(I published this, then unpublished it. I said before, this is freewriting. It’s scattered. Not edited. Bits of an idea that might make an essay someday. This one is really dark. It’s kind of therapeutic, I guess. I’m trying to be brave, and put myself out there. I imagine, like everything else, this gets easier, and the content gets better, over time. I am afraid of the judgement, and afraid in a very practical sense. If you misinterpret or disagree, I am at risk. But it is legal to humanely dispatch livestock. We, in fact, shoot our own beef cattle in the pasture, hang and gut them, and transport them to a facility to be cut and packaged. It’s sure more humane than the alternative. They don’t see it coming. But someone out there is going to find that, and the following, problematic. Please understand, hastening the demise of an animal incompatible with life is legal and merciful. It’s also damned hard.)
Raising livestock is a slog. It’s an uphill battle every day, and luck is everything. It’s everything. Beginner’s luck is real. It gets you hooked. But the pendulum swings. And the downhill slide sucks.
I thought for the longest time that when life threw up roadblocks, my job was to figure out how to go around them. Maybe, instead, life was trying to help me out, to tell me to turn around. Maybe I was too stubborn to see what was right in front of my face. I sure did fight. I tried. Maybe I fought for the wrong things.
I loved horses growing up. My dream was to be a horse breeder. My first horse was a $100 orphan bought on the Blackfeet Reservation. Her mother was sent to slaughter, but the truck wouldn’t load foals, so she was left standing in a field, three weeks old.
I fed her from a bucket. Took her through the 4-H program, all the way to the end. Won o-mok-see belt buckles. Took her to show at The Governor’s Cup. Then, when I was in high school, I got the opportunity to breed her to a gorgeous Thoroughbred racehorse stallion. She didn’t settle.
I’m someone who always wonders what the universe wanted. I think all these years, I’ve believed that had she conceived and carried a foal, she’d have died delivering it. I don’t know why I think that way. I thought the universe was protecting me, but it might’ve been a better death than the one she had.
She died an awful death. She developed Cushings, foundered, her coffin bones rotated, she had to be euthanized. I insisted on being there when she died, insisted on holding her head. When the drugs hit, she fell forward and knocked me back against the barn wall. She did everything she could as she collapsed to not hit me.
It was the first time I’d seen a euthanasia in a horse, and I don’t know in hindsight why the vet let me stand where I did. It was dangerous, for one, but more than that, devastating. I hate that with her last living breath she tried to catch herself so she wouldn’t fall on me.
I’ve euthanized a lot of horses since. I guess if I’m being honest, not a one of them was a pretty death. My 32-year-old Rudy had a stoke, and couldn’t quit turning in circles. We got the job done, but it wasn’t pretty.
Bert, my old Trakehner stallion with the bad hip, slipped in the snow and couldn’t get up. At least he was already laying down.
My wobbler colt, Landusky, stayed at the vet’s overnight for diagnosis, and when they called the next day, I didn’t go to say good bye. Hate me for it if you want, but I just got done telling you these aren’t good deaths. What difference would it have made? They were kind, and he didn’t know what was coming.
I held a thrashing 72-hour-old foal down with my bodyweight while a vet who refused to even try to treat him on a Sunday night–because it was a Sunday night–euthanized him instead. His call, not mine. He’d have probably died either way, but the next closest vet was four hours away, and this was better than the suffering. But it wasn’t clean. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t fair.
Some of you will want to regale me with tales of neat and clean equine euthanasias. I’m glad you have those stories to tell, but I stand by what I said; even the best of equine euthanasias isn’t pretty. And they all break your heart.
***
Random aside, there’s this Internet trope that circulates from time to time, purportedly from vets and staff, insisting you need to be there to hold your pet’s paw when it passes. If you have it in you to stay, stay. If it will bring you peace, stay. If all you can do is say good bye and walk away, you did okay. If you read that shit on the Internet and your heart breaks all over again because you weren’t there, don’t give people on the Internet the power to shame you. Assuming your pet regularly saw the vet and staff, then they were family too. It’s enough they were there. It is.
I say this because I couldn’t bear to stay when Cowboy, my three-month-old Shar-pei puppy with hemophilia, who had already endured two blood transfusions, couldn’t be saved by a third. I told him good bye and stepped out of the room.
I held my Maddie when she died. But I second-guess myself every day about choosing to let her go. “Better a day too soon…” they say. I wonder if I didn’t just take the easy way out.
Maddie is the reason I believe in miracles. I don’t believe in your God, but I do believe in miracles.
Maddie was a Dwarf cat. Like Grumpy Cat. Like Lil Bub. Except it was before the Internet, and nobody knew about Dwarf cats. She was just a kitten that became a cat and never grew. A cat with a terrible immune system who was frequently sick and often had seizures. I know miracles exist, because she survived once when she should have died. I fell to my knees and I cried and I begged and she lived. And then, the last time she had seizures, my vet said maybe we could keep going, and I said no.
I think the Internet has brought an awareness to things like this that we didn’t have before. It has given us knowledge we didn’t have then. The Kitten Lady alone has done so much. There are so many medical advances for small animals now. (To make it goat-related, this reminds me of Goats Of Anarchy…and I might get there another day. I have thoughts.) Anyway, back then, nobody knew how to treat my Maddie, and I’d watched her seize one too many times without answers.
I’ll never know if I made the right choice the night the vet said he might be able to save her again, and I said no.
***
I did the math today. My pregnant mare, Sera, is 20 days away from where she was last year, when she lost twins at 280 days gestation. One was born alive. I held him and I cried, and then I stepped away and asked my husband to shoot him. Read that again.
Live colt, looked black, four white socks, blaze, everything I’d dreamed of, after breeding horses for half of my lifetime. I held him, and I felt his want to live, and I felt him struggling to breathe with lungs that weren’t developed, and I thought of all the ways we could try to save him, and I thought of every lesson I’d ever learned, and I saw how it would go, and I knew how much more it would hurt later, and I said, “Shoot him.”
I can find a record of three foals surviving after being born at 280 days. None ended up sound. (Joints aren’t developed at that age. Gravity destroys them.) One is famous. Belonging to Katie Van Slyke. Who had the money and resources to try. And, technically, that colt was born at 286 days. Every day matters. It wasn’t enough; he was euthanized before his third birthday.
I’ve had healthy, medically stable foals at 305 days. Sera was born at 315. But at 280 days, that colt barely had hair. His legs were as soft as al dente spaghetti. He couldn’t breathe. I made the right choice and I’ll find you and fight you and put you on the ground over it if you disagree. But it broke something in me.
Sera needs to make it another 45 days or so. Longer, better, but like I said, 305 is survivable. I scan her pasture every morning, looking for an aborted fetus. I look at her fetlocks, her tail, for blood. I look at her hooves, checking for drops of milk, the first sign I had last year before things went horribly wrong. This used to be my heart and my soul and my everything. I don’t think it is anymore.
***
In two weeks, the kids start arriving. I know how to do that. Every time, it’s like unwrapping a present at Christmas. I’ll lose some, and it’ll hurt. But there will be more ups than downs. I’ll hold the kids, smell their baby scent, feel their fur on my cheek, feel their teeth on my chin. I’ll watch them grow, and it’ll soothe something in me that hurts more than usual right now. The long, barren winters give me too much time to reflect.
***
It’ll distract me, too, as we count down to that foal. And, who knows, maybe Sera’s not even pregnant. I kind of hope. Maybe she is, though, and maybe we’ll get there, I don’t know. I haven’t kept count, but this will be about my 40th foal. If it lives, it’s going to join the ranks of some good ones. If it dies, the same is true. Hey, Universe, I guess it’s up to you.
Quit Mansplaining Raising Dairy Goats To Me: A Blog 