Saving Simon (12 page)

In the mornings, before we let the chickens out, Simon would climb halfway up the hill and stare at the fox den. When the fox appeared to patrol on the ridge, Simon walked back and forth with him, stomping his foot, charging sometimes, and glowering. Meg stayed close to Simon. Every morning when Meg left the barn, Simon came over, and she hopped on his back, catching an escort to the hay feeder where the good bugs and worms were. Simon would let her jump on and then trotted up to the feeder where Meg jumped off. He then took up position between her and the ridge, where the red fox was still patrolling.

The Rhode Island Reds sometimes jumped on the donkeys’ backs to peck at bugs and fleas there, but Meg had taken it a step further—she was definitely using Simon as a shield, as a big brother. He rose to it.

For days, Simon kept watch on the ridge. Two or three times, I saw the fox crawl under the pasture gate and creep down the hill. He never got more than a few feet before Simon would spot him and start moving up the hill, ears and nose down. The fox might have been unimpressed by me, but he was taking Simon seriously. An angry charging donkey is not a pleasant thing.

The fox would back up, slip under the gate, and go hunt somewhere else for a while. We didn’t expect this truce to continue, but after a week, the fox drama just ended.

The fox had disappeared. He never came back. We no longer
saw him at the top of the pasture, and after a few days, the chickens and Simon all began to relax, to let their guard down. He’s just waiting for this, I thought, but I was wrong.

Maria and I drove up the hill and saw that the den was empty. The family had moved away, perhaps to a new location where some vigilant donkey wasn’t waiting for them. There had to be easier ways to eat than to get by Simon.

So our perspective on Simon changed. He seemed, as usual, quite pleased with himself, all puffed up and important. He was the big guy on the farm now, the protector, the chaser off of predators, our hero. I just about burst with pride. My man, I kept saying to him, my man. Bedlam Farm became a pastoral place again, donkeys grazing up the hill, chickens pecking around in the grass.

But it was clear that this was his farm now, and he took his role seriously. Like dogs, donkeys like to work, and if you don’t find some for them, they will find their own—gnawing on barns and trees, chewing on tires, moving cans around and opening them.

Simon had a role. He was the guardian donkey of Bedlam Farm.

TEN
 

As Simon recovered and
wove himself into the heart of the farm, I kept thinking about the farmer. I knew he’d been convicted of animal neglect and fined $125. But other than that, I knew nothing much about him.

A neighbor of the farmer’s e-mailed me and asked if she could come by the farm to see Simon and meet me. She said it was important to her to see how he was now.

Three days later, Jeannie drove her battered old Toyota pickup into the driveway. I saw it was a farm truck—the straw, jugs, chains, and bits were unmistakable.

Jeannie looked like a horse lover to me—she had that tall, lean, and muscled look. I guessed her to be in her late thirties. Her handshake was strong, but I could tell she was anxious.

She said she had seen Simon when he first came to the farm five or six months before the raid. He was tied up by the barn, and then he just disappeared. She hadn’t seen him since. She had grown up on a farm near Rochester, and had two donkeys
and loved them dearly, and she had a feeling something was wrong. She never saw Simon working or grazing or being fed or brushed.

She had been worried about him, and she felt guilty that she hadn’t called the police. When she saw them arrive with the trailer, she guessed he might be dead.

She looked around the farm, and then we went to the barn. Simon and Lulu and Fanny, all of whom had come to appreciate treat-bearing strangers, came down to check her out and sniff her pockets. Jeannie knew what she was doing. She asked permission, then reached into the pouch in her jacket—horse people always have those—and held out a cookie in an open palm to each donkey. She looked Simon over quickly and then smiled. “Good job,” she said. “From what I hear, this is a lot different than he looked up there.…”

She tickled the side of Simon’s nose, which donkeys love.

What was the farmer like? I asked. She shook her head at first, and then shrugged. Country people never like to talk about their neighbors, especially to strangers. Neighbors are important, and so is their goodwill.

Well, she said finally, he was a quiet man, not friendly, not hostile. If you needed some help, he was happy to provide it, but he never wanted to talk much, and she never saw much of the son or wife. There was to be no socializing, no visiting. She got that message and respected it. She had seen some horses around. She thought he must have been trading some or buying them. They were out in the pasture behind the house. They had a small pole barn for shelter and looked strong and healthy, she said.

She had noticed things deteriorating a bit around the farm; she guessed he was having a rough time. She said she always thought of him as a decent, hardworking man, but obviously
she had been wrong about that. No decent man could have allowed an animal to suffer like that.

“They should have put him in jail,” she said, quietly.

I nodded but didn’t respond. After Jeannie left, I went out to the pasture to brush Simon and check on his legs. I kept thinking about what she had said.

Was that so? I hear that judgment often—the idea that people who mistreat animals ought to go to jail. I also hear people say they do not trust anyone who does not love an animal. That there is something wrong with people like that.

I didn’t feel that way. I have good friends who are not drawn to animals, and they are good people. I think the love of animals has become a religion in America, a faith. If you look at the news, you sometimes see an angry and violent country, but if that is so, animals are its soft place, its merciful heartbeat.

The definition of mercy is “the compassionate or kindly forbearance shown toward an offender, an enemy, or other person in one’s power.” The definition of compassion is “a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for those who are afflicted by misfortune.” Compassion is the strong desire to alleviate the suffering of another.

Wouldn’t the farmer be entitled to some of both? Or had his treatment of Simon forfeited that right?

Mercy and compassion are deeply ingrained in the human relationship with animals. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the animal rescue movement, locating animals in need, transporting them around the country, rehoming and rehabilitating them. There are thousands of “no-kill” shelters all over the country where animals spend their lives being cared for and fed rather than euthanized.

In America, the Left and the Right agree on almost nothing, but they do agree when it comes to loving animals and
treating them well. It is difficult to think of any single issue or movement that is so unquestioned and supported as the love and care of animals in need.

Yet there is no national rescue group for people—no consensus on how to help the poor or if they should be helped at all. Social service budgets have been slashed all over the country as Wall Street bonuses soar into the billions. I am not a political person. I just wonder at the contradiction, and how narrow the prism of mercy and compassion can be.

For me, compassion—like writing—comes from moving to the edge of my comfort zone. I know that people who profess to love animals seem to show little mercy to humans sometimes.

I’ve seen the mobs online raging about cruel humans and abused dogs. I was first introduced to the great numbers of people who attack human beings in the name of loving animals when I wrote
A Good Dog
about my decision to euthanize my border collie Orson after he bit three people.

Digital mobs rarely kill people, but I see little mercy and compassion in their swarming. There are thousands of pages on social media devoted to horror stories about people and animals, and the rage I sometimes see there is breathtaking.

Where did I stand in all of this? Animals have made me better every time I opened myself to them. Could I feel this way about people? Learn to be more patient, less judgmental?

I think I knew the minute I met Simon that I had to go and meet the farmer, see his farm, try to understand what had happened. My heart broke for Simon and what he had suffered, but he was also a mirror. In feeling for him I had to also feel for the man who had done this to him. They were not separate things; they were parts of the same thing. Simon and I and the farmer were all connected—part of the adventure of life, the theater of chance.

I suddenly saw that I could not possibly be compassionate toward Simon if I did not at least try to understand what had allowed this abuse to happen. If we can do this to animals, we can to it to others, and ultimately we are doing it to ourselves. Donkeys have always carried messages to human beings, from Jesus to the Kabbalah to Simon in my pasture. Simon was shaping—perhaps reshaping—my heart.

It was just not enough for me to condemn and judge and dismiss. That was not, to me, the path to being a fully realized human. I didn’t want to run away from what the farmer had done. I wanted to run to it, to put myself in his shoes.

One warm July morning I drove out to the small town north of Albany where Simon had lived. I had seen the address in the paper when the farmer had appeared before the town court and been fined. Since the recession hit in 2008, animal control officers reported the growing problem of people who could no longer afford to take care of their animals—dogs and cats dumped on the roads or brought to shelters, farm animals without enough food or proper treatment of sickness and injuries.

Many small farms were going under, and as farmers struggled to stay afloat, they cut corners wherever they could. It wasn’t, I was told by a farmer friend, a decision anyone felt good about; it was a process that devoured the human spirit. Quite often, these farms had been in one family for generations. No one wanted to be the one to break that legacy. No one wanted to let go.

I had been a reporter for a long time in big cities—Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlantic City. I am not afraid to approach people who didn’t want to talk to me, and I had learned how to talk to people, even when it wasn’t comfortable.

Still, I was anxious. It could not have been easy for this man, having the state police come and haul his donkey away and charge him with neglect in front of all of his neighbors. He would not be happy to see me. He was unlikely to want to talk to me. But I was more curious than nervous. I wanted to see how I felt around the man. I loved Simon, and it was hard not to look at his awful suffering and not be angry.

It took an hour and a half to get to Simon’s old farm. I could see it was not and had never been a dairy farm; it was a crop farm. There was one small red barn, no big cow barns, no silos, no broad and sweeping pastures.

There was an old farmhouse next to the barn, and I saw some rickety wooden corral fences, the kind used to contain horses. I saw three horses standing by the gate. They looked a little thin to me, but not alarmingly so.

A dirt roadway led out to some fields in the back—one cornfield and some hay fields. The farmhouse was raggedy, the white paint peeling off of the front, the shutters broken and cracked, gutters falling off of the roof. The old gardens by the front of the house were overgrown and looked as if they hadn’t been tended in years.

I walked down the road away from the house to see if that gave me a better view of the pen in back where Simon was kept, and it did open up as I walked farther south.

I took out my binoculars, which I was carrying in my camera bag, and looked through a break in the pine trees that blocked the view from the front. I saw the pen right away. It looked like an old hog pen to me; the wire mesh fence was tall and looked sturdy. The wooden pallets—the only shelter Simon had—came up in a steeple about four feet off of the ground.

To get shade or protection from the rain, Simon would have had to lie down and stick his head under the pallets. No
wonder his skin had been blackened by rain rot. Outside of the pallet shelter, there was room for him to stand up and turn around, but not much more. There was no grass in the pen, so his only food would have been the hay thrown to him. It was a death sentence, that pen, back out of sight of the farmhouse. The farmer didn’t have to even look at Simon, and might have already thought him to be dead.

Simon could have been in the horse corral. There was obviously some hay around; there was plenty of brush and bark out behind the house, for that matter. Donkeys can eat a lot of things if they are hungry—even if they are not. In much of the world, this would have been their fare.

That pen was no place to put a healthy male donkey. It was a prison, a death trap, the equine equivalent of a concentration camp. And I remembered that this was the first thing I had thought of when I saw Simon—he was a concentration camp donkey.