Tuesday Don and I met at a restaurant to mark our 30th anniversary with a small celebration. Within a minute of arriving, not anticipating the effect it would have, he told me one of the new chicks - one of the White Crested Black Polish like the one above - had died that afternoon. I began to cry, and when the waitress came by to take my drink request, I couldn't speak or look at her. I'd had a stressful day at work, and the harsh reality of our little chicks' fragility came as a shock. Finally the waitress left so I could pull myself together. Poor Don felt terrible.
We didn't have pets in our home growing up. I think it was my dad who wasn't comfortable with animals, since Mom had dogs as a girl. As a result, I didn't have first-hand experience with the life and death cycles of pets, which would have been a good way to learn about death.
Since moving to the farm in 2003, I've had encounters with animals, such as these wild fauns that felt comfortable in our yard last summer after apparently losing their mother, probably hit by a car. One year the barn cat we inherited with the farm was hit by a car and killed (Rudy, not Bishop). How kind our neighbor Bill was to respectfully pull Rudy off the road into our yard before we got home.
On my 35-minute drive on country roads to work, I see a lot of road kill. Since the Department of Natural Resources doesn't remove animal carcasses from the roads any more, we get to watch the process of decomposure.
This deer was a mile from our house when I drove to work Wednesday. She's lying there right in the triangular spot at the middle of an intersection, a strange sort of cautionary traffic sign. It looks as though someone was planning to drag her off, with that blue rope around her neck. They gave up, I guess, and Thursday morning the deer was still there, but the rope was gone.
We see crows and buzzards picking at the flesh of the animal carcasses. At first I was disgusted by the sight. But after a few years, I'm grateful to watch the food chain at work and to know that the flesh of animals killed by human drivers will be eaten by other animals. By the way, if you hit a deer and kill it with your car, you are welcome to take the deer home, which many do for the meat.
Recently Don taught his 3rd graders about decomposers. If, for example, Thomas Jefferson's dog had not been decomposed by those organisms, it could still be lying visible in Virginia today.
I'm sorry if these pictures bother you. I must be becoming more of a farmer than I thought, because I'm getting used to such sights. I know that the deer population would grow completely out of control if we drivers didn't kill some of them and hunters didn't take their share. (I've hit two deer while driving. Both of them ran off, so I don't know if they died soon after that or not.)
I don't like seeing any animal die these violent deaths. But it is even harder for me to see the newest life forms die so quickly, like the quail chicks and chicken chicks Don is raising, even though I know a certain percentage of them will die in the natural order of things, even as babies. It's especially difficult when I've held them in my hands.
Post a Comment