the miracle of death

i came into the barn this afternoon to find willy had aborted her calf. the poor little thing the size of one of the barn cats lay in the gutter in a pool of blood, pink and white and cream colored. looking like a kids drawing of a calf - all the parts there, but the proportions skewed. i thanked the calf for coming to our farm and covered it up with hay before sending it on it's way out to the manure pit.

willy lay in her spot, chewing her cud, seemingly undisturbed by the event. she probably even felt better, having expelled the masses of dead and dying tissue from her body. but i knew what this most likely meant for willy: a trip on the beef truck.

a cow that aborts her calf is not a cow to keep. She may have other problems causing her to abort that will only become evident later, it may be difficult for her to become pregnant again and she will certainly cause the farm to lose money because of her extended dry (non-lactating) period. On a farm that happens to not have many replacement animals, she might get a second chance, but we have 5 heifers about the calve waiting outside still for a spot in the barn. Better to ship her. "Out of sight, out of mind" as our old vet used to say.

But a cow is not the same as a printer or a motor or a widget. A cow is a living thing. (Maybe on a huge farm with a thousand cows it is easier to think of them as a commodity, but I went to a huge farm once and the farmer found his favorite cow to show me, a cow without a name, only a number, and still scratched her behind the ears and let her lick his hand.) You were probably there when this cow was born as a calf, fed her from a bottle, got her through her first lactation, took care of her when she was sick, brushed her and talked to her and fed her every day. She is also large and warm and reasonably affectionate. To send her off to be made into Campbell's beef stew because her body did what it had to do seems unfortunate, to me. Yet, that is what happens to most spent dairy animals.

Them's the breaks. Monetarily and realistically speaking, every animal on a farm cannot be kept. That's why they're farm animals and not pets. And the miracle of death is just as natural as it's much touted counterpart. It is something that must simply be accepted.

Still, I wish that every animal could live out their whole life on the farm where the farmer and the consumer could know that they had an existence that was as pleasant and natural as possible. This could include on farm slaughtering of bull calves and cows no longer suitable for milking. Then the products from these animals could be processed by local processors and marketed directly to people in the area as food for people, animals or as compost (http://www.youtube.com/HighfieldsComposting). I wish that these animals and their bodies were respected as the vessels of life that they are, even in their passing.