Mercy Killings

I'm with the dad in Charlotte's Web.

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when Chief Bromden smothers McMurphy with a pillow and then breaks through a window to lope off into the sunset, mercy killing looks like an act of rebellion. If only we could all be so free and bold!

On a farm, where we sometimes have to kill an animal to prevent its suffering, it looks a little different.

It’s lambing season. When birth goes well it’s like magic. You walk out to the sheep shed in the morning, dew still sparkling on the grass, and peek into the shed. A burly ewe stares back at you with a particular expression that is both placid and wary and sometimes questioning. She holds her head low in a protective stance then looks down with surprise to nuzzle the tiny creatures she’s produced. You squat and watch from a distance as the babies, sometimes still wet from the birth, shakily step around their mom nosing her underside with that uncanny compass that guides them to the teat. They wag their tails. The mom sniffs their butt. Sometimes she bleats at them in a soft voice that my son once commented was the sheep version of baby talk. It’s so beautiful and hopeful and magical. It feels like a miracle every time — all the more so because it doesn’t always turn out this way.

We’ve had a particularly harrowing lambing season. One newborn lamb was gotten by predators. I found her on her back, legs splayed with a one-inch hole in abdomen, from which her entrails had been extracted. A bird of prey? We’ve never lost a lamb to predators before.

One ewe had a stalled birth, requiring an emergency visit from farmer friends down the road, who dropped everything on their own farms and came to our aid, helping a bellowing ewe to deliver three poorly-positioned triplets, all of whom arrived dead. At least the ewe survived.

On the same day, another ewe had triplets, two of which are alive and perfect; the third was still in its amniotic sac, dead, when I found them.

But the hardest case was a little lamb born with a bad leg. “That white ewe had twins,” my husband announced as he returned from the sheep pasture. “But one looks like it’s struggling. We should check on her.”

We went out to look. Both lambs were with their mom. Adorable. Sweet. Lambs. As we got closer they all stood, wary of our approach. And then we saw: one couldn’t stand. Her leg was buckled under. We got hold of her and Chris massaged the leg under the mother’s fierce glare. The tiny leg was as rigid as if the joints were fused. Both front hoofs were tucked. Newborn hoofs are funny soft things that continue to develop after birth. It’s possible her hoofs would have straightened out. But the effort she made to stand involved a bent rigid knee and a tucked hoof. It was horrible to watch her humping along, bleating for her mom, frantically trying to get up with every step.

We did a little research. Called friends, looked online. The answer I arrived at was that it was unlikely this knee would straighten out. Others who’d had similar issues ended up having to put the lamb down after weeks of trying to straighten while trying to keep the lamb fed and socialized.

A dark farming joke I tell is that I’ve landed on the side of the father in Charlotte’s Web. Sometimes you have to kill an animal, Fern. It’s now or later; and it’s going to hurt worse later. We’ve learned through wrenching experiences that some animals are better off not living a life of pain and discomfort — or the terrible death that might come later because we didn’t do our job.

We agonized. Chris is more of a softie than I am. He went out to the pasture with a rifle and came back shaking his head.

By the time we went out to the sheep shed together, the mother had moved on.  The lamb was alone in the shed. We carried her out to the woods and shot her. The other ewes yelled at us as we took her away. She had the feathery weight of a lamb that is not going to make it. Killing a baby feels wrong in every way. But it was over quickly – far more quickly than that first lamb we’d found.

Afterwards I told my husband I was proud of him. It’s hard to do. And then we went and watched the other lambs, who are boisterous and rowdy and ridiculous and give meaning to the word life, careening around the pasture under blossoming apple trees and singing birds.