Dying Animals and Faint Hearts

This business of raising animals is not for the faint of heart. 

Unfortunately, ... we are the faint of heart. 

Pig died. 

It's one thing to have a helpless, little new animal die, but something so big and ambling and snorting and alive? 

Our kids took it like losing a beloved family dog. 

There was a rainbow after though. 

(And then we covered her with a tarp so the kids wouldn't have to remember her that way, and Mike's uncle brought his backhoe--we needed an entire backhoe!--to bury her.)

We discovered surprise chicks last week. (Surprise chicks! Can you imagine the excitement of kids finding surprise chicks?)

Then one drowned. (Ohhhh!)

Another was born a full four days after the others. Its beak was crooked and it was having trouble keeping up with its siblings. ("Can I at least have the little broken chick?" Hans wept to me after his chick---the one that drowned--met its sad end.) 

Because it wasn't strong enough to keep up with the older chicks, Mike put it under the hen who had been sitting faithfully on a golf ball. 

She took to it gladly and watched over it carefully all day and night--pecking my hand when I got close enough to even offer a watermelon rind. (Hens can be so mean to each other but they really are wonderful mothers). 

She was so delighted with her little runt of a crooked-beaked chick.

The next day Mike discovered her strutting about in a panic. Her adopted chick, now that he had a little more strength, had abandoned her and gone back to his siblings. 

Now she just hovers about on the outskirts of the main mom and chicks like some sort of childless aunt. 

Hans found a dead duckling under our trampoline this week. (How? I've seen no ducks. The cats?) He was so sad, so he put it in a box and ... put it in our garage. In this heat. (Eeeeehuhhh. Ohhhhhh.)

And our bishop found two motherless peachicks (baby peacocks!) on his farm and asked if we would try putting them under our hen. But one kept wandering away so we put the two of them together under a heat lamp instead. And then one ... you may have guessed it ... died.

(Starling loved the peachicks. She still loves the peachick.)

(She loves to measure her peachick. Though her measurements range wildly. It grows and shrinks between two and three inches daily.)

(Peachick parrot [?] above and peachick at morning scriptures below.)

Two. (Sniffle.)

Mike and I were going through the small tragedies we've experienced in the last year or two alone. One of our pygmy goats--despite Goldie and some of the kids rushing it to the vet. All three of another goats' babies--stillborn. Pig's little runt sibling. Pig. Our huge geese (dogs). About a million chickens (the same dogs). A baby chick. A baby peacock. All the mice our cats bring to the porch (to our kids' horror). One of the birds that got in our stove.

I'm probably forgetting some. 

But we are part in the animal world now. And part in the funeral industry. 

When we called Abe about Pig, he did point out how removed we mostly are from death these days. There's no preparing loved ones' bodies for burial anymore, etc. He suggested that there was something a little bit poignant in the kids experiencing and being a little closer to this circle of life business.

Perhaps he's right. 

But goodness!

We are definitely going to need less faint hearts!