Last week I cut up livestock organs for dog treats. There was a cow tongue, and the tastebuds felt like braille under my fingers. "Grass is good," it said, "but corn is better." That tongue had seen so many blades of grass, so many clumps of clover. It had called out to the rest of the herd, waited for a response. And now it sits in a dehydrator, waiting to be suitable enough for a dog to eat.
Today we decided the fates of sheep. We herded them through a series of gates into smaller and smaller pens. Eventually they crowded into a chute, where we checked the small ones for parasites and chose which ewes, marked with yellow ear tags, were big enough to breed. Lisa sprayed the big ones with blue spray paint to be mixed in with another herd in a few weeks. "You want to be sprayed," she told them when they jumped with the shock of blue on their faces. "Don't you know that?"
The orange ear tags are foster replacement lambs, and the black ones are castrated males, both groups just waiting to grow big enough. After de-worming they ran out of the chute into a different paddock, and immediately forgot the stress.
"They're not the same," Bruce and Lisa tell us. "They don't have life goals or aspirations. They breathe, they eat, they poop. They don't think about yesterday or tomorrow or whether or not they'll be here next spring, they just live."
In one pasture are all the old ewes, the ones past their lambing prime. There's one old ewe who gave them triplets, which isn't rare but usually ends with twins, but this one kept them all alive and strong. "She'll stay here when the rest of them go," Lisa said. "We figured after something like that, well she deserved it."
Today, tomorrow, the next day, that old ewe will probably breathe, eat, and poop. She will never know she did anything spectacular, and will probably never notice that her life ended up differently than anyone else's. She will never appreciate the opportunity they gave her, never use it to better her life. She'll just live.
