Swimming Pigs

Starting at about 6:15 yesterday evening, and ending about thirty or forty minutes later, we had torrential rain, and when I say torrential, I mean torrential. There was a torrent running down every inch of the slightest slopes and pools in every depression or hole. About twenty minutes into it, I realized that it was bad enough that the pig shelters would be flooded. So, after having changed my wet clothes for the third time already, I put on another dry pair of pants and shirt, slipped on my rain gear and knee boots and headed back out into the rain.

I stopped at the barn and loaded four bales of hay onto the forks of the tractor. I checked the middle-sized pigs first. Half of them were laying in wet, half of them were standing in an inch or more of water in their shelter. I looked around the paddock for a dryer spot to move the shelter to, but there wasn’t one. There were rivers running through the paddock in some places. My only option was to spread out two bales of hay in their shelter, which I hoped would be enough to keep them dry. As soon as I was finished spreading the hay, the pigs all went running back into the shelter. I realized just how hard it was raining when I stepped out of the shelter. It was like I had been whacked with a board. It just slammed right into me. I put my head down and trudged over to the tractor.

I checked the big pigs next. As I passed through the hedge row, I turned onto the pig field road. If I were driving a car and not a tractor, and even if the road were paved, I would have had to turn back. The water was probably eight inches deep in some spots, and rushing past me. There was about four inches of water in the big pig’s shelter, much too much to manage with a little bit of hay. I decided that I would need to move the shelter, but I hadn’t brought the chain with me, so I would have to come back.

On my way to check on the little pigs, I had to cross a narrow stream, over a foot and a half diameter culvert. The water had overwhelmed the culvert and jumped the stream banks. If I hadn’t known the road so well and where the edges of the culvert were, I might have ended up off the road with a wheel buried in the stream. As I crossed, it looked to me that the water was more than a third up the back wheels of the tractor. I could see the water through the holes in the floor of the steel operators platform, rushing past just a few inches beneath it.

My brother Pete and I had moved the pigs to a new section of the field earlier in the day, a bit higher up the hill, so the flooding in the shelter wasn’t as bad as it would have been. The spot where they had been was pretty well under water. As it was, the water had seeped into the shelter in the new spot, but it wasn’t that bad. There were a couple of wet spots, but since the pigs are still so small there is still a lot of space inside the shelter for them. Nevertheless, I didn’t know for how long it would continue to rain, and I did not want the pigs to get chilled, so I spread out two bales of hay in the shelter, concentrating it along the length of the driest side.

Mercifully, as I was finishing bedding down the little pigs’ shelter, the rain stopped, just like that, literally as if someone had turned off the tap. One second a torrential down pour, the next, nothing. When a rain like that stops just like that you realize just how incredibly overwhelming it had been. I hadn’t realized it, but while it was raining there had been a constant great roar that drowned (literally) everything else out. In its place, an eerie silence and utter stillness, broken only by the quiet grunts of the little pigs settling into their bedding. Within moments, however, the birds started to chirp, slowly inching back out from deep in the crooks of the tree boughs into the open air. I looked around and listened and took it in for a second, but then I got back to work because the big pigs were still under water.

As I drove from the little pigs’ field back to the barn, it started to spit a bit, but the rain had finished. The middle pigs were out, playing and rooting around in the wet ground. I stopped and checked their shelter. The bedding was still reasonably dry in most places, but I was worried that the moisture would wick up through the hay over night, so I decided to add one more bale of hay. Back at the barn,  I loaded three more bales of hay onto the forks and grabbed the chain.

I distracted the big pigs by putting some food in their trough and then drove the tractor into the paddock and hooked up to the shelter. I had scouted the paddock after I filled the trough and there weren’t any really dry spots, but I did find one spot that would do. I dragged the shelter slowly into place and then unhooked the tractor and then spread two bales of hay inside the shelter. By the time I was finished, the pigs had finished their food, so I had to put some more in the trough so that I could get the tractor out of the paddock.

On my way back to the barn, I stopped and spread the last bale of hay in the middle pigs’ shelter, and then finally parked the tractor at the barn and walked up to the house where I announced that I would most definitely not be cooking dinner. Pete, Jen, and I went down to Middleburgh to Hubie’s, where I nodded in and out of sleep between bites.

 

Unnatural

No matter how hard we try, the reality of any farm is that it is an “unnatural” system. Through breeding, forage selection, grazing management, fencing, reproduction and growth goals, necessary survival rates, and a whole host of other human manipulations the gap between natural animals and unnatural farm animals is quite large.

Yesterday I wrote about saving a lamb who was unable to get a drink from its mother. The reason it was unable to get a drink was because the ewe makes so much milk that her udder was so full that it was too low to the ground, the teats were pointing straight down, and the teats were so engorged that they were too fat and too firm for the lamb to get his mouth comfortably around on the rare occasion that he was able to find the end of a teat. Had I not been there to intervene, it is likely that the lamb would have starved, although it is possible that he might have worked it out.

It seems, therefore, that the farmer was the solution, the savior. If, however, we look a step or two back, we see that the farmer was in fact the source of the trouble. Production minded farmers are constantly breeding their sheep up to produce more milk, while at the same time they are generally also breeding their sheep up to be more prolific, shooting for an average lambing rate of about 200% (two lambs per ewe), which would require a significant percentage of ewes to have triplets, while a good number will also have singles. The more milk, the more lambs that can be fed. The more milk, the faster and bigger the lambs will grow. The goal is to strike a balance between high milk production, high prolificacy, and high growth rates and potential. Within this balance, however, much will be out of balance, and problems will arise. Milky ewes will make too much milk, requiring an intervention. Prolific ewes will have too many lambs, requiring an intervention (bottle feeding). Etc. In other words, in creating unnatural critters that live in unnatural environments, we create problems for ourselves.

Nature kills its problems and nothing notices. On an unnatural farm, every death constitutes a substantial financial loss. It takes anywhere from two to five (depending on one’s per lamb profit) lambs from other ewes to pay the cost of a single ewe that doesn’t have or loses her lamb or lambs in any given year. In nature, a sick animal wanders away and dies, and nothing notices but the buzzards and flies. On an unnatural farm, there is a mad scramble to keep animals alive, if only to kill them later.

Any horse person has heard the non-horse person argument about bringing the horses in out of the rain or the cold, “It’s a horse! Just leave it outside.” The idea is that horses are big natural critters with thick fur coats that could get along just fine outside. The reality is, however, that domesticated horses are not natural critters and farms are not natural places. First, many performance horse breeds, because they have been bred up to perform at the levels they do, have high energy needs and cannot spare very much energy for warmth. Second, farm landscapes often do not permit shelter from the wind or rain or snow. On my farm, our pastures are wide open and are pitched directly into the prevailing wind, which blows pretty steadily all winter long at ten to twenty miles per hour. Also, our pastures are fenced. The movement of the horses is unnaturally limited. A natural horse in a natural environment in dangerous weather would walk until it found a sheltered spot. And, third, natural horses in natural environments that don’t find shelter in dangerous weather die. Just because the species deer still exists in spring doesn’t mean that a substantial number, and perhaps even a substantial percentage in a particularly hard winter, didn’t die. They did die. The goal on an unnatural farm is zero percent death loss due to environmental conditions, an unnatural goal.

If you ask them, you will find that most pasture-based farmers attempt to recreate as much as possible natural (environmental) conditions for their animals. They fall, however, far far short. Nature is inimical to farming. The true goal of every farmer is at the very least to mitigate nature; it is most often, even on the pasture based farm of a natural minded farmer, to overcome nature, to dominate nature, to control nature. Nature is a false aspiration. I am always at every instant on the farm at odds with it, even when I feel closest to it.

 

Cat and Mouse

For the past five minutes, I have been watching our cat wander around the livingroom carrying a mouse in his mouth. He cannot seem to figure out what to do with it. He wants to put it down, but then changes his mind. He wants to show it to me, but then when I reach out to take it from him, he runs away. Since I started typing, he has made his decision. He batted the dead mouse around for about thirty seconds and is now eating it, head first. The crunching sound is making me cringe. I wonder how it is possible that such a thing tastes good. Well, apparently it doesn’t. He just threw up all over the floor. I’ll be right back…

OK, I’m back.

Living in a farmhouse built in 1820, I am used to living with mice, although I cannot quite get used to having them dropped, often still alive, by the cat in our bed late at night. Gregor loves to share. He is an excellent mouser, in fact, he is an excellent hunter, period. During the spring, when we are plagued with cluster flies, Gregor probably gets a third of his nutrition from eating them. He can snatch a fly out of the air as easily as you or I would catch a gently tossed baseball. His brother, Samsa, who died a few months ago of kidney failure, was a terrible mouser. I do not think he caught a single mouse in his entire life. Whenever we heard the cacophonous crash of the hunt, we could be sure that Samsa would be watching Gregor go after his prey, trotting excitedly after his brother as he crashed with abandon from one side of the room to the other, up over chairs, between book shelf and stove, under ottomans and couches, until he had the mouse trapped between his paws and then clamped in his jaws. If the mouse happened to get away from Gregor, Gregor sat and waited. And waited. An hour later he would be waiting still. Samsa having long ago lost interest would have left him to go curl up on a chair for a nap. Gregor is reckless and will leap five feet or more through the air off the back of a chair just to get up onto the fireplace mantel before realizing there is nothing really exciting up there and thumping back down on the floor. Samsa would look and ponder, calculating the distance and the height, and invariably sit back down, pretending of course, as cats are wont to do, that he never had had any interest in getting up there in the first place.

Gregor’s mouse exploits have a deep significance for me. I identify very strongly with him. As a livestock farmer I am, after all, the most canned of hunters. Whenever I hear him crashing around, or feel the cool slick fur of a mouse on my cheek or sliding down my thigh through my sleep, or whenever I see Gregor carrying (proudly, I believe) a mouse dangling from his mouth, epsecially when the mouse is alive and struggling to get free, I think about this natural cruelty. It is cruel; I don’t know what else to call it. Its naturalness does not obviate its cruelty. I wonder how and if Gregor’s cruel hunts reflect on my own. Dare I make a natural analogy? Gregor tortures his prey, for shorter or longer periods of time, depending on…depending on what, something that I might call his mood? Depending perhaps on nothing but chance or coincidence. If the mouse happens to be clamped in Gregor’s mouth in such a way that its windpipe is constricted, it suffocates and dies. If Gregor bites down too hard when he snatches it up off the ground after releasing it and letting it scamper away a few feet, he breaks its neck and it dies, sort of like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Or, perhaps I am under-anthropomorphizing. Perhaps Gregor really is more intentional than that. Perhaps he does have moods that make him more or less cruelly playful. Perhaps he knows exactly what he is doing. And what is the mouse’s experience of all of this?

What, if any, connection is there between the tortured cruel death of prey animals by predators, whether the torture and cruelty is intentional or not, and the slaughter, humane or not, of my livestock? Is it natural for me to caringly raise livestock, load them on a trailer and drive them to their deaths? Would it be more natural if I, myself, did the killing? Is the question of nature even relevant? Gregor sees a mouse, attacks it, plays with it, kills it, and, if he is hungry, eats it. That, simply, is what he does. Why, then, is what I do so hard, so complicated, so unsimple? Why cannot I, simply, do what I do? Why must I play cat and mouse with myself? Why can’t I just accept what I do, and that it is bloody and messy and irrevocable?