Sweet, sweet “Izzy Girl,” by far my favorite goat, died suddenly yesterday morning. She was fine and appeared totally healthy the evening before.
However, yesterday morning at 7:30 or so, she didn’t come out with the rest of her herd mates for her grain, so I went in to check on her. She was huddled in a corner, lethargic, and more or less apathetic, although she was still reasonably alert. She had clearly had massive diarrhea. Her back end, back legs, and one of her front legs were covered. One pile of diarrhea was interspersed with opaque (whitish), viscous mucous. I took her temperature, it was a little more than 98 degrees (normal is 102-103). I set up a little infirmary in the barn office, where I could attempt to keep her warm, and at that point, she was able and willing to walk from the pen to the office. While we were walking, she crouched and expelled a small stream of clear, viscous fluid from her anus. She was not interested in warm water with molasses, and she would not swallow when I tried to drench her. By 8 o’clock, her temp was down to 97 and her breathing had become shallow and more or less rapid.
To make a long story short, she died about half an hour later, and had been uncomfortable the last few minutes, standing up, keening, stumbling around, eventually falling down, thrashing mildly about half rolled on her back, with her tongue sticking out, groaning. Finally, she stopped moving, although it was a number of minutes before she died; she quickly spasmed for a second or two every thirty seconds or so.
If the above seems a little clinical, that is because it is. I sent it, along with a health history, in an e-mail to one of the vets at Cornell in the hopes that she might have a clue what happened. I also decided to have one of the local vets do a simple necropsy to see what might have happened.
The reality of Izzy’s death was much less clinical. As she died, I could barely contain my emotions. I was helpless. I could do absolutely nothing for her. She was in agony. Tears streamed down my face as her body quickly shut down. She screamed, over and over again. I sat there, limp, and impotent, stupidly petting her as she thrashed around. “I’m so sorry, Izz,” I kept saying, “I’m so sorry.” Near the end, she stopped moving and stopped breathing, and I thought she was dead, so I called Jen at work, who had been on her way out the door when I ran up to the house for my flashlight, so she knew that Izzy was sick. Horses, however, don’t die in a flash like sheep and goats do, so she couldn’t believe it when I told her she was dead. But, just then, she cried out again, weakly this time, and spasmed, and flailed her head. I started sobbing, and Jen stayed on the phone with me for a few more minutes until she had really died. I put my ear to her chest, her long white winter coat tickled my ear lobe as I pressed it against her. Silence. Stillness. Izzy, sweet sweet Izzy Girl, was dead.
I had obligations, so I whispered my goodbyes, stood up, ceremonially dusted myself off, and finished my chores, the wind biting my wet cheeks as I wheeled a bale of hay out to the sheep. I walked from death to life, and with death on my mind, I fed the living, I watered the living, I watched and listened to the living. I lived. I cried. I am crying again.
Izzy should have died a decade from now, an old friend, one of my first goats. Instead, she died yesterday and broke my heart.
Militant vegans/vegetarians scoff at the idead that livestock farmers can be or are deeply emotional about the animals in their care, and with industrial farming as the reference, I cannot blame them. On a pastoral farm, however, the contradiction, the paradox, of lovingly killing animals in order to eat them is resolved in the depth of the emotion and care given to their living moments. Care is more than an activity on a pastorl farm, it is an ethic, an ethic that permits, and demands, the development of a deep bond between a farmer and an animal that she may kill or have killed to eat.The fact of slaughter does not abrogate the ethic of care.
That ethic of care granted to slaughter animals is extended beyond care to kinship with breeding animals, even though farmers often have to make tough decisions about breeding animals who are not paying their way. A quality breeding animal may spend a decade or more on a pastoral farm, becoming as much a part of the farm family as the dog. Izzy, her voice, her eyes, her appearance, were deeply embedded in the tenor of my days. Her life, the continued beating of her heart, was an assumption implicit in my every act, from sliding on my boots in the morning, to cutting open a bale of hay. But, now she is dead.
Her body was cold and stiff yesterday when I lifted her from the bed of hay I had prepared for her in the office and carried her out to the truck. I laid her gently in the bed and closed the gate. I picked her up and laid her gently again on a few squares of brown paper on the floor at the vet’s office. I will pick her up twice more. When I see her this morning, she will have been cut and splayed open and probed to see what might have caused her sudden death. The second time I pick her up this morning will be to bury her in the compost pile where she will be slowly broken down until she is fertility for the soil. She will feed blades of grass and clover.
