Meditation While Digging a Goat Grave

The small ones go in the garden. I find a corner somewhere, the end of a corn row, or in between the wire cages of overgrown tomato vines.  My favorite spot is at the bottom of the garden, near the compost piles, but that whole area is getting full now, so I’m forced to expand the location of my plots—a sort of grim urban sprawl.

I dig a hole, taking care that it is at least six to eight inches longer and wider than dimensions of the carcass and deep enough that the remains won’t be disturbed by other animals or the tines of my old, rusting-red tiller. The first burial is traumatic enough. Then I lay in the chicken or the duck, back when we had ducks, in a pose the looks reasonably natural. I don’t want an animal that I’ve known, that has given us food or pleasure, or even one that hasn’t, to spend eternity with its neck twisted at some odd angle, gazing up at the annual succession of corn roots, the bottoms of carrots, or the bulging growth of sweet potatoes. I know that it doesn’t really matter to the animal, but it matters to me.

Along with random chickens and ducks, which generally die of old age or the occasional predator, on average we lose one newborn goat or lamb per year. Generally, that happens with young dams and multiple births. This year, for instance, Justine, our two-year-old LaMancha dairy goat, gave birth to triplets. It was her first birth, and she seemed a little uncertain about the whole process. She’s always been reticent. The first two births went fine. Within a few minutes the kids—a doe we named Blossom, and a buck, Pat—were up on their feet, searching for teats. We thought Justine was done. Then about twenty minutes later, we saw another caramel-colored hoof emerging from Justine’s posterior.

The birth went fine, but the kid refused to thrive. It tried to climb up on its knobby legs, but kept stumbling. Even when we held its still-wet body up and tried to get it to latch on to a teat, it made only a half-hearted effort. For reasons she keeps private, Justine refused to help—refused to lick this one to life. Perhaps she counted teats (goats have two) and counted babies and decided to keep things even, or perhaps there was something wrong with this kid that with our limited senses neither Vanessa nor I could perceive.  This one, posthumously named Buddy, took up a corner just outside the compost bin. Eighteen inches by two feet, a spade and a half deep.

The spring after we first moved here, we ordered a batch of chicks from a very reputable hatchery in Nebraska. Twenty-five was the minimum order because they ship them through the mail, in a cardboard box, and the chicks need the mass to keep warm. Newly hatched chicks can live three days without food or water. This box, however, got left on a loading dock one cold night in Minnesota. We were tracking the package and expecting the worst, but when it finally arrived all but one chick was alive. We put them in a large tub in the bathroom, dipped their beaks in water to teach them to drink, gave them some feed, and hung a heat light, hopeful that they would survive, but every time we checked another one or two had dropped off. We ended up losing about half of them over the next twenty-four hours. I buried them in a small, mass grave near where we would later plant cucumbers, and we waited for the replacements.

Larger animals present more complex problems, for various reasons. First, they take up too much real estate to put in the garden. You want them in a quiet spot, not constantly trampled. There’s also the possibility of odor—you don’t want to smell a rotting sheep corpse while you’re picking green beans or suckering the tomato vines. Besides, any odor will draw wild animals as well—we hear coyotes at night, and we don’t want them foraging our garden or lurking around the barnyard. Finally, for whatever anthropocentric reasons, we get more attached to larger animals—they’re mammals, they are generally around longer, and they have more personal identity. Except for the occasional oddity, chickens don’t get names. Goats do.  Sheep mostly.

So the larger animals go further out. I usually try to find a place on a hill somewhere, someplace with decent drainage and a view. Fortunately, we have twelve hilly acres and, also fortunately, we don’t lose that many larger animals. In the past six years, I have buried two dogs, three full-grown sheep, and two goats. Digging the holes is always the most demanding part physically. It takes a big hole to receive a hundred-and-fifty-pound sheep, and they generally die during a dry spell.

Clara was a particularly difficult loss. She was one of the original four goats we started with in the spring of 2014. We bought her and Buck together from a one-legged goat breeder in East Tennessee. Nice guy—we had met him at the annual goat show at the Wilson County Fair the year before. Good goats. We brought Clara and Buck home in a dog crate in the back of our Subaru. They were twelve weeks old, and we bottle fed them for another month. They trusted us like dogs. The bond, once established, doesn’t break.  

Clara was our main milker—she could produce a quart or more a day for us and still have enough milk to feed her off-spring, usually twins. She had great teats—nice and long—and a large udder. She was also bitchy and dominating. She’d headbutt the other does and stand at the barn door, keeping them out with her icy stare. That way she had all the hay to herself and her kids. We learned early on that it was easier to work around Clara—haying the other goats outside, for instance—than it was to continually confront her about her wickedness. She never responded well to shaming or to righteous indignation. Though I could overpower her, and sometimes had to, forcing her to let the others in the barn during a rain, the moment I left, she resumed her role as the Bitch Queen.

We’ve always been on an annual cycle with the goats. Clara would give birth in April. Early on, the kids took most of her milk, but as they started eating hay and other solids, we would take more. By June, the kids would be weaned, and we (meaning Vanessa) would continue milking until around November. Last year, however, she stopped giving milk in July. This year, June.

She started getting sick in July. Her udder got hard, and she became languid. We called the vet and scheduled a farm call. Dr. Bates came on a Tuesday, checked her out, said she didn’t think Clara had mastitis and gave her a broad-spectrum antibiotic and a shot of fever-reducer. She also gave us a vile of the fever-reducer, for daily injections, and an additional syringe of the antibiotic to administer on Sunday.

But Clara didn’t make it to Sunday. By Friday, she was barely eating or drinking, stumbling, incoherent and getting glassy-eyed. We called for an emergency farm visit. Dr. Townes arrived at noon, while I was working on the fence at the front of the property.  It was one of those muggy, humid days, and I had soaked my clothes with sweat. I caught a ride up the drive with him—windows down—and Vanessa met us at the barn. Within a minute, Dr. Townes diagnosed Clara with sepsis, and told us the most humane thing to do was euthanize her right now.

“She could live a couple of days,” he said. “But she’ll be miserable.”

It was that quick. It was also the most humane thing for all of us. Vanessa had been worried all week, fretting, not sleeping, watching this animal that has been such an integral part of our lives for six years, that has given us a dozen offspring, barrels of milk, occasional joy, and has shown us the limits of our own notions of “proper behavior.” Watching this animal decline, we were suspicious that she was suffering more than we could know.

Then we had to deal with the body. Dr. Townes said that the public landfill in Smith County (not far from where we live) would accept dead animals. “It’s privately owned,” he said. “You don’t have to live there. You just have to pay.” He said he knew of people that had taken cows and horses there. I thought about it while I finished the fencing work that he had interrupted when he arrived. I weighed the advantages of loading her up and driving to Carthage versus the difficulty of digging a hole the size I would need, but in the end, I couldn’t just toss her onto a garbage heap like a worn-out piece of furniture.

So, I found her a spot in the swale near the front of the property. It’s a low-lying area, so she doesn’t have much of a view, but it’s under a grove of black walnut trees, near a spot where she used to graze when we moved the herd to the front.  Honestly, I chose the spot as much for myself as for her. It was in the shade—I didn’t want to be digging a big hole in the sun—and I was hoping that there would still be some moisture in the ground. I got the shade, but not the moisture. It took me about an hour and a half with a shovel and pick-axe to dig a large and deep enough hole. Then, while Vanessa was out picking up a few groceries, I dragged Clara out of the barn and carried her down to swale in the scoop of my tractor. I was a little worried that my hole wasn’t large enough, though I had been careful to take my measurements. It was about three in the afternoon by the time I got her covered with soil and topped with large, flat pieces of limestone—to discourage digging—and I was hot, dirty, grimy, and stinking. As connected to life on the farm as one can be.

Christians believe that the eternal soul lives on after the body passes, and that the fate of the soul after death depends on the actions, attitudes, and beliefs of the individual in the temporal life. I’m not sure if Christians believe that goats have eternal souls or not—I never heard that topic taken up in any Sunday school group I’ve attended—though I think many contemporary Christians believe that dogs have souls, or at least their dogs have souls. Good for them. But I am not Christian, and for me it’s enough to know that Clara is and will always be where she has always been, where she belongs.