Don’t Tell Me I Don’t Care - Insight 7

I love life and that is why I spent seventy-five minutes this morning fighting for it. I carried a baby, I rubbed it dry, I helped clear its lungs of mucus, then I finally fought to breathe life into its corpse during the waning minutes. I felt its breath, its heartbeat, a few slight bawls of energy. I felt life in my hands, yet it slowly slipped away despite the hard grasp I tried to maintain.

Forgive me if I am irritable and combative today for my throat still chokes as I smell the remnants of a calf’s body in my beard and the wood chips we laid him in irritate the skin beneath my shirt. The grime and dirt from my fight for life are still caked upon my knuckles.

Today was a morning that started like any other this calving season, yet it ended with deep set emotions from far within my heavy chest and capped by slight tears from the corners of my eyes. Not once during my long attempt to help the dying calf in my lap did I ever consider the thought, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

I left an easy life with good pay and better benefits to return to one with an unknown future in many regards. I left a life dedicated to saving men and women and returned to one of animal husbandry where I am repaid with fun, playful days filled with excitement and beauty, then supplemented by dark, sullen times such as this where, despite my best efforts, I lose. I hate losing, but mother nature ultimately makes the call.

The hardest thing today was not the physical effort to help the calf live. It was not putting my mouth over its tiny nostrils in an attempt to breathe in life. It was not the burn from the space heater as I fought to warm a hypothermic body back to existence. It was the moment my father and I looked at each other and recognized it was too late. Despite the best efforts of two men to save a beautiful life, we had to walk away and accept that we cannot save them all.

We have been beyond fortunate to have this as the first fatality as we approach the halfway mark of a long calving season. That does not mean it becomes any easier to accept an undeserved loss. I assure you, I never stopped caring.

Recently, a few people on social media have trolled my accounts where they reminded me, and followers, that these beautiful babies we help bring into the world each spring are raised for slaughter. Yes, they are. That is a fact I do not shy away from. I have to eat, my family must eat, and the rest of the world needs to be fed by animals just like ours. I do not turn a blind eye to that fact, but I can guarantee I provide for them in the best ways possible until that final moment. That moment where they transition from a living being to a nutritional, sustaining food source for me and billions of others. I do not relish the idea of these beautiful creatures one day dying, but I have long accepted it while I recognize it is not ideal. However, if I want to live, I still need to eat.

Don’t tell me I don’t care when I fought longer than that little bull calf did this morning. I am a rancher. I understand what ultimately becomes of my livestock, but that does not mean they do not hold a piece of my heart regardless of what becomes of them, now or later.