Pansy: Bovine Genius in Wild Alaska

by Charles D. Hayes

  Ideally he would live in Idaho knowing that he could come back to the ranch any time and that Randy and Nadia would be here. God, he hoped it would work out. He couldn’t handle another existential monkey wrench in their lives just now. Surely, at least for a while, things could go as planned? It was part question and part prayer. He was not a religious man, but at times he wished he’d been raised that way. He longed for something stronger than wishful thinking with which to contemplate the future.

  Intelligence

  Pansy was a few weeks older than her friend Nellie, and they bore no resemblance to each other. Mandy would watch them at a distance as they walked along the fence like two youngsters out for a stroll. She couldn’t tell how or by what method it was occurring, but somehow they seemed to be communicating. They would both turn at the same time, heading in a new direction, like birds in a flock instantaneously taking a sharp turn without running into one another.

  Today Pansy walked to the gate and then back to Mandy, indicating that she wanted to go out of the barn lot. So Mandy opened the gate, and they walked for about a half-mile with Elise in the lead a few yards ahead. As she neared a clearing, she stopped abruptly and trotted back to Mandy, then turned around, as if to say, “Follow me,” and went back to the same spot. There on the ground was another bear track only it didn’t look very fresh.

  “Okay, girl, I see it,” Mandy said and continued forward. As they walked along, Pansy would look back to see if Mandy was watching her. How could a cow be this smart? Pansy was demonstrably smarter than any dog they had ever owned, even their cattle dog, Bart, that someone shot the year before. Bart had been good at his job, but he didn’t point out bear tracks and he didn’t open gates or get his brush when he wanted to be groomed. What does this say about us, Mandy wondered, if we eat creatures capable of thinking like we do? Was it possible that her lack of excitement about the bear tracks was somehow accepted by Pansy as reassurance that it was okay to continue their walk? That's sure how it seemed, but how could you tell about something like that? There could be a whole field of intelligence that animals exhibit only to themselves, since no one would ever think to ask or consider that they could be aware of such things.

  Pansy had recently added another talent—she could untie gates fastened in rope knots by using her tongue. Now the only way to keep her from opening a gate by herself was to use a lock or a metal pin. Mandy was dying to put all of Pansy’s feats on the web or maybe start a Facebook page for the calf. What stopped her was the thought of what might happen to Pansy if the word got out. She would never again be safe out of sight. It would be too much to worry about. What would become of Pansy when Mandy went away to college? She couldn't get the question out of her mind, but she was not going to leave until the rest of the herd was gone. She'd be embarrassed to say she was starting school mid-year because of her concern for a cow, but that was the case, and she would make it clear if she had to spell it out.

  The Snitch

  Ben Atwood had a friend who knew the owner of the deli where Nadia worked. This friend thought Ben would be delighted to know something no one else knew about Nadia, and he was right. Atwood could barely contain himself. He wasted no time going straight to the magistrate. This would show them, by God.

  Judge Joseph Hopgood, commonly called No Hope Hoppy behind his back, was forty miles to the political right of the Tea Party and even another mile or two to the right of the former Alaska Independence Party. He listened intently as Atwood spilled his guts with so much excitement that Hopgood wondered if the big man might wet himself. When he said he would look into it and motioned for Atwood to leave, the man seemed bewildered, as if he had expected much more. Indeed the judge was concerned, but he never let citizens know what he was thinking or whether what he was being told was affecting him in any way or even if he really believed it.

  Hopgood had learned early in his career on the bench that you couldn’t be easy to read by the public and be a good judge. He thought himself the best of the best, and he had political aspirations that he would soon make clear. The information from Atwood, however, was indeed a concern and one that might have statewide reverberations. One case in Delta Junction could mean others statewide. He would have the troopers look into the matter after he did some investigating on his own. If the allegation was true, it could be the tip of the iceberg.

  The judge knew all too well that people called him No Hope Hoppy, and he reveled in the acknowledgment that he was a man of the right, a man of principle. He would have preferred Hang-em Hoppy, but since Alaska didn't have a death penalty, it didn't seem likely to catch on, even though he had tried to get the nickname started himself by leaving anonymous notes around town. "Those who break the law answer to me," said a card taped to the side of his bathroom mirror where he shaved each morning. Every time he read it, he would catch himself smiling.

  Something about Atwood pissed him off. No doubt it had partly to do with the haircut, the earring, and the detectable tattoo just beneath his shirt collar, but it went further. Even though he couldn’t pinpoint it now, he knew he would soon enough. After all, he was the judge and that's what he did, put his finger on things, or rather his thumb.

  New Perspectives

  In one of the books Randy was reading, former Marine Karl Marlantes said that treating PTSD required talking about what had happened in combat. He also said something to the effect that some people just never grow up. Randy agreed, remembering some of the Marines in his outfit who fit that description perfectly. They would likely never grow up, no matter what kind of life experience they had. But he didn’t think that about himself.

  What Marlantes said about the exhilaration of war was both true and troubling. The declaration that combat is the crack cocaine of all excitement highs scared him because he knew this to be true, if he knew anything at all. What was most troubling, though, was what Marlantes referred to as one’s shadow self—the other person inside you that for the most part stays hidden, showing himself only at those moments when you don’t know what you are going to do next. Then you feel surprise, and usually regret, when what you’ve done is over. Behavior like that could land you in prison.

  Randy didn’t really want to talk about his experiences in combat, but he did want to study about it more. He was already feeling some relief simply from understanding that, as rough as he’d had it in Afghanistan, others throughout history had had it worse, much worse. Even so, he figured most of the men he had served with would never set out to study war and get to the crux of the matter so that they could deal with what’s eating at them.

  It all comes down to killing, he thought. One philosopher Amy told him about, but whose name he could not recall, put the whole thing in perspective when he stated simply: life eats, and because it does, people and animals have to die. Hell, even that old bear was just being a bear and doing what bears do. Preying on livestock seems evil to us as ranchers, but not to the bear. It was human beings that messed everything up beyond repair. And of course, no one really cares about the perspective of the livestock because no one thinks they have one, except maybe people like his cousin.

  Mandy had told him recently that during World War II, the Nazis gave strict orders that animals were to be treated humanely. It was considered a moral imperative that they do so. She said that if any of their police dogs became sick, they were taken to a veterinarian immediately, but if the same fate befell Jewish prisoners, they were simply shot on the spot. She found it insanely ironic that people were sent to their death in cattle cars, but if the cars had been filled with cattle, much more care would have been given to the animals’ comfort. A car meant for eight cows was made to carry a hundred or more Jewish prisoners. How was this kind of psychic contradiction possible for members of a species who view themselves as so morally superior to animals that simply being compared to animals ruffles their feathers?

  Never before in his life had Randy been this engaged in serious reflection about the human condition. What thrilled
him was that the deeper he got into it, the more exhilarating it was. Learning is cathartic, he discovered, and he wondered why this hadn’t occurred to him in school. Only a few days ago, he’d asked Mandy how she had learned so much. When he admitted that he never expected such wisdom from someone so young, her answer stunned him. She quoted something Ralph Waldo Emerson had said about young people reading books in libraries: Far too often they forget that the books they’re reading have, in fact, been written by young people.

  He knew nothing of the work of Emerson. His cousin's sincerity and her obvious maturity moved him deeply. Now he was beginning to wonder if Marlantes was really right about needing to talk about war experiences. Wasn't it more important to think about it critically and to consider many differing points of view other than his own? Indeed, so far, this seemed to be the secret. The only way to become objective about anything is to take another viewpoint while setting aside your own emotional involvement. And, if you didn't do this, how could simply talking about war help? What was beginning to form in his mind was the firm idea that what a person really needed to do was to forgive himself for those things that kept gnawing at him, the ones that gave rise to the dreams.

  It occurred to him that adrenaline is akin to magnetic emotion. Once it locks on to memory at the occurrence of a terrifying event, it can't be reasoned away unless it is overwritten by a profound revelation, an act of reasoning powerful enough to be experienced emotionally. Whether you told anyone about your combat trauma was much less important than simply experiencing emotional potency with the strength to override it or cause it to fade in significance. And realizing that so many worse things had happened in the past seemed to make the idea of letting go of your own bad memories a lot easier because yours, though dreadful, didn't quite measure up on the horrific scale.

  For his birthday Mandy had given him a copy of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker wrote about the history of cruelty involving both animals and humans, and it was psychologically staggering. The filth and complete lack of etiquette that existed during the Middle Ages was so offensive, Randy couldn't bring himself to discuss it with anyone. It was heartening just to realize how far in some ways humans have advanced, and yet he didn't know a single soul on the planet who knew enough to appreciate this fact except, of course, Mandy.

  Lately it seemed he and Mandy could not have a conversation without her bringing up animal cruelty, although she seldom gave graphic details. There was one image Pinker wrote about, however, that he could not get out of his mind. At one period in fourteenth-century England, there existed a sport in which live house cats were nailed to a post and then participants, with their hands tied behind them and using only their heads, would proceed to pummel the animals to death while risking having their eyes scratched out. What kind of people could or would do such things, and what kind of people would want to watch them do it?

  Randy wondered if Mandy kept that image with her, too, but he would never bring it up. People needed to know about these abhorrent behaviors, but they didn't need to talk about them. Or did they? Were worse things going on today? Knowing as much as he had learned about human nature, he answered his own question saying, “Of course.”

  Appetites

  Tonight seemed to warrant a celebration, but there was no real occasion to observe. It just seemed as though a special surf-and-turf dinner at the table together was appropriate. Nadia already seemed like a member of the family, and her presence was reason enough to celebrate. What was clear to everyone was that Randy was crazy about Nadia, the reverse appeared to be true as well. Ed thought Nadia was perfect for Randy and so did Mandy. All three liked to hear her broken English spoken in what seemed like a Russian melody.

  When the conversation lulled, Nadia said, “Mandy, you do not like the steak?”

  “Nadia, I’m a vegetarian,” Mandy said.

  “Oh, I forget.” Nadia looked a little uncomfortable and couldn’t think of anything to add.

  “Do you think living on a cattle ranch made you a vegetarian?” Randy asked.

  “It’s not something I decided on suddenly. I’ve been thinking about it and studying about it for a long time.”

  “Well, something must have started it,” said Ed.

  “Maybe, sort of.” Mandy got up from the table and returned with her laptop computer. “There’s a philosopher in Wasilla who writes a blog.” She began reading from the screen, “He says, ‘Imagine you are sitting on a hilltop overlooking a canyon below and that before you is a seemingly infinite stage as far as the eye can see. Upon this stage, facing you, is every animal whose flesh you have personally eaten. You have to work at this for a while to get your mind around it. All of these creatures could and did feel pain.’”

  Glancing around the table, Mandy could see she had everyone’s attention. “He says chances are, if you’re a senior citizen like he is, you can remember when livestock and farm animals had something of a life before they were slaughtered, but that was before industrial, assembly-line farming took over.” Then she read further, “‘Currently many creatures live in such tiny spaces that throughout the whole of their lives they don’t even have enough physical room to turn around. When we consider how many cattle might be represented in all of the hamburger we’ve consumed in the half-century or more that we’ve lived, you have to wonder if it’s even possible to position the stage in our thought experiment to include all of these animals without blotting out the earth and sky.’”

  She set the laptop aside and looked at Ed. “I just don’t want to say when I’m old that a view of all the animals I’ve eaten will blot out the earth. In a book called Eternal Treblinka, Charles Patterson says that assembly-line slaughterhouses for domestic animals were what created the psychological conditions that led to the Holocaust.”

  “But Mandy,” Ed tried to reason, “we are not an assembly-line industrial ranch. We aren’t going to kill people, and you are quoting a book with a title that puts animals on a pedestal with people.”

  "That's not what he's doing at all,” Mandy countered. “He is simply making the case that the way we treat animals sets us up psychologically to take the inhumane steps necessary for genocide. If you’re insulted by the title, maybe you should look at it the other way around. Why do you have such a low opinion of life that's not human? Besides, if life has no real meaning for animals, why do you suppose they try so hard to stay alive? Why is genocide something only people do? You say we’re not an inhumane operation, but you’ve contracted with an assembly-line slaughterhouse."

  "Yes, Mandy, but that's not the same thing." Ed was trying to keep his voice calm.

  "Same as what?" Mandy asked.

  "The same as the big slaughterhouse operations. We're just not like that, Mandy."

  Hoping to steer clear of a fight, Randy chimed in, "I've been reading up lately about genocide, and until a couple of months ago, I had never heard the word. Now I think about it a lot."

  “The majority of slaughterhouses, are assembly-line factories,” Mandy continued. “Surely all of you know this is true. Doesn’t it also make sense that deadening our feelings about killing animals in a barbaric way leads to insensitivity toward people?”

  Ed started to speak, but Mandy kept talking. “Did you know that veal calves are killed when they’re only a few days old, and the ones that are allowed to live longer are kept where they can’t even move or turn around?”

  “Yes,” Randy said, “but we don’t do that.”

  “No, but we feed the appetite for meat. You think cows don’t know they’re going to their death when they watch the ones in front of them being slaughtered?”

  “No, I don’t think they’re that smart.” Randy shook his head, and Ed and grunted in agreement.

  “Well, they are,” said Mandy. “They run away from slaughterhouses all of the time.”

  “They don’t either,” Ed said with an expression on his face that seemed to imply he couldn't decide whether to smile or look conce
rned.

  “Yes, they do. Look it up. Google it, both of you. See for yourselves.” Mandy pushed her chair back, signaling dinner was over, and turned to Nadia. “Would you like to go for a walk with Pansy and me?”

  Nadia didn’t wait for Randy to protest. “Sure, I go with you.”

  A Confession

  A couple of weeks later, one of Ed’s prize bulls was missing, so he and Randy mounted their four-wheelers and rode most of the area suitable for riding. With no sign of the bull, they parked the vehicles and began to walk the fence line. A half-mile into the woods they found him tangled in wire left over from repairing the fence. He wasn’t hurt yet, just caught and unable to free himself. They cut away the wire, and the bull headed back toward the barn. “Should have never left that stuff out here,” said Ed.

  “I’ll bring a four-wheeler as close as I can and come back and get it,” Randy offered.

  They walked in silence for a while. Finally, Randy said, “You know those medals I got in the war?”

  “Sure, what about them?”

  “I didn’t deserve them.”

  “The hell you didn’t,” Ed protested, “I read the citations.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t tell what should have been reported. We were brutal far beyond what was called for. There were times when, if it moved we killed it. Man, woman, child, dog, it didn’t matter. How are you supposed feel about that when you’ve had time to think about it?”