Massages, the Steer Run-In Sheds and Some Buddhism Thrown in for Good Measure

Today, Joanne Ehret came to the farm. She's a massage therapist, licensed in the State of NY, and also a long-time volunteer. After a morning of cleaning waterers, she agreed to show me how to massage some of our residents who could really use a massage. Probably they all could use a massage, but some more than others. 

We started with Pete. 

Pete's case history: he's a Duroc pig, which is a breed often used by factory farms. Which means that Durocs are bred to grow really fast so the factory farms can sell them to slaughter fast. The problem being that piglets can often grow too fast for their joints and ligaments and whatnot to catch up. So they develop issues like splayed legs. It's a syndrome: splay leg. You can look it up. Anyway, Pete was rescued by a kind soul from a farmer who was going to let him die because he was the runt of the litter. 

The kind soul didn't know from pig nutrition, though, and fed Pete donuts and junk food. So in addition to having splay leg, Pete got really fat and soon couldn't walk. So he spent several months just sitting on the concrete slab where the kind soul kept him (the kindness is more and more replaced with ignorance until WFAS makes an appearance in the story). Enter WFAS, who took Pete, now overweight, unable to walk and suffering from flat-ass syndrome (not actually a syndrome, at least not for pigs). 

At WFAS, Pete loses weight, starts to walk, makes a miraculous recovery from his flat-ass and can actually stand up by himself. BUT, he still has the stiffness in his back legs from the splay leg issue. 

Enter Joanne. 

Pete is laying with his good side out when she first approaches him. She massages him and then he seems to get up--is he irritated? No, he turns over to the other side, the one with the really stiff leg and then lays down again. 

Joanne shows me how to gently push his hip back in toward his body, easing the splaying. 

Pete is silent and in heaven until I start doing annoying things like petting him on the head and talking. He rightfully nips at my knee and I stop. 

Pete falls back into a Happy Pig Trance.

Next up is Albie, the famous goat who has been on the cover of the New York Times Lifestyle Section. Albie is missing his left front leg. Despite many attempts, Albie's team of renowned prosthetists have not found the right prototype yet. So he walks by throwing his weight forward and to the right.

Word of Joanne must be getting around the farm, because while we're on our way from the barn out to the field, Albie positions himself on a flat rock--the perfect position for a massage on his front legs and shoulders.

Joanne starts in and notices how tight his shoulder and scapular are on the right side. But he likes getting massaged on his left side too, the side without the leg--Joanne says he likes getting the blood flow going into his muscles. Albie moves only to stretch his leg out a little or to slide forward so Joanne can reach the muscles on his chest.

The other goats gather to watch and then also to do the goaty thing of trying to stir up some trouble. I maneuver them away.

Albie stays on the massage rock (as it now is known) for at least a half hour.

Joanne and I move on to try her magic on the pigs, Andy and Cromwell, but it's time to do some steer run-in-shed cleaning. Which is always part of the balance: the must-be-done and the should-be-done, although really much of the time, I'm not sure which is which. We might say shed-cleaning, the animals might say massaging. It all seems important.

The cleaning of the shed is maybe the "chop wood, carry water" that the Buddhists talk about. But while we're pitchforking out dirty straw, we say very little. What flowed between our hands and Albie, Pete and the others, fills our hearts. And that's enough.

Just Another Summer Night at the Farm, with the Slight Addition of Some Ichthammol and Swat

I was late to the farm today. As soon as I got there, I helped feed the white bird girls. I pour food into their troughs and then they ignore me. So does Pebbles, the rooster--right after he darts up mid-pour to bite me on the hand. He can't resist telling me one more time not to mess with his ladies, even though I'm feeding them, which is arguably their favorite thing in the world. 

When she's feeding the turkeys, Julie notices that Sammy is still limping. He's had a hock problem for a while now (the hock is kind of like their elbow). She decides an Ichthammol wrap is called for. Ichthammol looks like tar, but it draws out infection. 

Julie puts the Ichthammol goo onto pieces of gauze, places the gauze around Sammy's hock and wraps it all up with vet wrap--it's like a thin ace bandage that sticks to itself. Sammy cooperates the whole time. It's always surprising how often they help us when we're helping them. 

It's not that hot out and it's feeding time--which is usually turkey-chirping-crazy time, but Petunia parks herself in front of a fan and closes her eyes. She often acts odd when she's about to lay an egg. She has her rituals and comforts that we don't understand--or not yet. Maybe someday. 

Time to feed the pigs. Stubby (named for his stub of a tail, seen on the right) gets up and walks to the Lazy Pig Trough, which is the one that's right outside their beds and not with the other troughs in the pig feed area. Sometimes it's really the Human Are Suckers Trough, as the pigs who don't want to walk to the feed area look at us, and we remember that this is their 10th year and 10 is really old for pigs and what would we do without them and just this once why not spoil them. 

This is Oliver. You can recognize him by how his tongue is always out. Could you say no to that face? No. You couldn't.

It's a cool night, but it's damp and the flies are out en force. When Julie and I feed the steer, they're flipping their tails around to shoo away the flies that gather in battalions immediately after the tail swishes back.
Andy, in particular, gets flies on the mid-line of his belly. He kicks himself with his hind legs to get rid of them, but ends up making open wounds that really attract the flies. I rub Swat, which is a fly-repellant ointment down his belly, which is so expansive, I have to do one side as far as I can reach, then the other.

Swat is pink which seems to go well with Andy's black and white coloring. Under Andy's stomach is Dylan on the left and Elvis on the right, an unintentional framing. Did Andy kick me while I was trying to take pics of his pink Swat belly with my iPhone while kneeling in cow pies? No. 

Sometimes we help the animals; sometimes they help us. But it seems pretty clear, even after a couple hours on a regular night at the sanctuary, that most of the helping is from them, to us. 

Homecoming

The moon is bright in the sky tonight, with no clouds. Andy will sleep well; Ralphie is back. 
That was the theme of the day. As soon as I got to the farm, Dawnell told me. The trailer that took Ralphie to Cornell early Monday morning was on its way. 

A trip to Cornell is nerve-wracking for the rest of us left behind. What will they find, what will happen. Whether we form words for it or not, the question arises, will they come back to us. 

Ralphie had to go up last year. He stayed for almost two weeks, while the vets did tests. It was Andy who licked Ralphie over and over when he got back. 

In the afternoon, storms crept up over the mountain to the south and east, then moved across the sky to the north. Then the call came. Fifteen minutes away.

No one told the steer, but they gathered together at the corner of the field closest to the driveway.

And they waited. And Andy mooed. 

Phil got the gates ready and then the humans went back to doing the normal because normal goes on and the towels have to be folded and Brewet needs to be taken out of his sling and the pigs have to get fed and the farm doesn’t stop even when the sun and moon of Andy’s world is in a horse trailer on the last leg of the journey from Ithaca.

Phil sees the trailer on 212, just outside the farm. The driver backs down the curved driveway. Ralphie sticks his nose through the bars. He paces and moos. The others call back.

And then the trailer is at the field. The door opens and Ralphie jumps out onto the grass. 

The driver tells us about 4 steer she drove to Illinois. “Beef cattle. They wouldn’t get off the truck,” she says. “It took forever, they kept circling back.”

Maybe it was the heat or the rain, but Andy’s eyes were dripping water down his cheeks.

Rebecca said, "Did you see how worried his face was? And strained—not like Elvis.”

The steer all go back to eating hay. And keeping Dylan, the baby, away. Because he’s the youngest and that’s the way it works when things are back to normal and the ones you love are with you and the moon rises over things just the way they should be. 

The Boone Sutra (One of Them, Anyway)

It reached 90 today--at least. The turkeys cool off by standing in the pool that forms by the pig barn pump. It's where we wash out the produce bins, so there are bits of grated carrot and lettuce that float in the muddy water--delicacies for the birds cooling their feet.

And so, Boone, Lord of the Mash, High Priest of the Blue Bowl of Boone-Mash Heaven, Scourge of the Med Center Back Door, reminds us again of What is Important (besides Mash). On on scorching afternoon, all you really need is a little salad, a pool of water and some mud between your toes.

What the Rain Brings With It

It rained today, but not until mid-afternoon. In the morning, we put the Galaxy and Orion, the goats, in with the two white roosters, to graze down their yard. At first the goats were happy in the small field of clover, then they started bleating. I went out and asked, "What." Not so much asking as telling them everything's fine. They looked back at me. I went into the med center to do some work on the computer. After a bit, I heard Julie calling Galaxy as she led Orion by his horns through rain. Goats hate rain--they had sensed it coming.

On rainy days, there's less to do. Our agenda was bird checks on the main flock. Then the rain started and that item was downgraded to lice-dusting them. We had barely started when the rain turned heavy. All of the birds took shelter under the coop and we gave up.
We go back to the med center to fold towels and sweep the floors. We ignore the inside when the day is sunny and the outside calls with our lists and agendas.
The rain clears enough to feed the pigs and have them all come out for dinner, eventually.

Except for the metal trough, dinner is kind of a 16th century painting of a cornucopia depicting the bounty of summer. And it's almost all organic. 

After we open the gate, the pigs don't stand and eat, they're all about going from trough to trough to find the best bits. 

Last night, the ladies of the main flock got watermelon; tonight's gift from the pigs' produce is cantaloupe. 

The day started off as summer and devolved into early fall, with the rain bringing in the cool. The rust and gold leaves are lurking behind the green, no matter that it's one day after summer solstice.
It happens when it's not officially happening.
The clouds are thick and when Sophie comes in to the med center, she looks at the clock and says, "Oh it's only 6:30."
It's all a surprise, but none of it is to our bones. Like the goats, they know what's what.
I went inside, when the signs of rain were all around me. Orion and Galaxy knew.
But then, the animals always seem to be saying, "Listen."
And most of the time I don't, but it all is different when I do.



An Addendum to the Day:

Goats hate rain. And pigs don't like it that much. Except for Pete.

Still wearing zinc sunscreen from yesterday, Pete gets up by himself in the mud (miracle!) and heads out for a stroll. 

He roundly ignores me, my thumb and my poor photographic skills. 

A pause to graze and reenergize--think dixie cup of Gatorade during a marathon. 

Mid-field. 

Way out in the field, closing in on a Personal Best for distance covered in one go. Sophie is off-camera, cheering--only she knew that hidden in the overweight, non-walking body of the pig who came to the farm two months ago was the soul of an elite athlete. 

Ralphie, Cornell, Brushing, Watermelon, Mud

Today Ralphie went to Cornell. The woman with the giant trailer and the amazing backing-up skill came and backed up through the narrow strip of grass between pastures 2 and 3. Phil, Dawnell and Nancy coaxed him onto the trailer and word was, he got on without faltering, without falling, with the other 3 steer mooing and pacing. They hate to have any one of their tribe leave.

This is Ralphie's second trip to Cornell. The first one, about a year and a half ago, was inconclusive after sophisticated tests, so they sent him home. He's been stumbling again, having trouble with his back end and not being able to get up easily. So back he goes and his friends stay behind, some mooing at the corner of the field closest to where the trailer pulled away, some talking about him in the kitchen.

The steer were quiet all day, and in the heat of late afternoon, sat in a threesome, chewing their cud. I went out to brush them, because Andy loves to be brushed. When he's brushed, he stops chewing and puts his head down in a trance.

It's hot and they're laying in the sun. But none of the coops need to be cleaned. There is nothing to do on this day of the summer solstice, the longest afternoon of the year; nothing to do but go out with the steer on the field in a silent vigil for Ralphie.


A Brief Tutorial on How to Brush the Steer. Or at Least the Steer at WFAS. 

1. Assemble your tools. 

You'll need a hand, a brush and some flyspray--you might as well flyspray the steer while you're brushing. Even though they were fly-sprayed yesterday, the flies are vicious and predatory. 

2. Climb the gate and head out to the steer. 

The view from the top of the gate. 

3. Start with Andy. 

If you start with anyone else, Andy will just get up, come over, horn whoever you're brushing out of the way, and then lick the brush with his giant tongue until you give up and brush him.

Andy chewing his cud--why are cow-teeth so cute? Hard to say.

Note to self: Andy's back hooves need to be trimmed. A professional steer hoof-trimmer did everyone's hooves last month, but here they are, overgrown. Go figure. 

4. Brush Elvis and Dylan. 

Dylan. Sometimes he doesn't want to be brushed. Or maybe he just resents being last. Today, he lets me brush him and even spray flyspray on his back as I brush. 

It's a good idea to leave Dylan for the last because then you can take a break, sit against his stomach and listen to his rumen turn (it sounds like a washing machine changing cycles) while the swallows fly past in front of the mountain rising beyond the field.

Note to self: even Dylan's back hooves are a little long. Starting to question professional steer-hoof-trimmer's credentials. Starting to feel a little guilty for sitting around with Dylan.

It's time to get up anyway and go help Julie feed the pigs. 

The problem being that it's really hot and no one wants to get out of their various mud baths. Which, by the way, look like the La Brea tarpits. Stubby sits up momentarily, but he lays right down again. 

Julie fails to motivate Oliver to even sit up. 

A few pigs meander over to the troughs, but most stay right where they are. Maybe they're leaving it all for a midnight snack tonight, when it cools. No one understands food better than pigs: it's meaning, the timing of eating it, the multitude of varieties of deliciousness. If they're not sick, never question a pig's eating choices. Just watch and learn.

I pick half a watermelon out from the pig produce and bring it to the ladies of the main flock, who rush out from the shade under the coop to eat melon in the sun. 

And so ends the longest day of the year. None of the birds want to go into their coops for the night. The light lingers and they stay pecking in their yards. Tomorrow there will be a little less day, we may hear word about Ralphie, we may find watermelon halves in the produce, we may have time to watch the swallows dart through the dust in the evening light, we may feel the world pause again as we sit in a circle with our tribe.

Feeding Time

Today, Lodo the pig was eating again. Yesterday, he wasn’t. A pig refusing food is a pig with something wrong.

At dinner last night, everyone got up to eat except Lodo. He was half-immersed in a mud pond and sound asleep. I walked over to wake him up. He stood, but then walked to the barn, not the feed area. I brought in a bowl of produce and he turned away, digging in the straw with his front hoof, making a bed.

Nothing was comfortable, though. He’d tremble as he started to lay down, then straighten up and start the bed-making over again.

All of the black and white Hampshire pigs are 11 this year—ancient in pig years.

I go and get some bread from the med center, warm it up in the microwave and put it under Lodo’s nose. Pigs love bread. Lodo doesn’t move. He’s made a bed now and is lying in it. Dawnell takes his temperature and it’s a degree below normal. Not frightening, but still off.

I leave the barn to feed out hay to the goats. When I come back, Louie is laying right next to Lodo. All of the other pigs are out at dinner still, but Louie and Lodo are nose to nose (Louie on the left, Lodo on the right).

Jenny says to give Lodo a beer—it’s an old trick that Susie, the Animal Care Director at Farm Sanctuary uses to stimulate a pig’s appetite. She gives me a can of Modelo. I lift up one side of Logo’s lip and pour in the beer by his tusk. Most of it runs into the straw, but he swallows some, not raising his head.

Later, I bring in 2 hard-boiled eggs, and 4 pieces of bread. Lodo eats both the eggs and Louis sniffs. Then I give him the bread, Zach comes in, noses Louie out of the way and bites Lodo on the shoulder as he chews the breads. All three of them get up in a cloud of dust and it’s the normal mayhem that’s the result of the combination of pigs and food.

It’s evening and time to leave, time to let beer and eggs and sleep do the work.

And today, Lodo is eating. But we all notice suddenly how much weight he’s lost over the last few months. It’s like looking at your dad and suddenly seeing that he’s old.

At the tail end of the pigs’ dinner, I see Lodo licking out a trough, alone. I toss him some bagels from tomorrow’s breakfast. He eats one and walks right past the others.

“What about the famous pig sense of smell?” I say.

He backs up and sniffs out another bagel. I go in and hand-feed him the rest.

He’s not trembling, he's up and he’s eating, even if his nose can’t find everything. Standing beside him, I feel like I’m Lodo and he’s my Louie and being next to each other is enough.

The chickens and the eggs

People always ask us what we do with the eggs. "Would it be so bad to eat the eggs?" a volunteer asks. Meaning that the chickens are free-range, rescued birds, after all.

But the humans here are vegan. And how many times do you have to hear Jenny Brown call eggs "chicken periods" (which they are) to swear off eggs forever.

Another volunteer who was cleaning a barn a few days ago, walked out to me, carrying two eggs. "What do I do with these?" he asks.

"Oh, just put them in the med center," I say.

He looks at me, "What are they?

I glance at him. "Eggs. From a chicken."

Was he so vegan he forgot what eggs look like? Was he so not-vegan and unhealthy that he only consumed pre-packaged food and forgot what eggs look like? He left before I found out.

Anyway, here's what we do with eggs: we cook them up (these are 2 dozen eggs--sometimes the hens get strangely prolific). We have a special, heavy-duty pan that we don't use for anything else. We boil the eggs, mash them up, stir in other things that are laying around--like grapes or applesauce or pieces of banana--plus add some vitamin mixture and then feed the whole thing back to the main flock.

And they are happy.

These are happy birds, fighting over egg-mash.

The white rooster at the top is Rod, who used to have a shoe-fetish (what do you expect from a bird who used to be called Maggie, as we thought he was a hen when he first arrived). He especially liked Amber's pink gardening clogs and sometimes she would leave one in the coop as a sort of cross between a date and a blow-up doll.

The other birds are hens. Every one has a name, but it's hard to tell who's who when they're running from one bowl of mash to the next, looking for the best morsels. The pigs do the same thing, going from trough to trough at meals, not wanting to miss anything.

Sylvia, one of the 6 hens who came as part of a rescue from an illegal slaughterhouse in the Bronx, is in the med center. She's thin and she's gurgly and she hasn't grown back all of her feathers. All 6 of the birds were nearly naked when they got here. They're what's called, "spent layers," birds who have been used to lay eggs constantly, are put through forced molting, and spend their lives stuffed into over-crowded cages. When they arrived, the first thing they did was dustbathe in the dirt, rolling and using the white, bone-like quills of their featherless wings to flip dust over their bodies. And then there was the sun. And then there were the bugs. And then there was the grass. And some time later, there was the mash.

Now Sylvia needs a shot of antibiotics every day. Dawnell holds her for the shot, then gives her green grape halves, which she swallows whole, and a bowl of mini-mash.

Sylvia joins Brewet, who's also in the med center because he

hasn't been able to walk in a few weeks. It's not good for him to sit all day, so he gets sling-time for a few hours, in a cloth grocery bag with holes cut out for his legs and tail. He's lost muscle in his right leg, so we take him for walks in the sling and get him to take baby steps. Sophie takes the approach of a physical therapist rehabbing a star athlete--less about sympathy and more about inspiration.

Brewet is our boy of days in the sun and pecking through straw and grass with his hen friends, Edie and Truffle. Of chasing away Peanut Butter, the younger rooster competition. Of being picked up by the person leading tours on weekends, so kids or adults or whoever can meet their first rooster. Of seeming to know his role as ambassador.

Brewet gets egg-mash too. He's not a layer-hen who needs to replenish his body, but he likes mash. And the hens give lots of eggs. And sometimes, the world feels like nothing but abundance, even to the humans.

Yes, There is Life after June Jamboree

Nothing of note today at the farm.

The day started cloudy, but in the afternoon, the clouds broke after 2 days of rain for the sanctuary’s June Jamboree. The main white tent is still up, but nothing is under it. The poles look like bones. Bales of straw used for seating are stacked on the porch of the med center to dry. The farm meanders back to normal.

I go to clean the white bird coop, which is written on today’s list with “ew!” next to it.

All the birds clear out except Hannah and Gingersnap, who dig through every pile I sweep together, as chickens do, looking for bugs or bits of seed. You learn to pick up piles right away before a bird scatters them. To chickens, a pile of dirty shavings is a treasure chest waiting to be scratched open with their feet, and they see no reason to wait.

When I’m done with the white bird coop, I take the hoof cleaning box—a pink plastic bin with a syringe, a hoof pick and two kinds of hoof heal—into the pig barn, hoping to treat Lodo and Stubby’s cracked hooves. But Stubby is submerged in the mud pond and Lodo is laying so close to Louie I can’t manouever my way to his feet.

So I put the pink bin back and take a brush out to Orion the goat. He’s lost weight and stands off from the others, not grazing. The clover in the goat field has flowered with all the rain, white scattered among yellow and purple and green that the sunlight turns lime around the edges.

I brush Orion and flakes of skin drift off his back and chest. I feel the bones of his ribs and spine. When I stop, he turns his head to look back at me. The sun is hot now and I kneel next to him in the clover.

Lil Jay had flaking skin too, back when he was sick and staying in the med center. But he recovered and his coat is lush and thick. I try to remember what we gave him—flaxseed oil?—but I can’t. There are so many treatments given and even more discussed. I read online about black oil sunflower seeds being good for a goat’s coat, but I need to do more research.

Dawnell opens the gate to the pig feeding area and it’s time to get their dinner. She fills a bowl for Pete as I come in. Dawnell lures Patsy and Judy into the isolation pen with a couple pieces of bread. They’re on a diet, though they don’t know it. Except Patsy might—she shies away from going in. “She’s afraid of Andy,” I call to Dawnell. Andy is on a diet in the iso pen too, but he’s the alpha male and bullies Patsy and Judy, who are bullies themselves, whenever they can be.

I call Patsy and Judy The Troublemakers, but this morning I thanked them and the other pigs for being so patient during the whole of June Jamboree. “You did an amazing job of representing,” I tell them and they lay in the straw, not moving.

June Jamboree has been two days of inviting the outside in. Of introductions between people and pigs and all of the rest of the residents. People touching the rubbery heads of turkeys and hearing the story of how Felix lost his leg or how the Hampshire pigs got here from a planned BBQ in Colorado and how Louise lost the tip of her ear to frostbite when she was alone and frozen to the ground on a sheep farm or how Albie was found sick in a graveyard in Brooklyn.

We tell the stories with words and the animals tell the endings without them. The outside comes in to the sanctuary and hands touch pig bellies for the first time. The words are changed when kids are there. “Market weight” is my euphemism for slaughter. There’s a new traveling slaughterhouse for family farms upstate that advertises itself as “harvesting” animals. But we all know what we mean.

June Jamboree is people coming to visit. Here are our hearts on display, sleeping in straw, dirt on their snouts. Here is Cromwell with his ears pinned back the way he always does when he sleeps. Here they are, our hearts, grazing in the field by the red sculpture, with flaking skin that needs to be brushed, with an amputated leg, standing under the mountain and chewing cud, or pecking the metal trim of the med center because it sounds like a metal trough or running with the red birds to the gate when someone approaches, in hopes of a mash.

We tell their stories because those are the facts and the facts are usually ugly, especially next to the breathing beings in front of us. But the facts you can quote and cite and tell. When what we mean to say is, can you see what’s here, feel what I feel, what I know to be true and have so few words for, just how it felt that time I laid against Dylan in the winter in the barn or felt Patsy the sheep’s nose on mine or held Victor’s head to my heart as he took his last breath, Victor of the magnificent horns and the insatiable love of treats and the way he’d look you right in the eye as if everything in the world was laid out as a banquet for both of you.

There is too much to tell and no words anyway, so I say, “Do you want to rub a pig’s belly” and invite people in and hold open the gate from outside to in for another introduction of child’s hand to a 900-pound pig named Stubby. Stubby of the thousand days of cleaning his hoof and watching him eat or sleep or limp to dinner or lay in mud the way pigs do, blurring the lines between animal and earth, between mud and flesh, between in and out.

I start the story, but Stubby tells it.

And today, when the white tent has shrunk to empty bones and the bouncy castle is deflated rubber on the lawn and the outsiders have gone back out, the story is still unfolding itself and the tellers are telling, even in the middle of eating, with their snouts snuffling through mashed up carrots and green beans and lettuce. And we’re here to listen and on a few days, now and then, to fumble toward a translation.