I think this is Myrtle’s last winter. She is hacking, which is tempting to think is a bronchial issue from the damp cold weather. As it’s not responding to treatment, however, I suspect it’s a sign she’s having difficulty clearing her cud because her teeth are going. She is, at minimum, a ten year old sheep. The oldest sheep I’ve ever known was 15, but Myrtle is an East Frisian, a dairy breed analogous to the Holstein in the cattle world. They are prone to osteoporosis later in life and not as long lived as the hardy, stocky, so called “primitive” breeds like Glenda the Icelandic (also over ten) who lives in my backyard barnyard with her, as neither can keep up with the main flock anymore.
I am likely to put Myrtle down soon. I strongly believe in letting them go before they’re suffering. Less suffering should be the least we offer animals we domesticate, but sadly, sometimes especially when people set out to be a sanctuary or keep an animal as a pet, the animals suffer a more prolonged end than they would in their natural habitat.
Myrtle has been living on borrowed time for over five years – she broke her leg in a clean snap across her metapodial bone by getting it stuck in the fork of a bush years ago, and I was advised to put her down. She was full of energy and raising twin lambs at the time, and showed no sign of giving up, so I splinted her leg, gave her pain medications and anti-inflammatories. It healed so well she hasn’t limped since. Now, five years later, she’s limping on that leg. A long, cold and wet season is likely to be uncomfortable for her. Her final hurrah last season was leaping two fences and getting scandalously knocked up by a sexy young ram. He was literally 1/10th her age and the move was pure chaotic-bossy Myrtle, but it also seems to be catching up with her despite our best efforts to support her nutritionally.
Ruminants don’t take to aging and disability well because, like birds and apex carnivores (and most free living creatures), they almost never have to cope with a slow decline and haven’t evolved to expect it. Ruminants who are not euthanized or preyed upon typically slowly starve to death as their incredibly demanding process of digestion breaks down. When an animal like a falcon or a lion gets even slightly hurt, they cannot hunt, and they die. When an animal like a sheep or a deer lag behind the group in any way, they are eaten. Predation is part of their life cycle always, even when not actually the cause of their death – it always accompanies it. Euthanasia is an old idea that is built into all ecosystems. Even in the La Brea Tar Pits, as mammoths sank into the black sludge, they were swarmed by dire wolves and cave lions who sank right alongside them. Predation is universal. In a state of nature, a lion would be coming for Myrtle. In my backyard barn, I have to be that lion.
It won’t be the first time there has been a lion in my backyard.
Years ago, when my folks lived in our house, the barn in the backyard held my mom’s chickens. One night, I was on call for the sexual assault hotline I worked for, and since their house had good reception I was staying at their place while they were out of town. Their dog, who was staying with me for the weekend was (and is) a massive, floppy, anxious puddle of a mastiff mix whose separation anxiety was incompatible with my small cabin made of soft redwood.
I was restless, as was normal when I was on call, so I was messing around with some kind of project for them. I think it was building a piece of furniture from a flat pack box. It was around 10pm and fully dark, in late winter.
The house is a drafty structure with two bedrooms tacked onto the side of a former barn and workshop, and a second story loft accessed by an outdoor staircase. The house shows the history of its various uses in the awkward way it’s parts fit together, the logic of design for one usage not perfectly over-laying another. So, when I needed a screwdriver I had to go outside, around the patio, and upstairs for the toolbox. I had the radio on and was humming to myself, not paying attention overly, and had breezed through the French back door, not bothering to make sure it closed behind me.
Arms full, I headed back around the dark patio with it’s towering Yucca plant and black, angular naked rose my sister had given my mom when they moved into the house. In it’s season, it’s a warm salmony pink with yellow tones. In the midst of the winter it was a series of dark slimy fingers pointing towards the sky. The bulb of light above the back door picked up the heavy mist hanging in the air, as it always does at this time of year on the coast, the marine layer hanging over us like the static screen of an old TV set.
Across the yard, I heard a chicken give a short, percussive alarm call. I turned around and peered into the glittering dark, the swirling bright points of moisture dancing across my vision. I heard more disturbance, and the sound of a heavy body in the brush. The dog, Weber, named after the grill, must be nosing at the bottom of the coop built into one end of the barn, I thought. Skunks had tried to dig in before, despite the layer of hardware mesh buried around the base, and he had gotten sprayed investigating them in the past.
I called Weber. He ignored me. I whistled and cajoled. No response. He’s never been a well trained dog, and like most mastiffs, was stubborn when he was interested in something.
Conditioned by years of dealing with his willful ways, and not wanting to have to chase him around the farm if he caught a scent, or worse, the skunk, I walked out towards the coop, and called him again, more firmly.
Behind me, there was a whimper. Slowly looking over my shoulder, there was Weber, behind the glass of the back door, whining at the injustice that I kept calling when he wasn’t even outside. It was not Weber behind the coop. I looked back towards the heavy bodied creature I had been scolding, cold running out to my extremities from my heart. Slowly, into the diffuse light cast from the porch bulb, a long form began to appear from behind the coop. A muscular body poured into the light and seemed to just keep coming, ending with a long heavy tail, sweeping up near the end.
I had been calling a lion, and she had come.
The lion and I looked at each other for a moment, my arms still full of toolbox, head full of chemicals making my body glow with endorphins. The lion’s eyes were unfathomable pools that held me fixed in place. The radio must have still been playing but I couldn’t hear it. Everything was silent and still.
The lion chose to break the tension by shrugging massive shoulders eloquently and then slowly, deliberately, with infinite dismissive casualness, walked out past the circle of illumination into the wet darkness of the night.
Released from the lion’s eyes, my suspended state instantly fell into action. Trembling with adrenaline, hands slick with sweat on the doorknob and fumbling the damn toolbox – I made my way back into the house. I blocked Weber from the doorway with my body as I opened it but I need not have worried. He backed away as I opened the door, still whining and drooling nervously, jittering as much as I was and showing no sign of wanting to follow the beast out into the dark. I spent the rest of the night glancing reflexively at the mirrored panes of the windows, startling myself over and over again with my own reflection.
There are no tamed spaces. There are only temporarily impoverished ecosystems.
The lion is present in every single one of our days and nights, in our illusions of control, in our hoping for more time and taking of drastic measures. I bought Myrtle more time than she would have had in the savannah or on a production farm, but I haven’t removed the rule that predation is universal. It is the way that all lives end. It may be lions, or it may be maggots, but all of us are borrowed solar energy and earth minerals, on their way back into the sky and into the ground, and through the bodies of other creatures is how that alchemy is achieved.
I have looked into those implacable eyes, not hateful or aggressive, just frankly unimpressed with my insistence that they obey my commands or take me seriously in any way. The work of a lion is to cycle nutrients by converting the body of herbivores made from grass which was made from atmospheric carbon into soil, and to relieve suffering by targeting the weak members of a herd and keeping the annual crop of fawns few enough to maintain the forage the herd needs. Over time this generates a stronger herd of herbivores. As a social omnivore, capable of abstract thought and organization, I am asked to play many roles in this ecosystem, and one of them is to look out from those apex predator’s eyes, with the same goals in mind. Who knows if I even feel much differently about it than they do? Of course they must know each deer living and dying in their territory and know when they are injured or sick. Having fewer choices for food than I do, they may pay even more exquisitely detailed attention to the needs of their flock. Lions are shepherds like me, but while I have shears and mineral blocks and veterinary tape, lions only have death and presence as their tools of stewardship.
As the nights yawn wider and the temperature drops, I am considering tucking Myrtle’s body into the warm bed of the home compost pile. There she will be safe from pain and cold. I am not fooling myself that the compost is any less predatory an end for her just because the mouths there are tiny and innumerable. The ground is just as hungry as the animals that walk or fly or slither over it.
Everything alive is voracious for the cycling of nutrients, and our attachment to our temporary arrangement of cells can make that terrifying when we think about it with our frontal cortex. However, there is comfort in knowing that at the most primal level we are known and wanted deeply by this world, a truth our body accepts in our reptilian complex when it is time to meet the earth.
Myrtle will be composted soon, and that compost will be spread on the pasture she spent her life eating. The lion wasn’t ready for me the night we faced each other at the barn but they will be, in some form or another, someday. I hope I play my part in the cycle with compassion and care now, and receive the same myself when my lion comes.