My Gentle Barn (34 page)

The food and vet bills for the cows started accumulating fast. Although we were getting about fifty visitors every Sunday and were receiving donations for our work from our new, wider base of supporters, it still
wasn’t enough to cover all the bills associated with the new cows. So we decided to hold a fund-raiser to help defray the cost.

About three hundred people showed up, and as Jay and I toured them around the property, with a focus on the cow pasture, everyone kept oohing and aahing over the two calves and asking what their names were.

“We haven’t had a chance to name them yet,” we explained.

A half hour later, when everyone was gathered around the picnic tables, Jay came over to me and whispered in my ear that we should hold an auction to name the baby cows.

“You think people will pay to name them?” I said.

“Absolutely.”

I wasn’t so sure. Why would anyone pay for something they couldn’t take away with them? I pictured us up there waiting for an opening bid, and people just blinking back at us. But I decided to go along with it if Jay would be the one to get up and do it.

Jay made the announcement and then asked for an opening bid of a hundred dollars. To my surprise, someone’s hand shot up immediately. “A hundred dollars right here!” she shouted out. Then someone outbid her at two hundred dollars. Then another person offered three hundred. People were bidding and outbidding one another and all the while were laughing and enjoying the process. In fewer than five minutes someone had paid $500 to name the first calf. Then the naming of the second calf went up for auction, and again people jumped right in, topping one another’s bids right on up to a thousand dollars. In ten minutes’ time, we had raised $1,500. I looked at Jay, my mouth hanging open. He just smiled back at me, a grin that said,
I told you so
.

The two winning bidders each gave the naming opportunity to their children. A young boy named Karma’s little red calf Mr. Rojas (
rojas
means “red” in Spanish). And a young girl named the other baby Night Goddess. Two fabulous names and money to help pay for their care. Jay had stumbled across a fund-raising gold mine that we would surely revisit in the future.

As I moved forward with the rehabilitation of the nine cows, not only did their trust in me grow, but so too did my confidence in my own ability to work with them. I was seeing that my instincts were just as much on target with cattle as they were with horses or dogs. And Jay and I began to feel that we had officially stepped into the role of cow rescuers. So when we received a call early in 2009 from the owner of an auction house—a place where ranchers and stockyards from all over Southern California brought their livestock to sell to slaughterhouses—we were ready. A new law had just been enacted in California that prohibited the selling of downed animals—those who were too sick to stand—for human consumption.

“Would you be willing to take some downed animals off our hands?” the guy asked Jay on the phone.

“Absolutely!” Jay said, his new confidence as a cow rescuer erasing any doubt he might have had just a few months prior.

We knew many of these downed animals would be calves pulled from veal crates. A baby who has been separated from his mother at birth and isolated in a small, dark box is, necessarily, sick—often so severely he can’t stand. These sick babies are a by-product of the dairy industry.

Cows are no different from any other mammal. Just like dogs have milk for their puppies, but at no other time, just like I had milk when I had my babies, but I don’t have milk now, cows only have milk for their babies. It’s breast milk, just like that of other mammals. Since you can’t have milk without the baby, the industry impregnates the cows. Then when the cows have their calves, the babies are taken away immediately, and the milk is stolen for humans. In order to make a profit off of all these billions of babies, the dairy industry has created the veal industry, which takes the baby cows away from their moms and puts them into a dark box where they can’t move and their muscles don’t develop. If the veal industry can keep them alive for eight weeks,
the babies are then killed, and their meat is sold as veal, which is a soft meat served in French and Italian restaurants.

There are many meat eaters who won’t eat veal because they think it’s so inhumane. But what they don’t know is that it’s the dairy industry that’s at the root of the suffering. When I’d learned the truth about the dairy and veal industries, shortly after I’d started the Gentle Barn, I immediately stopped eating milk products, going from vegetarian to vegan. I got it that if cow’s milk stopped being produced, there would be no veal; there would be no veal crates; there would be no calves too sick to stand.

Unfortunately there was still a dairy industry, so we were now expecting babies. And although they would never get to have the reunion with their mothers that Mr. Rojas had had with Karma, we would try our best to fill their mothers’ shoes.

In preparation for the call we knew would be coming soon, we contacted other rescues who had taken in veal calves to find out any secrets they could share with us—special supplements, treatments, or other tips that would help the calves pull through to health.

“The first thing you need to know,” one rescuer told me, “is that they’re not going to make it.”

“What?” I said. I was sure I’d heard him wrong.

“Just be prepared. No matter what you do, they just don’t live.”

Other rescues pretty much agreed. The calves who survived were a rarity. Most were just too bad off to pull through.

“I simply am not going to accept that,” I said to Jay after I got off the phone. I was going to apply every type of healing I could think of, every alternative treatment and supplement. I would even be calling out energetic healers. I was not going to accept death as a sentence for a baby.

When we got the awaited call in April 2009, we were armed with tubs of algae superfood powder, crates of milk replacer formula, lots of oversize baby bottles, stacks of towels, bottles of rubbing alcohol, and
thermometers. We had a vet on call, and I had a list of alternative healers who knew the babies were on their way. We also immediately put out a request through our community for volunteers.

No babies in the animal world—especially mammals—are left alone; the mothers are constantly licking them, nursing them, and fussing over them, and we intended to do our version of the same. It was a matter of giving these calves reason to live. We would have someone with them 24/7, singing to them, bottle-feeding them, petting them, even reading to them. There would be four shifts—two in the day and two at night. One volunteer would fill each shift to keep all six calves company. As a mother and someone who owed my very life to animals, I was driven to do everything I could possibly think of to give these babies a shot at life.

When Jay brought the six eight-week-old calves back from the auction house—a two-hour drive from the Gentle Barn—our new local vet, Dr. Morrison, was already waiting to examine them. She took their vital signs, writing down a description of each calf, so we could all tell them apart. There were two girls and four boys. All six calves had pale gums—a sign of anemia—skin funguses, pneumonia, and raging fevers. They were barely able to get up off the ground. One appeared to be blind. Dr. Morrison gave the calves their first shot of antibiotics, and then she mapped out the plan for their care while Jay and I took notes.

“You’ll take their temperatures three times a day. Normal is between 101 and 102. Right now, they’re all over 104. Whenever it goes that high, or even over 103 and a half, you’re going to pour rubbing alcohol along their spine in an effort to bring the fever down. It’ll draw the heat out.” She demonstrated this on one of the calves, and Jay and I tried our hand with the five others. “You’ll need to wipe their noses and around the eyes frequently to keep them clean. And do your best to keep the flies off them.”

We started teaching our first group of volunteers later that day
how to do all of this, as well as how to prepare warm formula, with algae mixed in, and how to bottle-feed—not so obvious with babies this big. We began giving the calves two bottles a day; they also had plenty of fresh hay. Jay and I came down to help with all the feedings; it took more than two hands to bottle-feed six babies. We also did all the temperature taking, and we administered antibiotic shots once every three days. Dr. Morrison would be coming by once a week to check on the calves. Until the calves were cleared of pneumonia, we had to hold them in strict quarantine. They were not contagious to humans, but they were contagious to our other cows. Anyone who had contact with the calves was not allowed to wander the property, but instead had to go straight to their cars. After Jay or I spent time with the calves, we had to shower and change our clothes before feeding or visiting our healthy animals.

From the moment of the calves’ arrival, we applied our secret ingredient—paying as much attention to these babies’ emotional needs as their physical needs. One volunteer spent the first half of the night with the calves—starting at seven p.m.—and was replaced by the second volunteer at one a.m. Each night-shift volunteer brought a sleeping bag and slept right in the stall with the calves. When there was an open shift, Jay covered it himself, and even when he wasn’t with the calves, he got so many calls during the night from the volunteers that we hardly slept for the first month.

Every night, when it was time to say good night to the fever-hot, runny-nosed babies, I felt a terrible ache in my heart. They were so sick and so weak; I yearned desperately to be the one nurturing them through the night. But I had my own babies to take care of, my own house full of children who needed me. It was the dilemma I found myself in again and again ever since I’d been crazy enough to think I could be both a rescuer and a mother. As painful as it was, I knew the calves were in good hands with Jay and the volunteers, and I was proud of myself for following through one more time on my commitment to do the right thing for my own children.

It was weeks before we saw any change in the calves, with their fevers consistently higher than 104, sometimes up to 105. They spent a lot of time lying on the ground; when they did manage to stand up, their heads hung low, as though they simply did not have the strength to lift them. Their appetites were weak as well; they’d suckle at the bottle but with no gusto, and sometimes they showed no interest in food at all. One calf was particularly weak, and his fever always outranked the others’. We decided to name him Chi, for “life,” and every one of us was rooting for him—Jay and me and our kids and all the volunteers. Dr. Morrison gently broke the news to me that she didn’t think Chi was going to make it and suggested we put him down, but I didn’t feel we were there yet. “We have to give him more of a chance.” I asked the energetic healers who’d signed on to double their efforts with him, in particular, and for a few days, he seemed a bit better. But then he started sliding downhill again. I talked to him daily, whispering to him about how good life was going to be here for him; he’d have plenty of fresh water and hay and space to run around with his friends, and lots and lots of love. But he stopped eating entirely and soon his lips and nose began to turn blue; he wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

As excruciating as it was, I had to admit that it was time.

Before the vet gave him the injection that would help him out of his weak, failing body, I lay down next to him and cradled his head, gazing into his eyes. “I’m so, so sorry, Chi. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. You don’t deserve this.” We had wanted to give these babies a living apology, a life of freedom and health and joy that would make up for the terrible start they’d gotten. But Chi was leaving too soon, and our gift would go unreceived. I felt as helpless as this little blue calf, straw stuck to my tear-streaked face. As I watched Chi’s light go out, I promised, in the name of his spirit, that I would do all I could to let people know about the devastation left in the wake of the dairy industry.

Chi passed away only two weeks after his arrival, and I was terrified the remaining five calves would follow in his footsteps. For a good month, they never strayed far from death’s door. I ran down every morning at the crack of dawn.
Today their fevers will be gone
, I’d say to myself.
Today’s the day
. But every morning, the thermometers read 104, 104.5, 105.