My Gentle Barn (12 page)

As she led him back down the driveway, I approached another counselor. “Can I talk with you a minute?”

I learned that Joey had been taken away from a terribly abusive, alcoholic father. Because Joey was so disruptive, he could not even be allowed in a classroom at the facility. He was constantly acting out, starting fights, breaking windows. “We’re really sorry we brought him,” she said.

I told her that Joey was just the kind of boy who needed the Gentle Barn the most, and I convinced her to let me work with him instead of having him wait on the bus.

Joey was about eleven but was very small for his age and had mousy blond hair. I knelt down beside him, my eyes just about level with his, though he refused to look at me. Although he was thin, almost frail, he
held his body rigidly, as though he were wearing a full suit of armor. No one was getting in.

“That spider is so small and helpless. You’re huge next to him, huh?”

Joey didn’t answer and pretended not to be listening, but I kept talking.

“He’s hiding under the rain gutter trying not to be noticed. There’s nothing he can do to protect himself from you, and he’s hoping you’re not going to hurt him.” I paused a minute. “Do you know what that feels like?”

Joey was silent for a while, his eyes shifting. He was thinking it over. Slowly his chin started to quiver and his eyes began to glisten. “Yes,” he said finally. “I do know what that feels like.”

I told Joey the animals were just like him. They needed protection, just as he had needed protection. “Will you do that for me, Joey? Will you help me protect these animals?”

When we rejoined the group around the picnic tables, Joey stood at the back but was attentive to my every word. Once we were in the barnyard, I saw him watching the other kids with the animals. If someone ran after a hen, he said, “Hey, don’t chase that chicken. Remember what Farmer Ellie said. The chicken’s saying no.” If someone yelled, he asked them to talk more quietly so they wouldn’t make the animals uncomfortable. I kept tabs on him through the whole visit, watching him and interacting with him. At one point, Joey and I walked into the barn, and I spotted a mouse in the corner. I pointed the mouse out to Joey, then sat down and patted the ground next to me. Joey sat down by my side, and together we watched the little mouse foraging in the straw for food. He told everyone who entered to talk softly so they didn’t scare the mouse. Joey had turned from aggressor to protector in an afternoon.

As I worked with group after group of children and teens, I began to find my rhythm and to see what worked and what didn’t. I was eager to teach the kids everything I knew about animals. One of my favorite things to talk with them about was how animals communicated. I would start off many of my groups by talking about body language. I’d frown and hang my head and then ask the kids what emotion that was. “Sad!” they’d shout. I’d move through the different emotions, and the kids would guess each one.

“I didn’t say a word, did I?”

“No,” the kids would say.

“But you guessed what I was feeling. Well, animals speak like that all the time.”

We’d talk about how each species has their own vocabulary. A dog wags his tail when he’s happy, but when a cat “wags” her tail, she’s annoyed. Cows and sheep swing their heads when they say no or want you to leave them alone. Goats lower their horns to say no. Baby horses smack their lips, like chewing, to show submission to another horse. And Katie, of course, was our ever-present example of saying “Back off” with her ears.

I also taught the kids that communication had to go both ways between humans and animals. We not only had to listen for what they were telling us, but
we
had to talk to
them
. With one group of at-risk girls, I asked, “Would it be OK for me to come up to one of you and start brushing your hair without asking you?”

The girls laughed and shook their heads.

“Right. So why would it be OK for me to go up to a horse or a goat and start brushing her without asking, or at least telling her what I’m going to do?”

Then I told them how I’d learned this about animals.

Both Zena the goat and her baby, Amy, had arrived at the Gentle Barn pregnant. “We didn’t know for the first month,” I said, “especially with Amy. She was just a baby herself. We never suspected she was going to
have
a baby.”

Amazingly, little Amy gave birth without any complications to a tiny black goat that we named Zoe. Unfortunately, Zena’s labor and delivery did not go so smoothly. The usual birth for a goat was a single kid—just like humans—with the occasional twin birth. But two months after her arrival in our barnyard Zena gave birth to four tiny goats. Two of them were stillborn and the other two were very weak. It became clear very quickly that the two surviving babies were not going to make it either unless there was some intervention, so I placed them carefully in a towel-lined carrier in preparation for a trip to the hospital, then tried to coax Zena into a larger crate. But Zena was not interested in being in a box. I put a harness on her and tried to lead her into the crate. I got behind her and pushed from the rear. But nothing I did worked.

“So, what do you think I did?” I asked the girls.

“You put food in the crate,” one of them said.

“Good guess. I thought that was a good idea too. But I tried it, and it didn’t work either.”

I went on to tell them how frustrated and exhausted I was. At my wit’s end I finally had blurted to the goat, “Zena, please, please. Your babies are going to die.” I explained to her that I was going to take them all to the hospital so we could save her babies, and then when they were better, they were all going to come back home.

“Did she believe you?” one girl asked.

I nodded. “She looked at me with this expression that said,
All you had to do was ask
. And then she walked right into that crate and sat down.”

The girls laughed, then one of them asked, “Did the babies make it?”

One more baby died, I told them, but we managed to save one. She was tiny and white like a little fairy, so I named her Tinkerbell. And that baby and Zena came back home, safe and sound. I pointed out Zena and Tinkerbell to the girls. “The important part,” I said to them, “was that I learned that animals understand a lot more than we think
they do. Now I always ask permission or explain before I do anything to my animals.” During the rest of the visit I heard the girls saying to the goats and pigs, “Can I pet you?” or to Shy, “I’m going to brush you now, OK?”

In the early weeks and months of working with groups, my eagerness to teach the kids that animals were not so different from humans sometimes led me a little bit overboard, and I’d end up saying something the accompanying adults did not think appropriate. I sometimes found the parameters of what I could and couldn’t say by walking straight into a wall.

Right after I got my first turkey, Tommy—rescued from his fate on the Thanksgiving table—I had a group of twenty very bright kindergartners. Their teacher had told them the animals had been rescued, so the kids asked about each and every animal. “Why did you save that one?” Or “Where did this one come from?” When we came to the turkey, they asked, “Why did you save this one?”

I had learned by this point that I needed to be subtle—especially with young children—so I chose my words carefully. “Well, we rescued him from a place that wasn’t going to take care of him, and so we brought him here.”

“Why?” the kids wanted to know. “How come they weren’t going to take care of him?”

“He just wasn’t safe there,” I said, “so we brought him to the Gentle Barn, where he could be safe.”

“But why wasn’t he safe there?” the kids asked.

I was running out of euphemisms. These kids were too bright and too curious to keep at bay. “Umm,” I said, and shot the teacher a helpless look. “You know Thanksgiving is in one week, right?”

“Right,” the kids said.

“What are you going to eat?”

“Turkey!” the kids sang.

“Well,” I said, “that’s a turkey.”

In unison, twenty five-year-olds said, “Ewwww.”

A week later I received calls from twenty furious parents. Twenty five-year-olds had refused to eat the turkey on their plates at Thanksgiving. All I’d told them was the truth, and the kids had made their own decisions.

With grace and that absence of judgment unique to nonhuman species, the animals in my barnyard ushered me through my first few months of working with kids. A child’s history of acting out or their special needs did not make any difference to the animals. The animals accepted hugs and tummy rubs and treats from all. I was not always as graceful as the animals were. I clung to my “script,” afraid to drift too far into improvisation. I fumbled and learned and tried again, and slowly I found my footing and became a little less nervous and riddled with doubt.

The animals’ stories were at the core of the healing I witnessed in the children. The animals had been to hell and back, and so had most of these kids. With each new group, I watched the kids closely from the moment they walked in through the gate. Their behavior told me everything about their histories. If they couldn’t make eye contact, I knew they’d been made to feel ashamed. If they bad-mouthed or bullied other kids, they’d likely been bullied at home. I picked out the animal’s story that best fit each particular group. That way I could talk to the kids about the issues they faced without putting them on the spot. Then I learned more about the kids by watching how they responded to the story. In these animals’ histories the kids recognized themselves and could relate to the animals as peers, confidants, witnesses, and models of the healing that was possible. And week after week, group after group, the courage and growth I saw in these children took my breath away.

The difference the animals and I were making was profound, and
it propelled me onward in my work. Word was starting to spread, and new agencies were knocking on my door, asking to bring their kids. The kids never did laugh at me; they never did seem bored; and it never took longer than twenty minutes to win over the most resistant of teenagers. The animals spun that kind of magic over all the groups that visited.

All I had dreamed of seemed to be coming true; I was healing animals and then working with those animals to heal kids. I was aligned with my purpose—doing what I had come into this life to do—and everything just seemed to be falling into place. The only thing that was missing was Scott’s presence at my side. We lived together in relative peace, but I was alone with the Gentle Barn. Scott had no desire to hear about what was going on in the barnyard—not with the animals, not with the kids.