by Brian Brett
“ IT’S ONLY AN ANIMAL,” my father said as I stood on the deck, weeping—hard words I’ve replayed in my head for fifty years. I’d been scouting in the bush like any good kid on the edge of the urban world when, in a thicket of salmonberry branches, I glimpsed the corpse of our white cat, its jaws drawn back in the grimace of a hard death. It was ancient in cat years, and it had crawled into the bushes to die. I began wailing like a child with a hammered hand. Everyone who’s had a dog or a cat knows what I’m talking about.
My thesaurus tells me that the antonym of human is animal. Whoever came up with that definition did not grow up with a dog or a horse or a cat. If you’ve got a nervous system, you’ve got a personality, and we’re suckers for personality. A biographer once claimed a literary friend had a pet clam when she was a child—which she denied. However, I can understand how the rumour began. She has a mind capable of seeing the beauty in a clam’s life. Whenever a creature we know dies, animal or human, we weep for it, and, greedily, we weep for ourselves—the lost possibilities of a golden future with our companions, the way I wept for my cat.
There are numerous reasons why a child should grow up with animals. For companionship, of course, and the discipline their care entails, but also to learn about loss when the creature dies—a crucial moment in childhood, yet one we never totally comprehend, as I discovered the day Stonewall Jackson, our proud, ancient gelding, had a stroke and died in my arms. If you can picture a horse dying in your arms, that was exactly what it was like. How outlandish to live with a creature so big and handsome, a real dancer in his prime, then watch him grow old and die.
It happens fast with animals, the descent from glory to the rag-and-bone shop. He looked ancient the last few months. People walking down the road beside the pasture would stop and stare at him. I wondered if they suspected we were mistreating him. Perhaps we were by not putting him down. Yet he had nothing but heart and a stubborn desire to live, checking our pockets for sugar cubes or ripping open a bag of feed as soon as I wasn’t looking. He had an unyielding righteousness that would bring him shambling to the deck every afternoon, demanding his daily carrot.
We knew it was coming for a long time, but we were never expecting it. Denial and death are companions. We were lucky enough to go for a walk in the lower field at the right moment. Did we sense the moment? As soon as I saw Jack down, I knew this was no rolling scratch of an itchy back. It was a stroke. As he tried to rise I grabbed him around the shoulders and somehow heaved him, almost supernaturally, to his feet. It was a stupid thing to do, but once a horse can’t get up that’s the end; their digestive systems will kill them if they go down for too long. He was so scared, leaning into me, shivering, sweaty, losing muscle control. I managed to hold him upright for about five minutes while he glanced, forlorn and knowingly, over his shoulder at me.
Then he collapsed. I had to leap out of the way as he had a second stroke. We could only brush his head while he shivered and gasped. We told him it was okay to go, but he wasn’t buying that. Not ever. Despite being paralyzed on one side he kept trying to get up, and it became a terrifying, slow, repetitive dance.
Sharon ran back to the house and started phoning. Mike took the call as he was halfway out the door of his house. She asked him to bring his gun. Though I’ve killed many animals in my life, I knew I couldn’t shoot Jack. Then she managed to find Malcolm—the vet with “the touch.” He must have roared down the island, because he arrived a few minutes before Mike. I suppose he’d encountered enough anguished horse owners to understand the necessity for speed if a horse is dying. He gave Jack a needle to relax him before the killing injection, while I cradled Jack’s head in my arms and Sharon stroked his neck.
Since we had to bring a backhoe in to bury Jack, we made sure he got the biggest headstone under the willow tree. The stone gives the farm the patina of an old western film, an island version of Tombstone, and I often smile wistfully when I glance out the window at his stone. I buried him with my favourite raku tea bowl. I always give our companions pottery I’ve made, offering a fragment of myself to their grave. There’s a growing collection of ceramics buried under that willow tree now, an archaeological record of our lives together here at the farm. We almost need a bigger cemetery. Two old dogs, two cats, one ancient canary, four geese, and two peafowl murdered by raccoons. They are Stonewall Jackson’s bedmates. Since then they’ve been joined by the Arabian grey, LaBarisha, and Samantha. Sharon scattered yellow rose petals around the grave after we covered Jack, so it was luxurious for a few hours. Then the sheep ate the rose petals.
Some days I go down there and sit on his headstone for a few minutes.
SEVERAL YEARS LATER LABARISHA died, and I had to make the same round of choked-up phone calls to the answering machines of backhoe operators. Almost all our original machine operators on the island have small farms or were raised on them. They understand the tragedy of a dead horse and consider it a civic duty to temporarily abandon a big-paying job to bury a family horse. Ken Byron had one of his boys down at the farm by lunchtime and we buried her next to Stonewall Jackson, under a large sandstone fossil rock a good friend had discovered behind the house. Another one of my pots went beside her beneath the willows, and a vase that contained some of Sharon’s father’s ashes so that he could also become part of the farm. Because of the growing number of graves under the willow tree, we had to lay her facing the field, her ass end to the house, which is the way she often treated us in her vain and beautiful arrogance. The kindness of the young backhoe operator made me recall the elaborate rituals that tribal cultures, and even some organized religions, have conjured to describe the birth of death and how we must treat it.
Our two sons were surprised upon learing Sharon had put her portion of her dad’s ashes with LaBarisha. She just told Chris, our older boy, that her dad wanted to be near us, and besides, she thought her dad would like the company of the horse. I could see the boys were a little confused by the unorthodox burial, but I admired its wonderful gesture.
It strikes me that in the early days of our species death was usually immediate, often brutal, and always magical. If you study tribal societies, it’s apparent that a thread of reverence toward death, human or animal, inhabits the majority, as it generally does on small farms, though a vein of mistreatment also runs like a cancer in all communities. Most small farmers are gentle with their animals, and while slaughter might appear grim, they tend to respect livestock and pets. As in tribal cultures, rogue practices have continued since history began, whether it is the cruelty of Native buffalo jumps or mean farmers beating stubborn livestock.
Our species, fortunately, has empathy, one of the qualities that make us human—the ability to inhabit another mind. Our imagination takes us there in an eye-blink. Imagination can save us from cruelty. To be cruel we have to break the imaginative bond, distancing ourselves from our victim—thus, we refer to the slaughter of animals as “harvesting,” and the animals become “products” or, worse yet, “units.” Then we can tuck into our platefull of pork spareribs and not feel the pain of the pig. This is also why writers tend to sanitize farm life, glossing over gruesome deaths, and why it’s difficult for so many to read or watch documentary accounts of slaughter or accidental deaths of livestock. We are living amid modern myths, whether they’re the free-enterprise propaganda of agribusiness products basking in glowing fields, or the sunshine vision of small farms extolled by eco-urbanite enthusiasts blind to the dirt, mindless labour, gore, and dangers of a real mixed farm.
While urban people tend to hold a bucolic view of rural life, but the idyllic farm of children’s tales has also had a long history of barbarity and ugly practices; the difference is that the small farm never had the mechanistic qualities and plant-endagering scale of corporate agriculture.
Still, even eras of small farming have affected world climate, mostly because of population explosions but also because of foolish practices. Burn-and-plant periods of civilization around the world often
accelerated climate change, followed by cooling periods after plagues and famines. Ice-core samples show that the epic worldwide slash-and-burn farming era that peaked around 1000 bc denuded most of China, India, the Mediterranean region, the lowlands of Central America, and the highlands of Peru, leading to population explosions and gradual world warming that was counteracted only by what scholars now believe was a volcanic eruption, an atmospheric veil of dust that caused sudden global cooling. Mayan corn culture suffered its first major crash, and in the sixth century ad the already overstressed European population encountered the Justinian plague, which led to further global cooling when deforestation and burning decreased. The Roman priests might have dragged a lot of entrails out of living roosters and owls, but their divinations still couldn’t predict their culture was its own worst enemy.
Once the European populations rebuilt and became overcrowded again, the Black Death that climaxed in the 1300s was followed by another round of global cooling, which likely encouraged the collapse of both complex and simple civilizations such as the Khmers and the Greenlanders. It’s now clear that traditional agriculture, though not as potentially dangerous as our Oil Age, is capable of affecting the world’s climate.
Despite these climate change episodes, our populations continued growing, and the animals died in ever-increasing quantities. However, with the dawn of industrial food production we learned how to hide animal slaughter behind locked doors. Death is now relegated to films, books, distant wars, car accidents, and our own ghettoes. It’s the last great taboo of modern society, an event discreetly hidden since we began moving away from the land and the animals. Europeans and North Americans not only conceal death behind factory walls, they’ve also erected walls of gushy sentiment—the trusty pet mourned with much ceremony and tears. But most of all, we want it out of sight, even when it comes to our relatives and loved ones. Grieving with the corpse has been shrunk to a single ceremony for the community, with very little time for the actual relatives. No more the body laid out on the table or the uncovered coffin in the home.
However, death walks openly and commonly on every mixed farm. There’s not only the loss of the trusty dog, the horse, and the ancient, much-loved hen or ewe. There’s the slaughter of the chickens, the lambs, the cows, the pigs. Then there are the surprise deaths—the attack of a cougar or wild dogs, or the ewe that delivers a lamb and just walks away, uncaring about her crying offspring. What twists me up most is the startling way death can arrive, like a mystery guest at a party, wearing a different suit or dress each time.
One day a friend, the poet Patrick Lane, and I were sitting in the sunroom, drinking Scotch, several years before he went dry. We were being bad in the afternoon and enjoying it, until a tree swallow darted in through the open door. Recognizing its mistake, it made a sharp turn and tried to exit through the window beside Patrick. It bounced off the glass with a fatal ka-thunk, landing dead in his lap, while he sat there, stunned, whisky glass half raised to his lips.
“Does this happen to you often?” I asked. “Or was it a special performance just for me?”
YOU TURN YOUR BACK and fate arrives, usually at the most awkward times, the dead ewe you have to perform a Caesarean on in the pouring rain, with barely seconds to save the chilled lamb, and then you do save it, and it revives, coughing in the wet grass while you desperately towel-rub it, bringing warmth and blood circulation into its newborn limbs.
The dead lambs—they made me understand how delicate and precarious the miracle of life is. There was the terrible year a lamb died being born. Suddenly, in the next stall, an older ewe perished giving birth, yet her lamb survived. Sharon, determined to save the living lamb, tried to give it to the ewe who had lost her baby, but she rejected it, pushing it away from her udder. So Sharon skinned the dead lamb and tied its hide around the rejected one. The mother was suspicious of the gore but recognized the smell. She didn’t reject it, quite, though she didn’t accept it. We kept her chained for the day to the wall of the birthing room so she wouldn’t trample the lamb to death if she did reject it. Then suddenly Samantha darted into the room, and the ewe, seeing the dog, converted into an instant mother, ripping the flimsy chain from the wall, chasing the collie out of the room, and herding the suddenly accepted, disguised lamb into a safe corner. I always considered this episode the goriest in our history on the farm, maybe because I didn’t have the willpower to do what we both knew had to be done. Only Sharon, who’d worked her entire adult life as a nurse, had the strength to save the lamb. Out of the gore another life leaped, a lovely lamb that went on to become a prime ewe in the tribe.
WHEN I LIE WITH THE DYING LAMB
When I lie with the dying lamb
in the manger, I desire so little,
because life is already
more than I can take,
nestled in the hay, listening
to the gasps of tiny breath—the hiss
of the propane lantern hanging overhead.
The mother is dead in the corner,
and soon death
will follow death as it has done for the millenniums
since this unholy mess invented itself
in a chemical fog that should
make any thinking creature bitter.
How our blood surges for the newborn,
the gorgeous miracle and enigma—
even though we will slaughter this lamb
for meat in four months if it survives,
which it won’t. Death is seconds away.
I look into its eyes, seeking the mystery,
but they are already filled with the secrets
of the other side, the place
where we can’t go, until we go.
And I lie still in the hay, holding the black hoof
of a dead lamb—feeling left behind once again,
uninstructed.
The strangest thing about raising sheep for meat is that you will weep for them, fight for their survival; and then, when their time comes for the market, you will kill them. Mike Byron slaughters in his field, the old way. I’ve field-dressed deer and moose and eaten bear in the bush and thrived for nearly forty years eating raw fish and sometimes raw meat, but I was taken aback the first day I helped him slaughter a lamb and saw his gore-covered killing platform in the field behind his house. Then, after watching him carefully, and following his instructions, I learned his techniques for killing as many as a dozen lambs a day (during his most productive years) and his way of keeping the flesh clear of contamination. He moved his killing site so that contamination wouldn’t build up and handled the hide with one hand while skinning it, thus preventing his knife hand and knife from being soiled by the hide. Then he winched the lamb up as he finished skinning and gutting so that the cleaned lamb wouldn’t contact anything foul. During his forty years of slaughter he’s never heard of anyone getting sick from his meat. Traditional slaughter is a lot safer than it looks. However, it’s still a shock to city denizens, who appear to believe that meat is born prewrapped in plastic on Styrofoam platters.
Sharon and I were visited by friends from Montreal and their two children, Jacob and Isaac. The boys were twitchy at first, but like most children they soon began to enjoy farm life—until the day we dropped in on the Byrons to pick up extra eggs. Mike was in his field, wrestling with a recalcitrant lamb as we drove up. “Here, hold this lamb,” he instructed in his no-time-to-waste voice. I was so used to working and talking with him that I just held the lamb and he slit its throat, then efficiently drove the knife into the neck vertebrae, quickly severing the spinal cord and ending its suffering. His standard technique. The lamb’s corpse flung itself into its final convulsions, bleeding out on the grass. The youngest boy began hyperventilating. Slaughter was so much a part of our life that it never occurred to me, in that brief moment, to recognize how harsh it would appear to a city kid. This was the moment I realized how distant I had become from the urban world. I went red with embarrassment and guilt while Mari
e-Louise led the sobbing boy away. It would be a long time before I heard the end of this affair. “What’s the matter with him?” Mike asked, handing me the knife and dragging the lamb toward the skinning trough, where we swung it up onto the platform so he could begin the skinning and gutting. Then I quickly returned to the car with my friends, apologizing profusely and endlessly.
Over the years I’ve learned to respect the traditional slaughter of animals, along with age-old growing techniques for vegetables and fruits. Modern concepts of hygiene and cleanliness can be even more dangerous than the “dirty” practices of our ancestors and the animal world, as the now-immense scale of meat recalls and food poisonings reminds us. I’ve known a few deaths in my time and slaughtered my share of game and livestock, and usually I want to weep when I look at the body. It’s claimed that the dead instantly become three-quarters of an ounce lighter: the weight of the soul. That’s too little, in my book—death is much heavier.
Usually, we don’t know death unless we know the victim. Bloodbaths in Zimbabwe, or suicide bombings in Jerusalem and the customary reprisal that inevitably kills children in Palestine, are distant until we see the distraught faces close up, and then our heart unravels, as it does when we lose a relative, a friend, or a pet. Whether it’s Old Yeller or Lassie, dogs especially grab our emotions—maybe because they can be among the sappiest creatures on earth, or because their world is based on the pack mentality’s need to please. Cats aren’t far behind. When ancient Egyptians lost a cat, they shaved off their eyebrows, and if their dog died, they shaved their entire bodies. Who doesn’t feel sorrow reading the story of Odysseus coming home after nineteen years? His ancient hound, warming its old bones on the dung heap where it had been relegated, recognizes him immediately, raises its head, and whimpers before it falls back, dead, having fulfilled its obligation—waiting for him to come home. Dogs love us unconditionally. I wish I could be as good a person as my dogs think I am. They can love you more than you can love yourself. Maybe that’s why the French say the best thing about a man is his dog.
