A few months passed and magically the children’s brains evolved to a place from where they were willing to let them go. They admitted that they had not so much as looked at them sideways for several weeks, had not even spared them a passing thought, in their pursuit of other childhood joys–Pokemon, sugar, play dates and GoGos.

Lucy Posing

Realizing that we were not going to slaugher our own sheep, I came to the conclusion that I was not really prepared to slaughter anyone else’s. The project of animal farming has lost its appeal, it now seems to me too much like being a gaoler, then executioner. And I’m not enough of a carnivore to justify that. From now on it will be the occassional small amount of excellently raised meat from someone we know.

So I quietly uploaded three sheep and two goats (all girls, all ready to be impregnated) onto Craigslist, along with some very cute photos. So cute that I almost deleted the posting.

A couple of days later I get a call from a farmer in New Gloucester. He is no-nonsense, with a Maine accent. This is old-time farmer, I think to myself as I tell him about their lineages. There is Lucy the feeder we bought last year. We kept her from slaughter to see what breeding would be like. She gave birth to Prancer, mentioned variously on HH. Then there was another feeder I bought this spring. When I realized that we couldn’t kill prancer, I felt it was unfair to send the other orphan to slaughter all alone.

Little Black

The goats: well, we bought them in a fit of absence of mind. Truthfully, Kate saw a picture in a Bates alumni magazine featuring a woman walking through a Maine field to milk her goats: children in tow, sun in the West. Seeds of dream were planted. We got goats. Two years later we couldn’t find a buck to impregnate them, and we realized we didn’t like goat cheese enough to have to milk these suckers every day. Kate’s dream evaporated, like a pool of goat  piss in the early morning sun. I was left caring for Robin Hood and Little Black (both of whom are very nice and I’ve developed some affection for.) But we were  just paying for hay and grain through the long Maine winter for nothing. So Craigslist it is.

Back to the Maine farmer. He isn’t interested in their readiness for childbirth. “I’m mostly into meat.”

Ah, well that’s not really gonna work, I’m afraid.

Call me if you change your mind.

I hang up feeling a bit sick.

Then a nice woman from Valley View Farm called, and I went through the same script with her, and she sounded much more promising.  

Some days later she showed up with her husband, and to tell the truth I felt slightly suspicious because they were more old school farmers than I had thought, and neither one seemed interested in what I had to say about the animals (although the husband did seem to have a kind way with the animals).

As we were loading them into the trailer Gemma came running down the path to the barn in tears. “I just want to say goodbye to them!” She bawled.

We opened up the trailer to let Gemma in  while trying to stop the ruminants from escaping, then we assured Gemma that it was for the best, that they were going to a nice home. Katy even managed to get the woman to agree to have us come visit, although she rather strangely told me “although, once they’re in a flock they’re hard to pick out.” Was she suggesting that these ones would not be around, but there’d be other animals she could try to fool Gemma with: Look there’s Robin Hood, doesn’t she look happy?

Then she confides to me on the side, ” anyway, I’ve always thought out of sight, out of mind.”

Which turns out to be the case.

So no more biweekly runs to the hay farmer down the road. No more trips to the feed store for foot rot treatment and grain. No more hustling out to the barn first thing to hay and water (chickens can wait). 

An eerie quiet, filled by the soft sigh of vegetables waiting to grow in the spring. 

Goodbye animals. Goodbye.

Kidz with Goats

The weather’s turning warm, finally. I thought I would have to do this earlier but it has been so cool in the last few weeks that Lucy the ewe has been fine with her heavy fleece. Except, perhaps, that she takes frequent shade breaks from grazing in her shelter on sunny days. But the nights have been cool. So much so that I’ve lost a bunch of tomato plants to the cold, I think. Either that or the hoop house is too hot. Probably both.

But now that the weather is taking a turn, that fleece had to come off. This week was looking very busy, what with getting ready for the mulling spice season and (finally) launching our sail boat Bon Vivant, that I came home from work, and Katy went out, so I fed the kids and took my new Sheffield Steel shears out the the paddock, along with a copy of Storey’s Guide To Sheep which has a promising twenty-step description of how to shear a sheep, and I went at it.

Before I started I gave Conrad the camera with instructions to take a few shots of me and Lucy. Below is the results. He got bored after a few shots and went off to climb a tree. Gemma, who can’t get out of the paddock without help, took over the job of photographing. 

Upshot:  half an hour later, one short-haired sheep with no blood. Amazing.

  

This is the point at which Conrad got bored. Notice his penchant for close up, all action shots. Preferably with my head missing. Gemma has a slightly different, but no less individual style. See below:

This one’s rather beautiful, almost lyrical wispiness.

Out of focus ass-shot

This one really conveys some of what I was experiencing

  Prancer looking sheepishly for a suck

are we done?

I took the last couple of shots. Gemma got bored too and I was left to document my own handiwork. A bit messy, perhaps, and not as short as it could be, but I was afraid of cutting her, which apparently is very easy, and they bleed alot. Also, I have to say, I wasn’t very impressed with the Sheffield Steel Shears. They had a tough time with some of Lucy’s wool, which was, admittedly, matted with all sorts of stuff. On reflection its not as smooth a cut as it could have been, but it will be effective. She’ll be cooler, and less likelihood of maggots.

escapee

A lone lamb grazes across the hillside, separated from the flock by several hundred feet and an electric fence.  The “flock” in question here is a motley collection of animals; there are our two goats, Robin Hood and Little Black (like everything else named by the children), then there is the ewe that we bought as a feeder last year. Feeder, for the uninitiated, is a lamb to be fattened for the table. In fact the word gives the wrong message, since it seems to conjure images of the animal being stuffed, or fattened in some ungainly, foie gras kind of a way. The fact is we turn them loose on reasonably good pasture and let them at it. I only occassionally give them pellets, usually to get them to come to me if I need them to.

Feeders

Anyway, this lamb turned out to be the biggest of the four we bought. So we kept her (she was a ewe) and decided to have a go at breeding. She is a Dorset Freisan mix, the Dorset being heavier set, with more hair around the face, and the Freisan being finer-boned and more of a dairy breed. We took her to Luke’s place, where he had a virile Navajo Churro Ram by the name of Panda (‘cos of his coloring). We turned her in with the Ram, and left her there for a couple of weeks, then brought her home. Several months later we booked tickets to England to visit our peeps. Then, when we consulted the calendar and did a little math, we realized she would probably lamb while we were away. Shit.

Back on the phone to Luke. “Can you watch our sheep for a couple of weeks? She’ll probably lamb while we’re away, and that’s good for us, because we don’t know what we’re doing, and you do.”

Luke was unphazed and graciously took her in, saying that usually the lambs plop right out.

 Strangely enough we did have sheep for several years while I was growing up in Devon. In fact we had about 400 at any time. Why did I not know more about the process? Well, I was away at boarding school, and my dad was a gentleman farmer who employed a farm manager. Truth is out. That said, we did often get up in the middle of a January night and do lamb patrol, and we often bottle fed lambs, but I never put my hand up a sheep’s ‘tube. Therefore my technical knowledge of this kind of animal husbandry was limited. We were used as sheep dogs quite often. Sometimes we ran after them, sometimes we rode our dirt bikes to round them up. We were also pretty good (my brother and I) and manhandling them into the sheep dip–a kind of concrete bunker with water and disinfectant in it.

lucy

So while Luke watched the ewe, we jetted off to the old country and drank dark ale and danced around the may pole.  Actually it was March. The daffodils were out, and the weather was fine. Two weeks later we came back, and to my amazement she had not lambed yet. This meant that we would be on watch. So we took her back home, looking extremely preggers (she, not us–that came a little while later). But it was a full two weeks more until she popped. It happened one night, and Conrad, always the first one up, came running into the house to tell us the news. We came to the barn and found her licking the afterbirth off the lamb, who looked great (a ewe). We took a quick glance at Sheparding for Dummies, and snipped off her umbilical, swabbed the stub with iodine,  checked the ewe’s teats for squirtage, and that was about it. Done deal.

Snowflake

So that gets me back to the motley flock. Apart from the Ewe and her lamb (named Prancer, then changed to Snowflake–because of her coloring) there are two other lambs. These are the feeders I bought from Perry Ells up in Union Maine.  She runs a 60 acre sheep farm in some hard scrabble country which she and her husband cleared themselves, reclaiming land from the forest. The area has a certain Scottish beauty to it, hilly and wooded, with plenty of ferns, swamps, and outcroppings of granite. There are remnants of old homesteads in the woods, every so often you come across a stone wall where a livestock corral had been, or the foundation of a house. The Finns settled the area so there would have been plenty of hardscrabble sheep too.

This year I only bought two feeders. We had Prancer and her mother already, but  it was clear that we would not be able to slaughter Prancer, so we had to look elsewhere for food. This kind of carnivorous thinking begins to sound very grim sometimes, and it makes Perry Ell’s all-natural farm look like a death camp. The two lambs we bought from her were like adolescent orphans in comparison to Prancer. They were twice her size (because six weeks older) and tried to suckle from her mother (which they did not succeed in doing). They will be the unlucky ones. the problem is, however, if we are to continue eating our own lamb, then at some point we’re going to have to…eat our own lambs, that is, ones we have “birthed” on the farm. If we can’t imagine eating Prancer, how will it be different with Fluffy, or Snowdrop, or Kebab? 

Here is the rub (and I’m not referring to the spice rub): One hears that if one is to eat meat one should be ok with the killing process. But we’ve done that, and are not particularly OK with it. But is it evil to prefer to pick up one’s meat at the deli counter? This way you don’t have to face your lamb as you load it into the truck and take it to slaughter. For people of weak moral character this is probably the way out. Don’t think about it.

Eat Me

We still have lots of meat from the three we butchered last November.  The two feeders I bought this year were another Freisan dorset mix (ram), and a suffolk Freisan mix. The Suffolks are good meat sheep because they have long backs, yielding lots of loin, which is the good stuff.

But it was the Dorset who was grazing off by himself, outside the electric fence. He has been getting out for a week or two now, nosing his way under the lowest string of the fence. The fence is very imperfect. Being cheap, I have not invested in a pricey electro-plastic netting system,  instead I opted for a system of electric wire which is attached to plastic poles with insulators.  The whole setup is powered by a small solar charger. Because I’ve fenced in a good-sized area of at least half an acre, I’ve had to splice the wire in several places. This creates potential for the charge to get lost, in addition to the vagaries of the sun. You might think, reading this, that I do this to give myself a headache, and perhaps you are right.  Add to this the fact that sheep’s wool is thick, and that’s why the lamb doesn’t feel a thing when he goes under the wire. Its his unwavering herd instinct which keeps him from wandering off, so he grazes on excellent, untouched grass which is being saved for their next rotation, all by himself, like a solitary diner at a fancy restaurant. The only question is, why don’t the others do it?

greener grass

Rotation is the word when it comes to grazing,  as practiced by all good grass farmers–smaller the paddocks the better. Since my fencing setup is a pain to move I don’t do it as often as I would like. In general sheep don’t like to graze too close to their feces. This is good becuase if they did they’d get parasites (which they do often anyway), and there being many different types, it can be difficult to get rid of them by dosing. The trick with rotational grazing is to get them to eat the pasture uniformly, not leaving out the stuff they are perfectly capable of eating, but would prefer not to, like a kid eating the meat and leaving the broccoli. If they over-eat some plants they risk killing them, while others are under-grazed and gain supremacy in the pasture. That is why small paddocks encourage ruminants to eat all the plants, and when they are done, you move the fence. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

truly free range

The thing that really stuck with me from that book was Peter Singer’s suggestion that in 150 years or so humans might well look upon the eating of animals in the same way that we now look upon the keeping of slaves. Its a powerful suggestion.  And its easy to see how this could happen, especially when you start looking at some of the literature of animal rights, going back a few years even to George Orwell’s Animal Farm in which the humans come across as Nazis bent on extermination.

hey ewe

Orwell wasn’t the only one to make this connection (and its only completely valid with modern intensive animal operations like Concentrated Animal Feed Operations –CAFOs–although there’s an element of the death camp even in larger ”family farms”–more below).  Alan Weisman describes in The World Without Us how humans have the dubious distinction of causing the mass extermination of species after species through their relentless hunting.  Even the “traditional” tribal societies who are often described among the cogniscenti as being much lighter on the earth than us White Men, waged a relentless war against animals. About 10,000 years ago America was home to “super mammals” the like of which the earth has never seen: Ground Sloths the size of Elephants; Mammoths the size of several Elephants; wolf’s that make Africa Lions look like Labradors, Lions as big as rhinos. Not long after the arrival of Clovis Man (our brainy, upright ancestor) these animals were history, yet they continued to live on in other places where Clovis didn’t get to, for some 5000 years before dying out. Then fast forward a few centuries to the scene in Cormack McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in which “the Kid” follows a pack of Buffalo hide hunters, and encounters plains strewn with the butchered remains of hundreds, or thousands of buffalo–a scene to make a Native American weep.

So Man has been the bane of animals’ existence since he first came down from the trees; a kind of super ape with a taste for blood. Although it seems clear that we did hunt and kill alot,  Jeffrey Masson, in his book The Face on the Plate, discusses work among anthropologists and paleo-anthropologists that suggests maybe we did not evolve to eat meat, but were actually better suited to plants. Our mouths are small compared to most carnivores, our jaws certainly not designed to rip flesh from live prey like other predators. And our teeth are grinders of plants more than slicers of meat. 

We are then, one of the only creatures on the earth that does not know, exactly, what it should eat.

Is there any wonder that I felt so conflicted when I slaughtered 50 chickens over a couple of weeks last summer? Yes, you do get numbed to it after a while, but the question is, should we? The Nazis probably became numbed to incincerating people in the camps. Repetition does that, even with killing.  Due to the power of denial, all behavior can become normal. But deep-down, something just felt wrong about running the knife across the chicken’s throat and stepping back while it went into its death-throes,wildly flapping and spraying blood. I even closed the barn door while I did it, or did it at night to hide this indecency from the kids. Although we aspire to a kind of truthiness in agriculture, it was just too gruesome to want little children to see, suggested a kind of brutality I did not want them to associate with me.

"Processing"

The fact is that all creatures want to live, and in eating them we come into conflict with this awkward truth. One reason we started raising our own meat was to get a handle on what, exactly, it meant to eat meat. Another was to eat stuff that was not reared in conditions that are unnacceptable on all sorts of levels. But when you think about the basic conflict between the farm animals and us, even the “family farm,” that bucolic fantasy of wholesomeness, is essentially death row, where all animals, pig, and sheep, and cow and chicken, are more than likely to meet a sticky end, against their wishes, and the time spent there is time fattening up for the pot.

bantams

We even have a dillemma with the laying hens. We bought 25, lost a couple the first spring, and know that in a couple of years they will all slow down their laying and eventually stop. Then there will be little choice but to get rid of them. Some people turn them into stock. Perhaps we could slow cook them. But there is not much meat on these birds, so it looks like we will be faced with a massive slaugher–of the birds that the kids have spent two or three years getting to know and love. Why? because they can’t sing for their supper–not even these birds who have been selectively bred over centuries to lay far more than their wild ancestor, the Wild Burmese Jungle Fowl, ever laid (20 or so eggs in a life time).

silver-laced wyandottes

Killing animals has always nauseated me. I remember the first time I shot something with a BB gun, at the age of eleven or twelve. I went out before dinner with my Webley .177.  I wandered away from our house into the lightly wooded pasture and through the orchard. It was twilight, and a few birds were still out. I came across a starling about thirty foot up on a branch. I shot it out of the tree, but because of the feebleness of the gun, and my inability to get the pellet between the bird’s eyes, I only winged it.  I then stalked it about half a mile, as it tried vainly to escape. Finally it went under a gate and into a sheep field. I put the barrel on the gate and sighted at the bird’s head and flattened it in the grass.  Upon inspection I had made a mess of that bird that a few minutes before was minding its own business and probably gathering food for its young. I went back to the house for supper with no feelings of satisfaction, no pride in the kill, and ate a very meagre meal.

I’ve had that same feeling dozens of times since. Perhaps hundreds. I went on to slaughter more starlings with that Webley. I once shot a fly catcher, sort of by accident, an Ancient Mariner moment.  Then I graduated to a 20 gauge shot gun and went after rabbit, duck, pheasant, pigeon, grouse.  But large mammals, thankfully, I have never felled.

skinny

What is interesting to me, however, is that the feeling of numbness never totally left. I think this is part of the sense of denial that Masson talks about in his book. On some level we know that this taking of life is somehow wrong. I don’t necessarily say wrong in an objective sense, because I cannot be sure that it is “morally” wrong, at least by some objective sense of morality. But for somewhat sensitive souls (as children, we are all sensitive souls, some lose it, others do not completely) there is an underlying unease with our taking of animal life, at least in both the senseless and systematic ways that we are want to take it. Yet we repress these feelings, and are taught to do so by persistent cultural training. We cover the origins of the meat, and we lie to our children’s questions about the origin of their food.

We had a rooster, briefly. Like all roosters he went psycho and started attacking the kids. I told them I would deal with him, and I shot him and put him in the crock pot. He was a Polish bantam, not really designed for eating.  But he was less than a year old, so not too tough. The kids seemed pleased that I had killed him, having both been attacked at some point  by him, andI made no secret of that fact that I had done so. That was why at dinner that night, when Conrad asked innocently, Is this King? I told him Yes, without flinching. I was not sure whether his mum had told him we were eating His Majesty, but I thought it was likely. I was a bit surprised when Conrad pushed the plate away.

king

In a sense I took this as evidence of our confusion about eating. Yes, Conrad was happy that King was gone–he was a vicious bastard, and for small children he posed a real threat, with those spurs. But he was uneasy about the prospect of eating him, as if it was taboo, as if it was, somehow, just plain wrong.

So to sum up for today: its tough eating animals. Maybe we shouldn’t. But then again, we have for a long, long time. And anyway, what would become of all those domesticated animals if we let them go? Not pretty. One thing is for sure, all the industrial shit has to stop. For them, for us, for the planet. Please!! In the meantime, perhaps Pollan is right: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

grass