Gutted

As I was walking to the barn yesterday to start my morning chores, I noticed an unusual huddle --a wild turkey and a few crows picking at something down by the pond. The something was snow white, which puzzled me, as I knew all the chickens -- including the few white Columbian crosses we have left -- were safely locked in the barn. 

I struggled to think what it could be -- the wild ducks that we've seen visiting our pond are all dark and brown earthy colours. Then I remembered: two of the Muscovies, one male and one female, refused to come into the barn the previous night. I tried to chase them, shoo them in, but they simply flapped away from me. As I left the barnyard I felt uncomfortable leaving them outside as we'd seen a mature fox just the week before, but the male duck can be a vicious beast, so I told myself the lady would be ok.

As I walked towards the carnage crew, I realized I was wrong. As the wild birds flew away, I saw the lady duck, gutted; her chest and body cavity ripped away, with bloodied feathers scattered around her.

I didn't cry or freak out; in fact I felt strangely disassociated from what I saw. I was disappointed, sure, but we'd lost ducks and chickens before (though usually all that's left is the feathers) and my mind started spewing platitudes of all sorts -- "Where there's livestock, there's deadstock"; or "It's part of farm life"; and "Nature can be cruel."

I picked her up carefully by her limp neck and started walking back up the hill towards the barn, stopping only to grab a shovel. I continued past the barn and into the woods at the back of the second paddock, the donkeys and horse following me in a bizarre funeral parade.

I quickly dug a grave and buried what was left of the lady duck, saying some sort of cursory 'return to earth' blessing, ending with an apology. Then I returned the shovel and continued on with my chores. This is part of farm life, I told myself -- buck up and get on with it. It's just a duck.

But for the rest of the day I felt agitated, uneasy, fragile, and the more I tried to dismiss that, push it away, the more it grew. Until finally, just before the kids got home, Lucas called me on the phone to see how my day was.

My eyes started to gloss over, my throat tighten and a sick churning began deep in my belly. The details of the story gushed out and I wanted to share with him, unload, all of the gory images that were weighing heavily on me -- the shocking contrast of the blood to her feathers, her breastbone picked clean of all flesh, her unseeing eyes, and how just the night before, after giving up on trying to get her back into the barn, I had taken a moment to admire her form, her beauty, her aliveness and gentle personality, as she paddled off into the darkness after her mate.

As I shared the story, I could sense the pain lose its grip on me. I didn't feel any less sad that the lady duck had been ravaged this way, but I could feel the sadness and not suffer by it.

I thought of a passage that author Jon Katz recently wrote on his Bedlam Farm blog about how these sorts of losses are a part of life:

"This is a familiar part of life on the farm, this sickening feeling seeing things you are responsible for and live with killed suddenly, and then the process of sorting through it, because you know the foxes or raccoons or whatever will return... It is a nice life, not a perfect life, and there are no simple or easy solutions... So there is the happy time cuddling a lamb and the other time picking up body parts of animals you were talking to the day before…. It is disturbing, yet also oddly routine. It happens, anyone with a farm and livestock has experienced it. This lesson, I learn again and again. It is not a crisis, not a drama. It is life itself."

In trying to remove the drama, or what I thought was drama but was actually just feeling, I stifled a piece of my humanity. Rallying against these inevitabilities creates suffering, but so does not fully acknowledging the pain that accompanies these losses. Keeping animals on a farm is such a gift, but if you're not careful, it can become a burden, and I've wondered before that perhaps I'd be better off if I didn't keep animals as I get so attached to them. But that would deny me the happy times. 

So what's the solution? I'm learning that allowing myself to completely appreciate the joy of their life, then fully acknowledging and experiencing the sadness of their death, before finally letting both go, leads to greater feelings of peace, acceptance and ultimately freedom. It's something of a roller-coaster ride, but then again, that is life itself.