Death and Disaster (Bad Farmer, Good Grief?)

A few days ago, Paloma told me something seemed to be wrong with Stormy, her extra-special pet baby goat, the surprise baby that Flopsy popped out at the end of May. 

He’s always been small, and not growing as well as the others, but I attributed that to the fact that his mama was extremely elderly and thin while she was pregnant with him. I expected he would stay small, but had no reason to think he wouldn’t be healthy. But there was clearly something wrong right now. The day before, he has been keeping up with  the herd, but now he laid down on the ground, and was grinding his teeth, which is how goats express pain. 

We took him to the vet - even though it was Sunday. The vet took some blood and a stool sample, and when those came back, told us he had a very heavy load of stomach worms and was severely anemic. He was so anemic, in fact, that the vet said he had only a 50/50 chance of making it through the next 24 hours. 

We were shocked. I knew the goats had worms - the goats ALWAYS have worms. Worms are pretty much impossible to eradicate, especially if they are resistant to medications, as mine are. But we had no idea the situation was this serious. several of my mama goats are quite thin, and they have intermittent diarrhea, and I knew it was time to worm them again, but nobody seemed on the point of death or anything like that. 

We went home with subcutaneous fluids for him, to be administered every four hours, and with three different medications, each with their own schedule. The vet told us to coop him up tight with his mamma so he wouldn’t expend any excess energy. We did that, but when we went and checked on him at 10 pm, he seemed cold, so we brought him in the house and wrapped him up. Paloma slept with him on the couch. 

Despite everything we did, he died at about 6 am. Paloma was devastated, inconsolable. Ever since she was a tiny child, every goat she picked out to be her special pet has died. Stormy was the third. The first died of a urinary calculus, a not uncommon problem in wethers. The second ate rhododendron and died of poisoning. And now this. 

I don’t blame Paloma if she’s angry at me. Controlling parasites is difficult, as I’ve said, but I haven’t been as diligent as I should have been. I didn’t want to spend that kind of money - individual fecal flotations on every goat three or four times a year adds up quickly to several hundred dollars - and the best practices are incredibly hard or imposible to implement. Several months ago when I had a vet out we went over worm control measures, and I just didn’t see how they were feasible. We would need to invest thousands of dollars into fencing to create five or six pastures for rotation, and mow all the pastures every two weeks over the summer so that the eggs would be exposed to the ultraviolet light of the sun. The pastures are full of embedded rocks and pieces of concrete and such that it makes them impossible to mow with standard equipment. 

I asked “what if I took all the goats off the pasture entirely, kept them in a sacrifice area and fed them hay? How long would it take for the eggs to die off and to have a clean slate again?” 

Five years. 

FIVE YEARS. 

In other words, you can’t. 

The only thing I can do is do more fecals, and treat the symptomatic goats on a schedule. And make sure they have the highest quality feed and minerals so they have the nutrition they need to fight off worms.  So that’s where we are. That’s what I’m committed to doing. 

We buried Stormy under the plum tree. Now just about every significant tree on the property has a beloved animal buried under it. Ivory is under the pink dogwood. Dorian and Vladimir are under the pear tree. Now Stormy is under the plum. Paloma is still pining, a week later. 

Then today, I went out to feed the animals and found that all six of the surprise new baby chicks has drowned in the water trough. All fucking six of them. All of them. All of them. 

I can’t bring myself to tell Paloma. 

I feel like such a negligent failure. I KNOW baby chicks drown in water troughs. I should have scooped up the mama

with her babies as soon as we found them and transported her to the rabbit hutch to raise them in a safe place. But I didn’t and now they’re all dead. 

Sometimes I don’t know why I’m doing this. Sometimes farming just feels like one heartbreak after another.  Sometimes it’s very hard to imagine the upside. 

I have to believe that the joy of living close to the land, immersed in the specific nature of our homestead is a concrete good for the soul. I have to believe that forming loving bonds with individual animals, caring for them, and delighting in their grace and beauty is good for us. I even believe that grief is good for us. I do. 

Joseph Campbell, talking about Greek tragedy, wrote “the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.” which is undeniably true. Yet, he was not a pessimist or a melancholy man. On the contrary, he believed that we should strive to align our hearts and our perspectives with the eternal, divine animating principle that gives rise to the forms that we love. If we can do this, we will be peaceful, able to participate in the joy of infinite creation, which does not die with any one form but which goes on playfully creating more and more forever. 

This, however, is not an idea to be expressed to a grieving child at 6 am after a long, terrible, sleepless night. So I was incredibly grateful for my older daughter, Hope, who remembered this part of the FFA creed, which both she and Paloma memorized at school, and spoke it out loud as a kind of benediction: 

I believe that to live and work on a good farm, or to be engaged in other agricultural pursuits, is pleasant as well as challenging; for I know the joys and discomforts of agricultural life and hold an inborn fondness for those associations which, even in hours of discouragement, I cannot deny.