Farm Life! As (not) Seen On TV
I'm still triggered by vegans harassing me on Instagram about *saving* a sheep from slaughter, so I'm reposting this piece about our early brushes with reality.
There was a terrible windstorm one day and the roof of one of the chicken coops blew off. I saw it in the morning and promptly forgot about it.
This would be a turning point.
We were just embarking on our new lives as farmers. According to the movies and sit-coms I grew up watching, much comedy would ensue! We, the oblivious city folk, would fall off ladders, landing with inglorious splats in the middle of a pigsty. Our farmy neighbors would lean through our kitchen door to wryly point out our sophisticated stupidity. Goats would eat the fancy rose bushes we’d foolishly planted, we’d wear evening gowns to milk the cow, and every venture would be completed with another accidental run-in with a cow patty. It would be hilarious.
The reality was much darker.
We were just a few months into owning the farm. We’d ordered fifty chicks from a hatchery — a straight run, meaning both hens and roosters, intending to figure out later how to slaughter the roosters. A primary reason for our farming venture was the desire to bypass the cruelties of factory farming. Our animals would be free-range and happy. When it was time, we’d slaughter them quickly and know we’d given them the best possible life until that final moment. (That final moment was still a bit vague, though.)
For now we were delighting in watching the young chickens grow up. We named most of them: Baby, a tiny bantam hen. Mrs. Madoff, a Speckled Sussex hen. Frick and Frack, the twin roosters. Baby Hawk, a black and brown hen. Doris, Monkey, Helen, Champion, Jazz, and so on.
And then the windstorm came, and I forgot that the roof had blown off. That night I woke to the sound of a strange low, long moan. I lay in the dark silently, listening. It came again. What is that? I didn’t realize I whispered out loud until my husband in bed next to me whispered back, “Yeah, what is that?”
The displaced roof of the coop blazed back into my consciousness. “Oh no. The roof of the coop blew off. I forgot. Could it be that?”
“We should check,” Chris said.
We jammed pajama legs and bare feet into boots, grabbed our jackets and ran outside. As always — then and still now — venturing into the night it is like arriving in an alien world. Everything crackles with spring-loaded stillness. I half expect the trees to whisper for us go back to where we belong. It is arrestingly beautiful, but it always feels like there are things happening that I don’t know and can’t see.
We stomped through the wet grass out to the coop. Indeed, there was the roof tossed to the side and upside down like an enormous stranded tortoise. How I could not have noticed it when I closed the coop for the night? Our flashlights showed the interior of the coop empty of the 12 hens that lived there.
Swinging the weak flashlight haloes in ever-widening circles away from the coop, we found two birds nestled under a bush. “They’re sleeping,” Chris said. “No, they’re dead,” I said, poking at one of them with my boot, a white hen named Doris. Her head flopped down. She was dead; the other hen was alive but unmoving, apparently shell-shocked by the massacre she’d just survived.
We found Mrs. Madoff, the Speckled Sussex, on the path, disemboweled and taking her last breaths. The silly name we’d given her for reasons I now forget seemed like a mockery of our civilized foolishness. We thought we were so cute, we thought farming was so much fun; and here were our animals dying agonizing deaths.
There were feathers everywhere, but no more dead chickens. Further down the path almost into the woods we found Baby Hawk. She had a hole torn in her stomach where the fox had begun to rip into her flesh, but she was still alive. I ran back to the house for a towel, wrapped her up in it and brought her inside while Chris kept searching for more chickens. He found none.
It took weeks but Baby Hawk recovered. The bald, scarred crater in her belly was horrendous to look at or even contemplate.
The argument about my carelessness in leaving the roof off came later and would be revisited through the years.
Here was the reality: mistakes could result in excruciating deaths. Our efforts to avoid the cruelty of the industrial slaughterhouse had just been mocked and destroyed by agents of the natural world. There is no USDA slaughterhouse that kills a chicken by tearing out its innards and leaving it to die. We’d given our animals a worse death than anything sold in the grocery store.
And it was all due to my carelessness. This was the first glimpse at our radically different approaches to farming, a difference that would cause so much angst in what I’d assumed would be an automatically placid farm marriage and life, as seen on TV. But running a farm is like raising children. Everything has to be negotiated and decided: routines, goals, budgets, aesthetics all hammered out, one crisis at a time.
More about that later.
We weren’t in Brooklyn anymore. The changes had begun.
"I half expect the trees to whisper for us go back to where we belong."
I love this line - sometimes when I step outside to my back yard in the predawn, I can feel like I don't really belong out there.
must have been traumatic. I hope you've forgiven yourself.