’s no light anywhere but the house and the stars, glowing in the sky as if finally, those other, lesser, earth lights all shut up and let them speak.
It’s a cold night, but everyone makes it to morning. The chickens are up and about, pecking and scratching in the garden. Olivia comes out in her purple coat to investigate the issues and assess the likelihood of coercing someone into feeding her treats. The goats, Madison, Haley, Galaxy, Victor, Ezelle, Gertie, Orion, Gilbert, Lil Jay, Sose, Auren, Erica, Jumper, Houdini, are out of the barn, grazing in the field that this summer was covered in clover, grass and white, yellow, purple flowers.
That was yesterday. And now tonight, is colder and windier, but the heaters are all working, and Stubby is under three blankets and three layers of straw and the birds, feathers or no feathers or new little straws growing straight of their skin like miracles out of Genesis, are under the reddish glow of functional heat lamps. And every single one (goat, pig, sheep, turkey, steer, rooster, chicken) has a name.

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:01:10 -0400

So says Ralphie as he steps off the horse trailer. He’s back, maybe a little thinner, maybe 2200 instead of 2300 pounds. He’s back—two words, so much relief—exclamation points can’t do it justice. We were all gearing up to say goodbye. Erica and Anthony drove 5 hours to Cornell to see him, to be there for him if this was it. But it wasn’t it.
He came home. He’s still weak, not sure on his feet and he groans on occasion.
But he’s here. He’s in a separate part of the pasture for now, but the other three can see him. They stand at the fence together.
The vets couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, but they figured out that he wasn’t in pain and they sent him home.
And now there’s Andy, who won’t take his eyes off him. Maybe for a second to eat sweet feed, but then he’s back, staring through the fence at Ralphie.
He was frantic when the trailer pulled up with Ralphie, mooing over and over, not so much a moo but an octave changing bellow, low to hoarse and high.
Now his moos are more like cooing. He looks and blinks and watches Ralphie.
How many times did I say goodbye to Olivia a year and a half ago, when she couldn’t stand on her own much less walk. Before I left the farm, every time, I would kneel by her on the ground, her white fur covered in her purple coat, and say goodbye, thank you, then walk to my car with blurred vision. And here she is still, after a winter in the kitchen, after standing at last and then mooching food from the counter, and then walking around outside on the melting snow. After another spring, summer, fall and now she’s back in her purple coat as the temperature drops and the leaves strip away from the trees. She grazes by the barn, she demands alfalfa cubes, she headbutts small children, she supervises the changing of Louise’s cast, she honks as she gets ready to sleep, she tries to steal the turkeys’ food, she brooks no attempts to put arnica gel on her stiff left knee, she is ever vigilant for the opportunity to break into the feed area, she plows her head into pig produce cans, emerging with mouthfuls of shredded carrots and tomato. She and Albie and Felix, three white dots, hobble their way to the grass by the steer field. Once upon a time, Dylan was not much bigger than Olivia. She visits him now and again. She helped welcome him to the farm, get settled in—not like a den mother, more of an elder stateswoman with a finely tuned sense of propriety. Tonight she sleeps in the pig barn where there’s a heater, while Albie and Clover stay in their usual pen. She doesn’t want to lay down; it’s wrong that she’s here and they’re not.
But it’s too cold-you’ll see them in the morning, I tell her. She’s not buying it. There’s an order in the night that should be followed just as rigorously as in the day.
Things change and beings grow or come or go. We do what we can to keep up, to keep everyone warm, safe, and as close as possible to the ones they need to look at in order to know the universe is where it was and not set on its ear with all the stars dropping down willy-nilly, like pennies dumped on a sidewalk.
Olivia is distracted momentarily as Anthony, Erica and I change the sock on Stubby’s foot. We try to coax him to roll to the right side with belly rubs and a piece of watermelon, but he knows what’s up—more messing with his hoof, which he hates. We get out the tether, which he hates, and tether him. He hates all of it. Olivia watches, sticking her white nose through the gate and honking, things are getting interesting.
Anthony gets the sock on and tapes it around the top, fast. For a few minutes, there’s been screaming and huge bite marks on the sides of the stall, but that’s nothing on the scale of pig drama: pigs, even Stubby who’s like a puppy most of the time, are operatic divas full of sound and fury.
Immediately, he rediscovers the watermelon and eats, grunting.
It’s night now. The mountains that circle the farm are close to invisible. Ralphie is a huge black shape on the ground on one side of the fence, lying there, chewing his cud, his giant jaw moves like a clock ticking or a heartbeat, unhurried. Andy, Elvis and Dylan are as close to him as they can get.
Tonight the goodbyes are just goodbyes and nothing impedes my vision except the dark.