Trusting wolves
and living with the consequences
I had to kill a baby chick this morning, which made me miserable all day. This is how I know I’m not a real farmer.
My dog, a 90-lb. Bernadoodle puppy named Chilly, is not a real farm dog. He’s big, cuddly and kind of goofy. The whites of his eyes make his face very expressive. He’s affectionate and smart. He only barks for good reason. And yeah, he’s a “designer dog” so he doesn’t shed, which is a big chore off my list so no apologies.
Today he caught an escaped chick when she didn’t get back in the pen fast enough. I pried his mouth open. The little cheeper was unscathed. I was going to put her back in the pen but thought, no, I need to train the dog.
This would’ve been a good moment to stop and ask myself 1. if the universe had been kind enough to give me a pass and, if so, 2. should I take it?
Instead, I made Chilly sit. I brought him the chick carefully cupped in my hands, with just its little head poking out. He didn’t twitch. I knelt down and put the chick near his nose, telling him to be gentle. He looked up at me at an angle, nothing moving but those almost human eyes and then, in less than a blink, his entire mouth was around my cupped hands!
When I yanked my hands out, the baby’s head listed to one side, where a tell-tale speck of blood exposed a puncture on her neck. I hesitated, hoping she would get better. Of course she wouldn’t. I apologized to the chick and then quickly pulled her head off. The other chicks got very quiet.
My heart sank.
I stroked its headless form before putting both parts in the compost. I cursed the dog for being a dog, a descendent of wolves, and myself for being a trusting fool, a descendent of homo sapiens.
We Protect Our Own
Our coop is a hefty wooden building on 4x4 stilts, painted egg yoke yellow - of course - with a dog pen attached to it. We buried chicken wire six inches underground extending two feet out all the way around to keep diggers out. We close the doors at night to protect our birds.
We bought the coop from a guy whose wife spent two years designing it. By the time he finished building it they were getting divorced. I had a jade plant like that. Got it as a wedding present from John Tinker, a pretty famous Iowan who attended my first wedding. When the plant died 10 years later, somehow I knew that marriage was next.
For the last dozen years, Paul and I have kept guineas and then chickens nonstop. We let them roam the yard during daylight hours and go home to their safe space at night. We’ve lost a few anyway – one from a new dog who didn’t know better, a half dozen taken out by a school bus in the fog, a dozen suffocated by gnats during a particularly rough summer – but never have I handed one over to be murdered like I did today.
We build the important things in our lives – a marriage, a home, a career, our kids, world-changing projects – with predators in mind. We must protect our own, after all. Hence the need for metaphorical and physical surveillance, barbed wire and alarms, vigilance. Think about how this looks: Couples generally avoid befriending single women. (Single women know you do.) Homeowners put cameras in doorbells. People lock their houses and cars when they leave them.
Sometimes we employ counter measures. Parents get active in their kids’ high school so they can tell what they’re up to, who they’re hanging with. People move to a suburb with a big lawn where neighbors never invite each other into their homes. They call it “privacy” when they really meant “safety.”
And Still We Trust
We are always looking to the horizon or the sky for danger. It’s out there somewhere, at the store or in another neighborhood or among people who don’t look like us. We never scan the ground right in front of us or the step we took just behind us. We never consider the stepfather, the preacher, the teacher or the therapist. We never suspect that termites, our neighbor’s herbicides or the corporate packing plant that employs half the town will do us harm. If we were on such high alert all the time, there’d be nothing left for kindness and trust, vulnerability or love. There would be no laughter in the checkout line or holding open the diner door, no paying it forward, no hugging it out. There’d be no humanity at all.
Yet the wolves we expect, the predators we plan for, never look like the ones that end up attacking and never come from the direction we expect. Truth is, the most dangerous predators look more like Chilly, and for that, we are never prepared, and we never could be. So most of the time, throughout most of our day, we choose trust over fear.
Penance
They say when a farm dog gets a taste of chicken there’s only one thing left to do. This is also how I know I’m not a real farmer. We don’t even own a gun. I put the dog in timeout instead. I wanted to leave him there for the rest of the year, but Paul said I couldn’t because he likes to use that bathroom once in a while.
I spent the rest of the day moving boulders, sod busting and making repairs around the outside of the house. There was no sun and that was fine by me. I didn’t deserve sun. I didn’t deserve to get a job done. I didn’t deserve baby chicks. I didn’t deserve this dog yelping from the bathroom and I didn’t deserve to call myself a homesteader, much less a farmer. That mantra drummed on all day until I was too exhausted to believe it anymore, and for that I was grateful.
Surely, hard work must count for something. I always thought it did. I’m not so sure anymore. Hard work doesn’t make up for stupid, careless or thoughtless. Hard work can’t substitute for ignorance or pridefulness. But it can make your body hurt so much you’ve got nothing left for anything else, like guilt or regret. So I worked until my arms and legs gave out, my back kinked up and my mind turned to mush.
As the sun set, I leaned on the coop and looked in the pen at the remaining chicks. I watched the way they snuggle under mom when they’re cold. I listened to their constant chorus of “peep peep peep.” I love how they stand in their food to eat it then fall over to get out of the feeder. It’s pretty sweet. It made me smile.
Then, because the moment was just too redemptive I guess, I counted the roosters. They’ll have to go somewhere someday. Our two adult roosters are already too many for four adult hens. That’s how all this started in the first place. We meant to breed more hens to keep two roosters content. Of course, it was a hen that Chilly nailed, skewing my numbers. I don’t deserve hens.
I closed my eyes and listened to the peeps of the chicks, the chirps of the red-winged blackbirds, the coo coo of a mourning dove and the wind in the trees. Sometimes our only job is to silence the voices inside of us.
Chilly’s just being his best dog self. I’ll let him out of timeout soon. I struggle to give myself the same grace. People with a conscience seldom can. People who trust others invite the pain. This is what we call humanity.
Here’s a fantastic talk on trust by one of my favorite TED talkers - Simon Sinek. He nails what happens with new organizations as they grow beyond the founder and then he moves on to what we need to heal America. If you’d like to live the human connection he proposes, join us at Draco Hill Nature Farm for free events all summer.
Oof. Isn't this a truth, Suzan. I'm sorry to hear about your chick and resonate with the mundane misery of being all too human sometimes.