A New Resolve

I have a 20 acre farm with goats, sheep, chickens, turkeys, pigs, ducks, dogs, and cats.  I have been operating our farm since 1997 with the help of my husband and more recently our children.  This spring has brought us 5 new lambs, and 11 happy baby goats! However, it has been a tragic traumatic last few days. The kind that makes you wonder if you can keep doing what you're doing, or even if you want to. This week we had 2 deliveries go wrong. Our 11 year old goat herd queen, Tellula, died after giving birth to a large buckling, and her 9 year old daughter, Riza, died after trying to deliver a buckling with his neck twisted. Tellulabelle was my favorite doe.  She was born on this farm and came out looking exactly like her grand-dam Twin Bridge Farm Falou. She had a very calm, loving disposition. Her daughter Riza took after her in personality.  They were both fantastic milkers producing more than 4 cups every 12 hours. That said, our loss was not just a material one, but a bond that stretched back sixteen years.  That bond started when we purchased Falou in 2000.

My sorrow is palpable. I posted my thoughts and regrets on our Facebook page, Hobbit Creek at Shirefarm, and got the typical responses: "so sorry", "regards", "best wishes", and then the response, "I'm not sure I could do what you do."  This snapped me out of my stupor.  There are a lot of reasons I live this way.  Society has been developing a general disregard for life. This careless recklessness scares me to the core.  Some families never own a pet. If you are blessed to own a pet, you develop a sense of responsibility and an empathy that others can not grasp. Even more, when our society was less industrial, families had to work harder to obtain the nourishment they needed to survive.  People worked hard just to keep their animals alive.  People understood how very difficult life truly was, they were more empathetic, less entitled, and realized the brevity of life. Now you witness the disregard for the lives of others in just the little things. For example, the driver behind you feels that your 5 miles above the speed limit isn't fast enough.  They pass you on the left over a double yellow line.  There is another car coming from the other direction.  Luckily it pulls off onto the side of the road as the reckless driver passes in front of you.  Was this 15 seconds worth risking the lives of the 3 vehicle drivers?  Not at all!  I can come up with a lot of examples of societal disregard of the lives of others, as I am sure you can too. I think it would be very interesting to do some psychological studies in this subject.  Perhaps there are some already out there. I am too far withdrawn from the world of psych at this point to know where to look.

The nourishment we need to survive was once alive.  Don't tell me you are a vegetarian for this very reason.  Plants were once alive too. Not only were they alive, but plants also communicate and help the plants around them.  We are only just beginning to scratch the surface on how plants communicate and respond to their environment. People who eat meat often do not make the connection in their minds to chicken...that chicken was once a living and very vocal creature.  It was dusting itself happily in the sun, or it was stuck in a miserable dirty cage at some point before you placed it's meat in your mouth.  Do you know what if feels like to take another life; to take that life and later place it on the dinner table?  If everyone raised their animals, tried hard to keep them alive, do you think it would be easy to pull the trigger of a gun pointed at an animal? At another human? The mass production environment we have perverted over the past decades is foundational to society's deep rooted issues. 
 
The general population of the developed world "could not do what I do".  For some people the sorrow might be too much, for some people the stress might be too hard, some people just have no idea what it takes and lack the knowledge to endeavor. This is precisely why I do what I do. I feel it is important to raise my children in this lifestyle so they know. I want to know where my food comes from; I want to have empathetic children who are respectful of life.  Not just their own life, but the life of every living thing around them.  Respectful of the ants, the bees, the whales in our oceans, and sad when a life is lost because of human interaction like hitting a squirrel on the road.  "Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children"-A native American Proverb.

I have always loved animals, that love has been with me my entire life.  I thought I wanted to be a vet when I was much younger.  When I worked in a vets office one summer I was shocked to realize that a vet saw sick animals all day, every day! I don't like to see my animals sick, or suffering.  It is hard enough to deal with death when it happens to your 11 year old doe,  the eleven year old doe you watched be born. So I have found another way to surround myself with the love and lives of animals. It is at these times, when a life is lost and an animal passes that we are reminded how special our days are by being blessed with each beautiful animal that passes through our lives. I am lucky to have great animal friends. I am lucky to have their respect.  I am lucky that they look to me for protection and well being. We will remember our very sweet Tellula and her loving daughter Riza fondly. We will continue to love the generations of offspring that each of our animals has blessed us with.  The tragic and traumatic death of two of my favorite animals has hardened my resolve to continue living this lifestyle; I am blessed.