My Gentle Barn (35 page)

“You’ve got to stick around,” I told the calves. “There is such a good life waiting for you on the other side of this.”

Finally, finally, the fevers started to abate. The babies still spent another month hovering around 103 degrees, but a little more life was visible in their eyes. For the first time, we could see a possibility that they might actually make it.

At two months in, after hundreds of six-hour volunteer shifts, dozens of antibiotic shots, and endless bottles of green milk formula, the fevers finally broke. Every volunteer, and certainly both Jay and I, walked around with huge smiles on our faces. The calves seemed to be in celebration, their true, lively selves coming out of hiding for the first time since their arrival. Their hunger switched on and the calves were suddenly wildly ravenous. By instinct, when a calf nurses, she head-butts her mother’s udder to help the milk let down. Now, with the calves’ energy back, this instinct was in full force. Standing in for the mother’s udder, we had to be careful how we held the bottles; I had more than one bottle go flying across the barnyard. The men especially had to be sure to stand to the side of the calf, not directly in front of them, for the calves’ heads were right about at crotch height. And once these babies had finished a bottle, they’d circle like sharks, ready for another. But I wouldn’t have traded these challenges for anything in the world.

Once the quarantine was lifted, we decided to bring over a surrogate mama cow for the new babies. One of the cows rescued from the backyard butcher, Buttercup, had had her baby, Halo, three months after her arrival on our property. Halo was now a few months old, not
far in age from our five rescued calves. Amazingly, Buttercup patiently nursed every one of the five orphaned babies along with her own.

We continued to have someone stay with the calves 24/7 for a full four months, and it was a good while longer before we integrated the calves into the herd. All five ended up making a complete recovery, establishing a new paradigm for what was possible with calves rescued from veal crates. We went on to do two more veal calf rescues after this, and all the calves made it. Clearly we were onto something with this unusually high success rate, and we hoped that in the years to come we would be able to revamp the rehabilitation process for veal calves everywhere.

I never stopped being touched by the effort of the volunteers who offered their time and presence to help these calves survive. The request for support that we’d put out through our community for our first veal calves had brought in more volunteers than I ever would have imagined. Although we’d had our handful of volunteers before that rescue, I had always felt hesitant about asking for people’s time. It felt intrusive or like I would be burdening them with my own needs, my own troubles. But during this rescue, one volunteer after another thanked
me
for the opportunity to do this work. They would be glowing after staying up all night with these babies and they’d tell me how much the calves were doing for
them
. They felt a greater sense of purpose in their lives and were honored to be a part of something so important. Here I had been trying to protect them from my burden, and instead I unwittingly had been withholding a gift. Now that I knew, I began stepping aside more and more to let people help. Even after the calves had recovered, we started putting out regular calls for volunteers. Every time we did a rescue and every Sunday, we asked for volunteer support, and our handful turned quickly into a fleet of a hundred.

This expansion outward, and especially allowing other people in,
gave me one opportunity after another to loosen my grip—to step back, accept help, and release control. It was not my natural instinct to do so. It made me nervous to hand over to strangers the thing that meant the most in the world to me. But the more times I allowed others to step forward and shine, the more times they did. They entered into our fold and into our trust, and their lives were forever changed. One of the volunteers who’d helped out with the calves took a special interest in the healing process: Mike was highly attentive and devoted to the calves’ well-being. He worked with the blind calf, Faith, teaching her how to walk a straight line instead of the tight circles she had learned from the veal crate. Later he became our head calf person, which would eventually grow into a paid position. And for the first time in his experience, he felt he was living the life he was meant to live.

Our fleet of volunteers kept expanding, and slowly, as funds would allow, we also began building a staff in the office and on the grounds. The Gentle Barn was growing up before my eyes. I was no longer alone in this endeavor. The animals who had always touched my life were now touching the lives of hundreds.

Before 2009, the concept of “social media” was nowhere on my radar. I didn’t know what the word “blog” meant, I avoided Facebook like the plague, and a “tweet” was the sound a songbird made. But in August of that year I went with Jay to see the movie
Julie & Julia
. It was about a young woman who loved to cook, and she wrote about it daily on her blog; she ended up having tons of people reading everything she wrote. About food. I sat there during the movie with the wheels spinning so hard in my head I could have sworn steam was coming out of my ears:
If some young girl can get herself a following for writing about food, just think what I can do with the amazing stories about our animals!
The moment we got home, I said, “Jay, set me up a blog!”

“Well, you already have a Facebook page.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, remember I set up a page for the Gentle Barn last March?”

I had not remembered. I had posted one time (with Jay’s help) and then the veal calves had arrived the following month, and we’d been busy trying to keep them alive. I had forgotten the page existed. Plus, I’d had no clue at that time just how amazing this social media thing could be.

Jay walked me through how to post on the Facebook page, and he also set up a Twitter account and showed me what buttons to push.

I got busy immediately. I had loads of stories to tell and lots of Facebook posting and tweeting to catch up on. I started with our cow Karma—the one who had arrived as a new mom and had been reunited with her son, Mr. Rojas, the following day. It turned out that Karma must have been impregnated—again—right before we rescued her, because nine months after her arrival she had a second, unexpected, baby who we named Surprise. This new calf was now a week old, so my first post was about how Surprise was doing. The next day I filmed the little red calf discovering what his legs could do as he ran around and around the cow pasture at just seven days old. I got Jay’s help to post the video, and now the rest of the world could see it too.

I was hooked. I started posting several times a week, sometimes twice in one day. Little by little people began finding us on Facebook. I was thrilled each time someone “liked” my post, and especially when someone commented in response. I read each and every comment carefully and responded with my own comment as often as possible. Slowly our Facebook readership grew and people began following my tweets too. Some of these people had been to the Gentle Barn and were grateful to have a way to stay informed about the animals they’d met, but most of our followers simply were animal lovers and were touched by the stories I shared. I couldn’t believe perfect strangers were reading about the ins and outs of what went on in my little world. These people felt not like strangers at all, but like distant cousins all over the country,
and eventually all over the globe. It was as though I’d finally been put in touch with my long-lost family—the family who cared as much as I did about animals.

At the beginning of September there was another fire nearby. Luckily we were safely out of range, but Jay went through the threatened area to check if people needed help. We let everyone know we were available to assist with the emergency transport of animals, and we ended up hosting several animals who had to be evacuated from the fire area. All through this, I kept our extended community informed through our Facebook page.

For days the air smelled of smoke and ash, and our cow Buttercup’s baby, Halo—now seven months old—was not doing well with the poor air quality. Buttercup had been malnourished through most of her pregnancy at the backyard butcher, and Halo had been born weak, with underdeveloped lungs. The smoke and ash in the air was putting him over the edge and he was struggling. We put him and his mom in the infirmary with air filters running, but pneumonia settled in and Halo never bounced back. The day after Buttercup’s little fawn-colored calf left this world, I shared the sad news with our Facebook fans:

More people than ever commented, sending their condolences, and shared the post with others. I sat crying in front of the computer reading each and every comment, some more than once, and it buoyed me to know others were right there with me—even if only virtually. The
next day I posted a picture of Buttercup licking Halo right before he left us. In the photo, he lifts his head toward her, and it looks like she’s whispering good-bye in his ear. Comments and “likes” poured in, and I felt surrounded by kindness. I had grieved alone so many times in my life with no support, sometimes with others mocking me. Now people I’d never even met were sending me words of encouragement and even grieving with me. I didn’t have to explain or justify my sadness; they totally got it. I was in love with my new extended family, and I thanked everyone again and again for their kind words and support.

Over time I settled into a rhythm of posting twice every day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. I thought about my Facebook family even when I wasn’t in front of the computer. I’d snap a picture with my phone when an animal did something funny or inspiring and I couldn’t wait to post it for my online community. I began recognizing the names of people who had commented before; it would bring a smile to my face to see their name, as though I were running into a friend on the street. Sometimes people who lived in other states wrote that they were saving money to come visit. “We’ve been following you for a while,” one woman wrote. “We’re planning to visit the Gentle Barn for our thirtieth anniversary.”

More and more people started approaching me on visitor Sundays to introduce themselves. “Hi, I’m Kathy. I’ve met you on Facebook—well, not
met
, but I’ve read all your posts.” We would hug like the long-lost cousins that we were. I was thrilled to be meeting my true family in person—here from all over the United States. Before long people were visiting for a week at a time. They’d get a private tour and then come each day to volunteer. Eventually we even had visits from England, Germany, Singapore … These long-distance visitors usually came for a whole month, staying at a little motel down the road from us and volunteering each and every day of their visit. “I’ll feed the animals, I’ll shovel manure, anything you need help with.” I was blown away by how generous these “strangers” were—here all the way from the other
side of the world on a trip they’d spent a year saving for, and all they wanted to do on their vacation was
work
at the Gentle Barn. Was my life that special that people wanted to do my daily chores on their vacation? But I had learned with the veal-calf rescue to step aside and let people help, to not withhold the gift. Actually, I was stunned by how similar these people were to me; before I’d started the Gentle Barn, volunteering with animals would have been my dream vacation too.