My morning didn’t start out very good. I took the pups outside to do their ‘thing’ and I heard that goat scream that I hate to hear. It wasn’t that scream of a goat stuck in the fence, it was the death scream. It is a dull goat call that anyone in the goat industry for any length of time knows well, like a lethargic “help”. It is the call of death, the last desperate sounds of a goat that has exhausted all energy and can only use its voice to announce it will soon be dead.
I went into the house, grabbed my .22 pistol and walked out to the pen, where Bunny was, the hospital pen, a pen inside of the big pen, close to her friends but away from any aggressive goats. She had shown great improvement over the past week and I thought she was going to turn around. She had been sick in the fall with a pneumonia, then the worms took advantage of her weak system. it doesn’t take long for worms to take an animal down and with a weak system, it is a faster nose-dive. Bunny recovered enough last fall to make it through most of the worst part of winter. But this past week with temperatures up and down along with her system recovering, she was stable but anemic and in spite of all my efforts to help her build back her blood count, my efforts became obviously futile. I did try though. That is all any livestock producer can do. But it was clear to me that Bunny was suffering this morning and I dispatched her to the grazing pastures beyond. She was instantly out of pain.
Many would ask why I let Bunny live so long, if I knew she was going to die. I had hopes of her recovering. Why did I have that hope? Because I have brought animals back from similar situations on countless occasions in the past and that is what I do as a livestock producer. It takes a lot of time and effort caring for sick livestock, yet all across the country and world, livestock producers are doing what I did, caring for an animal that had little or no hope of recovering, just because it is what we do. We hope that the animal will recover, always knowing that the odds are against it, many would say a waste of time. Is it? Perhaps in a person’s mind that has no toleration for animals. But for those of us who have spent our lives caring for these animals, it is what we do, because they are our income, our lives. These animals are part of who we are and we will spend a whole night in a barn, holding a three-day old stud colt that we have dreamed of for years, as it slowly gasps for breath as it dies from an illness that has no cure. Or we sleep with a newborn goat on our chest with a heating pad to warm it up, so it can suck from a bottle. Or fight to pull a calf from a cow that is going to die, hoping beyond hope that we can get the calf pulled before it is oxygen deprived.
Yet we in in animal agriculture are constantly under attack by animal rights terrorists (ART), who say we are cruel, abusive and taking advantage of animals. They make claims we torture animals. I have never in my life witnessed a person in animal agriculture, torturing an animal. I’ve seen cowboys and ranchers protect themselves from livestock attacks but never seen torture as claims by those ART’s. I’ve witnessed animal agriculturalists cry as their livestock goes to market. I’ve seen them cry when they lose a favored animal. And, yes, I shed a tear for Bunny.
Bunny was so named because as a baby, her ears were almost straight up like a rabbit’s ears and of course as she bounced and played around the pen, it was easy to find her upright ears. Bunny had accidentally gotten bred before she was a year old and she gave birth to Pippin, her mini me only male version of herself, except for the ears. Pippin and Bunny for over a year and a half were inseparable and you could say Bunny was a helicopter mom, always screaming for Pippin when he was out of sight. I had held off breeding her again until she was three, which would have meant this fall I would have bred her for the first time since Pippin was born. Now I only have memories of her. She will be missed, along with all the other animals on my weed & brush control crew that have passed ( In 2022 I lost Monkee & Brat, who died of old age, both were 14 and I also lost my beloved Jinx, 11 1/2 yr old border collie last year.). Another animal will take Bunny’s place but she will always be a memory in my heart and mind.
Stick that up your back side animal rights extremists!
Bunny & Pippin as a baby.
Educated Cowpuncher 