A/N: This is some creative writing, but it's all true. Though I mean some of it…tongue-in-cheek…kind of agreeing but kind of concerned …
TW: Human and animal death, brazenly.
Below is the exact goat from the story, resting on the tummy of my (alive, at the time!) foster cat Arthur.
He wasn’t going to make her enough money. That’s why he was in the pile.
I stood on the mound of compost with a shovel in my hand that the farmer had generously let me borrow. “I think I buried it about there,” she said, pointing to a spot.
The soft earth was about the size of two cars side-by-side and contained all sorts of farm discards. Undesirable plants–“weeds,” as though that word is anything more than opinion–leftover parts from vegetables, eggshells, and any carcasses from animals who died on the farm. But I wanted the goat’s skeleton, and, with some work, I could make something of value from it.
The farmer couldn’t get her original intended value from the goat, who was meant to grow into profitable meat. But you usually can’t legally sell meat for human consumption in the US unless someone at a USDA-certified and monitored slaughterhouse kills the animal in accordance with complex regulations. Animals who die on the farm, such as from an unknown sickness, as this baby goat did, can’t get their owners that form of profit, and therefore their bodies are nearly worthless. Except, sometimes, as compost. Or a neat skull.
I dug into the earth to find him. His sister, a black and brown kid, bleated a cry for help in her pen. She was so small.
“She’s sick and will probably die too,” said the farmer as I dug.
Maybe the baby girl goat would live to grow, so she could be killed and become several meals for humans. Or maybe she would join her brother in the compost.
The farmer had recently rescued the two sick baby goats. Their previous owners couldn’t take care of them, so she took them in. Rescued them to kill them. Maybe the farmer could care for the living goat a bit longer, and the goat could enjoy a little more life. If the goat lived a bit longer, she could get bigger, too, and the farmer could enjoy profiting from her meat.
However, the farmer wasn’t going to take them to the vet to treat their illness. “I’m not spending $100 on a $30 goat,” she said. That wouldn’t be business-savvy.
The American Veterinary Medical Association argues that no one should be able to sue a vet for any more money than the purchase price of the animal, should the vet be found guilty of killing a pet due to malpractice. If a professional negligently kills your $20 cat, the AVMA says you should only be able to sue for $20. Your cat is not worth $2,000.
But the vets won’t think twice about accepting $2,000 for a surgery to save the $20 cat. Because yes, she is worth that much.
Years later, I would watch someone lower a box containing the cremated remains of my grandmother into a plot quite a bit less natural than a compost pile. The funeral home had embalmed her, filling her with poison so that her meat and organs couldn’t be useful to anyone. The embalming was a pointless, unnatural up-sell–it didn’t keep her body looking like herself or anything like that. She looked like a completely different person in the casket, and even less like herself after the cremation.
Grandma’s death wasn’t especially sad. She had served her purpose in life. Produced value. She helped run a business, and her kids invested in college, securing respectable careers and earning a good income. Her grandchildren do the same. That means her life had value. Plus, she was 83. Her life was about as long as could be expected for a human.
Of course, there is something a little more tragic about a dead human over a dead nonhuman animal, and there is something a little more tragic about a dead baby rather than a dead adult, humans and nonhumans alike. I had wanted a dead goat because I wanted to articulate a skeleton, and goats don’t have as many complicated wrist and finger bones as some other animals do. I wanted a baby one specifically because I could only fit a small skeleton in the apartment where I had set up a curtain to make the living room into another bedroom. (With a sacrificed living space for a third bedroom, I could get another roommate to help split the rent that I could still barely afford.)
I finally saw a brown, floppy ear in the dirt and kept digging around to see his face, the compost surrounding its white, unblinking eye. He had white fur with chocolate spots over his forehead and ears. He didn’t look asleep. It looked like an object. At some point in the digging, I had decided it was too fresh to process the entire body on my seventh-floor apartment balcony in Washington DC, so I asked for a knife to just cut off its head.
The most financially devastating death on that farm wasn’t that of the baby. It was the big bull who could barely walk onto the trailer to the slaughterhouse. Once the trailer got on the bumpy road, he lay down and died there. The farmer could not legally process and sell its flesh. The farmer had spent countless hours and dollars and land feeding, watering, moving, and caring for that big Scottish Highland, and he didn’t even make her a dollar in the end. What a waste.
Grandma’s death wasn’t too bad, but my uncle’s was. Right after college, after all that investment, Uncle Dan climbed Fossil Mountain in Alberta with his cross-country skis and his cousin. An avalanche killed them both. What a waste. I never met either of them, but my father and another uncle took me cross-country skiing once, and someone mentioned the skis I had been borrowing had been taken right off of Dan’s frozen body after they had pulled it from the snow. No use in wasting perfectly good skis. They’re expensive!
My uncle’s death, as I understand it, was a death of owing. He owed society for his upbringing, and society owed him their tears. Because it was a tragedy. “Your grandmother cried for three days when Dan died,” my dad told me. “Wailed.”
The black and brown goat wailed as I took the knife to the throat of her departed brother.
“Some deaths are worse than others,” my living uncle explained as we drove to the church in black clothes. I agreed with him that the death of Dan, the 27-year-old, was worse than the death of Grandma, the 83-year-old. My uncle had another example, though. “If your older sister died, it would be worse than if you died because the family and the loan companies gave your older sister so much money to go to dental school, and she has not yet become a high-paid dentist.”
Oh. I guess it’s that easy.
“Of course,” I said. I understood.
I tried to cut the throat of the dead baby goat with a bread knife, but it was surprisingly difficult.
“Go on,” the farmer said. “It’s just like you’re slaughtering a goat.”
“Would you believe I’ve never slaughtered a goat?”
The farmer took the knife and tried her hand, but the skin was too rubbery. “It’s like cutting a car tire,” she said.
Eventually, with enough muscle and a strong enough stomach, I cut and twisted the head off and drove it home to process. The idea to skeletonize dead animals on my urban balcony was a bad one, honestly, and the neighbors rightfully knocked on my door to complain about the smell.
But the skull turned out beautiful and white, and I could use it to remember the goat forever.
At some point, I chose money over memory and sold it for $45.
