My Gentle Barn (39 page)

We returned to daily life at the Gentle Barn, with our emergency calls and rescues and the daily hubbub of caring for a barnyard full of animals and a house full of children. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed. The commitment Jay and I had made seemed to amplify the support I felt. The man I loved was truly by my side, caring for our enormous Gentle Barn family right alongside me.

I had always needed animals like I needed oxygen. They were my very breath, and every time I saw one of them suffering, it was like someone was holding their hand over my own mouth. But for most of my life I had felt alone in these feelings, and like I had to prove that the animals I cared about mattered. I had to fight against my parents, push against my first husband, shove my way through the founding of the Gentle Barn. And in hindsight, perhaps part of all this proving and
pushing was me trying to persuade the critic that lived inside my very own head, the one that had always wondered—just a little bit—if all of them were right that I was crazy.

But here was Jay, showing me I wasn’t the only one who cared this deeply about animals, and proving to me once and for all that I didn’t have to do this work alone. The fire had burned the fear right out of me and deepened my faith; the Internet had connected me to a fabulous, global, animal-loving family I’d never dreamed existed; and Ellen had validated me and my work in front of the world.

The next thing that happened made me feel, for the first time in my life, like a true grown-up—one who no longer needed to prove anything at all.

It was August 2011, a scorching month in our little high-desert valley. We were working with a filmmaker named Tim to create a short film about the Gentle Barn. Sitting in the shade of a pepper tree, we were trying to look like we weren’t melting from the heat as I explained why we no longer rode our horses, and that we didn’t want to participate in the domination over any animal. Besides, it was much more satisfying and intimate to just walk by their sides on a mutual adventure.

Then Tim asked us to name each rescue we had done and tell the accompanying story. We tended to forget all we had accomplished in past rescues, focusing instead on what was in front of us—because there was always so much in front of us. Talking about the rescues brought back all the emotion we’d been through at the time—feeling the animals’ pain, experiencing the relief of removing them from a bad situation, and then the triumph when the animals had healed.

“Oh my gosh,” I said to Jay at one point, “we’ve been through a lot of adventures together, haven’t we?”

When we got to the story of the backyard butcher, Jay said, “We handed that one over to the Health Department. They were working on shutting him down or making him get his place in order. He wasn’t
supposed to be selling meat anyway; you have to be a slaughterhouse to do that. And this guy was selling
contaminated
meat.”

Jay had occasionally seen Manuel at the auction house over the years, and had even gone back to his place a couple of times to check on conditions there. For a while, it had seemed that the pressure from the Health Department was helping. But Jay hadn’t been there in many months.

“We don’t actually know what finally happened with that place,” I said to Jay when we took a break from filming. “Maybe we should go check on it, to make sure they really did stop the guy.”

Jay decided to drive out there later that afternoon. When he got home a few hours later, he did not look happy. “It’s way worse than ever,” he said.

Jay started talking with the authorities again, asking why they hadn’t shut the guy down. The Health Department told him they had been working to get Manuel to comply and bring his place up to code.

“But after all this time he’s
not
up to code,” Jay told them. “And the guy is selling tainted meat.”

The woman from the Health Department told Jay that if the man was butchering and selling meat, it wasn’t the Health Department’s jurisdiction. She’d have to pass the case on to the USDA. We didn’t hear anything back for days. When Jay contacted the Health Department again, the woman told him the USDA could not take the case on because Manuel was not an actual slaughterhouse; they only regulated legal slaughterhouses.

“Well, then, isn’t it back in your hands?” Jay asked.

The problem, they told him, was that they had never been able to gather any evidence that Manuel was selling meat.

“But they always announce they’re coming,” Jay reported back to me. “They set up appointments for reinspection.” Manuel thus had enough warning to be on his best behavior, to make sure not to have any customers show up at the time of the inspection, to clean his place
up and remove any of the dead animals Jay had witnessed when he’d been there. Jay had seen animal carcasses rotting in the pens or being eaten by the other starving animals.

When Jay called Animal Control, they said they had been there a number of times, and there was always fresh hay out for the animals. We suspected they announced their visits too. In response to the sick and starving condition of the animals themselves, apparently Manuel had provided them with documentation that he’d just brought those animals home from auction. Jay knew otherwise.

Frustrated and at our wits’ end, Jay called the Health Department again. “Can’t you do some undercover work to catch this guy in the act of selling meat?”

The Health Department said it was not their mission to entrap anyone. Their mission was to regulate and give guidelines, helping people rectify any problems and setting them up to succeed in bringing their place up to code.

Throughout these dealings with the authorities, I was restless and angry. How could something so blatantly wrong be allowed to happen? How could people simply turn their gaze away? I kept imagining the sick, starving animals crying for help and getting no response. I’d find myself awake in the middle of the night, the wheels spinning in my head.
There’s got to be a way to stop this guy. Should we call the press? What reporters do we know?

Then Jay had a brilliant idea. “The next time Tim comes out to work on the film, he should come with me to the backyard butcher and capture that place on camera.”

I could feel the excitement stirring in me. This might really work. But I was worried about Tim. “He’s never seen anything like this before. Are you sure you want to put him through that?”

“Tim will be fine,” Jay said. “And it can serve double duty. It’s perfect for the film, too.”

But we weren’t sure of the best way to go about it. I couldn’t imagine
the backyard butcher agreeing to have himself or his place filmed. We thought briefly about trying to hide a camera, but we didn’t know anything about undercover work.

“I might be able to convince him to let us film,” Jay said. Jay had taken photographs with his phone before, telling Manuel he wanted to show some pictures of the animals to his wife. Because Jay had built a “friendship” with the guy, Manuel had always said, “Sure, man. No problem.” Jay had told him about our program that brought inner-city kids out to work with animals as a way to help the kids. “I think he’s going to let us do it,” Jay said.

I wasn’t as convinced as Jay was. The entire time Jay and Tim were gone I was nervous and distracted. What if the guy got angry that they wanted to film? Clearly he was violent toward animals; was he also a danger to people?

A few hours passed before Jay finally called. “He let us film everything. He said stuff on camera that—Well, let’s just say he might have just shot himself in the foot.”

Jay and Tim had gotten footage of the dead and dying animals, the filth, the slaughtering area, and most important Manuel himself boasting about how many animals he had killed, how much meat he had sold and to what kinds of people. In one of the shots Tim showed me, I saw one goat who was a heartbeat away from death. She was like a little skeleton barely able to hold her head up.

“Oh, Jay, you’ve got to go back and get that goat.”

But when the guys went back the next day, that goat had passed away, and her poor little body lay unburied in the pen, in the same spot she had been lying the day before.

There was no shortage of animals who needed rescuing at the backyard butcher. Jay called me on his way back and said, “I pulled three goats. We’re going to take them straight to the hospital; they’re really, really sick.” At the hospital they received subcutaneous fluids and had blood work and X-rays taken.

When they arrived home, all three goats went straight into strict quarantine in our infirmary. They had high fevers from staph infections in their lungs and they were so emaciated that their hips jutted at sharp angles and you could count every rib. There was no spark whatsoever in their eyes, not one iota of hope.

“I wonder what that is on their faces,” I said to Jay. Their muzzles were covered with black gunk stuck in their hair.

“It’s probably the rotten tomatoes. That’s all he had out for them to eat.”

Goats didn’t normally eat tomatoes. To eat rotten ones, a goat had to be on the verge of starving to death.

We set to work immediately on healing these three girls, coordinating a plan with the vet and giving them their first shots of antibiotics and their first doses of superfood algae. And of course we made sure to have plenty of fresh hay and clean water out for them. They had arrived so terrified of humans, I had to move as slowly as possible in order to not further traumatize them. For the first week, I needed help from one of my barnyard staff in order to give the goats their medicine and supplements. The easiest way to contain a goat, and the least stressful for her, was to get her to walk into the corner of the twenty-by-twelve-foot infirmary, without any need for chase or force. We did this with the help of the goat’s natural response—as a prey animal—to “pressure.” Several feet from her, I would stand just a bit forward of her shoulders to keep her from bolting ahead; my assistant would stand just a bit to the back of her hind end to keep her from turning and bolting in the opposite direction. With arms spread wide, we’d move very slowly toward her, adjusting our positions according to her movements, to stay on these “pressure points.” Through this gentle maneuvering, we’d end up in the corner with the goat in our arms, and my helper would gently hold her still while I administered the medicine and supplements.

“This is going to make you better,” I would coo to them. “You’re
going to get strong and healthy and go outside to play with the other animals in the sunshine.” But in truth, for the first couple of weeks, I didn’t know for sure if they would. I would hold my breath each time I approached the infirmary, not knowing whether I would find them alive or dead. It took almost two weeks for their fevers to break. Slowly they began to understand that what I was giving them was making them feel better. Not only did they stop fighting the supplements, they also started to trust me just a little bit. Eventually they turned into superfood-algae junkies, waiting for me to arrive with their “treats.” Their appetites improved, and they slowly began to gain weight. I sent Ellen three choices of names for each of the goats and asked her to choose. She selected the names Sassy, Joy, and Divine.

A week into healing these goats, I finally saw the video Tim had edited from the footage he’d gotten over the two visits to the backyard butcher. Jay tried to dissuade me from watching it.

“I don’t think you want to see the whole thing,” he said.

“Please just show it to me,” I said. “I want to know.”

But I watched with my hands half-covering my eyes. Even worse than the visuals was what the guy said. He had not only slaughtered animals; he flaunted how many animals he had tortured and the details of how he had done it. He was the go-to guy for groups involved in ritual torture and sacrifice. At the end of the video, I sat there frozen in shock and horror.

Not only was it hard to believe anyone actually did such things, but here he was, openly admitting to it. And they had gotten it all on film without even hiding the camera.

“That’s the sickest part,” Jay said. “He was happy to have us film it all. He has absolutely no clue how twisted and wrong it is.”

Manuel didn’t think what he was doing was wrong because he was not the first to do it; it had been handed down from his father, and before that his grandfather. Three generations had let animals starve to death and left them out to rot, slaughtered animals in plain sight of the
others, tortured animals for money, and manipulated and deluded the authorities. And now Manuel was in the process of teaching it all to his own children.

“We have to stop him, Jay,” I said. The shock had given way to a grief and anger so fierce I could hardly breathe.

“I’m right there with you, babe,” he said. “I am so right there with you.”

We sent our footage to both the Health Department and Animal Control. For a couple of days we didn’t hear anything, so we called to follow up.

“We’ve passed it on to our Major Case Unit,” the guy from Animal Control said over the phone. At first I thought it was another blow off, but the next day we got word from the Unit directly. The Major Case Unit was the department of Animal Control that handled particularly bad cruelty cases. They would be starting a major investigation immediately, visiting the backyard butcher to collect evidence, and pulling animals that were in particularly bad shape. These animals were brought to us to heal, including one newborn calf whose mother was in such bad shape, the officers had had to euthanize her. It would take months for them to build their case, and I hated to think of the animals that would suffer in the meantime, but it was a relief to know someone was finally taking this seriously, and I was grateful they were keeping us in the loop. They also asked for our help, requesting that Jay provide written documentation describing what he had witnessed on his several visits over the last few years. We were pretty certain we’d be receiving more animals once they shut the guy down.