Bowling for Pigs

I’ve always considered myself a smart woman. My intelligence might be slightly above average. I graduated high school twenty-third out of five hundred eighty-nine. I wasn’t headed to MIT in the fall like the first twenty-two, but I led the parade of future blue-collar workers. I’m not bragging here. I just think that whatever life throws my way, eventually I’ll be up to the challenge

So, why am I so inept when it comes to taking care of farm animals?

After all, I raised my own kids and lots of people think that’s like being a zookeeper. In addition, I’ve owned three rescue dogs, one hamster, a love bird, some Japanese fighting fish, and I was stepmom to my son’s tarantula. I got skills. I got brains. I got hutzpah.

What I might be lacking is some common sense.

For six days this month, all the inmates at the Brady Rehabilitation Ranch were subjected to my inexperience as a farmhand. Again. Katy and Dan and the fam took off for their cabin to escape the heat and left me in charge of all the critters—six chickens, including two so reclusive I didn’t know they existed, one mama pig with six piglets, and two bossy sistersheep. They took their dog with them to the mountains so there’d be at least one survivor when they got home, and the desert tortoise was left to his own devices.

Lord, have mercy.

It was a circus from the get-go, right after twelve-year-old Jules, aka The Animal Whisperer, entrusted me with the schedule and ratios for feeding the flock, followed immediately by Katy’s whispered summary, “Just try to keep them alive,” and the telltale sound of their Suburban fleeing imminent disaster in a cloud of diesel fumes.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms I am not. I don’t even compare to Ma Kettle. I’m more like Gilligan if The Minnow had run aground in a chicken coop. Feathers flying everywhere, poultry running for their lives, splintered wood covered in chicken doo doo. When I’m in charge of the henhouse, it’s one big . . . poop show.

It could drive a good Skipper to drink.

Case in point. “Toss a few alfalfa pellets over there to distract the sheep,” Jules instructed me, pointing to right field, “and then fill the entire scoop with more pellets and dump them into Maggie’s dish, there,” she continued, pointing down at about six o’clock on the other side of the pasture gate, “then . . . toss a quarter of a scoop of chicken scratch that way," she finished, gesturing toward the pitcher’s mound. This was gonna be a lot of math. And geometry. The pitcher’s mound looked pretty far away to me, and my arthritic throwing arm isn’t what it used to be. I wasn’t sure I could do much more than bunt the stuff.

Sure enough, it was a fiasco. I shook up that game plan every way I could imagine, but the sistersheep always raced in from the outfield, drop kicking the chickens in their mad scramble for a few dozen alfalfa pellets, followed by knocking the piglets on their kiesters. And it hurts my heart to say this in public, but Maggie’s mothering instincts are nothing to write home about. She was just as selfish at the dinner table as everybody else and left her little piglets out in left field to fend for themselves. One night while I was entertaining neighbors at my house, I spotted the sistersheep headbutting those poor little piglets over a few pieces of alfalfa in the pasture. The dark-haired youngsters rolled across the fairway with so much momentum they looked like bowling balls flying down a green alley. I jumped up from my chair, muttering forgivable things, ready to give those wooly bullies a piece of my mind, when one of my visitors stopped me midstride.

“Ummmmm,” he began, as his wife looked at me with alarm. “Ya gotta let the animals work it out for themselves.” I’m pretty sure that’s the same thing Napoleon said at Waterloo, but I sat down anyway and played another domino. What the heck, I thought. I fed them like Jules asked me to and kept them alive like Katy suggested. Nobody told me to break up fights. What else can you expect from a city girl?

My guests headed home soon after and I began to clean up the kitchen. Tossing some food scraps and a couple of cracked eggs into a large bowl, I found a pint of moldy strawberries in the fridge, too, and decided to throw everything over my patio fence out to the animals. Not that they deserved any treats, but it saved space in my trash can. The eggs had barely splattered on the ground when all hell broke loose. It was like they knew I was coming, and they were waiting for me. Creepy. The chickens, racing on skinny legs and looking like their arms were tied behind their backs, ran like drunken sailors across the pasture, headed straight for disappointment. I’m pretty sure chickens don’t eat eggs. By the time I’d lobbed red pepper remnants and onion skins over the no-climb fencing, the roly poly piglets arrived with both the sistersheep hot on their tails. Maggie pulled up the rear.

I guess nothing excites a bunch of freeloaders more than rotten food.

I had the porch light on, but the rest of the pasture was in pitch darkness. I’d given them all my scraps except for the strawberries. Since the whole pint was ruined, I thought it’d be less messy if I simply held the plastic clamshell upside down over the fence and let gravity empty it out. But gravity took the whole thing out of my hands and the entire container with its contents landed at the feet of a crazed crowd. Holy.Moly. Now I know where the inspiration for that painting of stacked farm animals came from—it was a feeding frenzy on the south side of somebody else’s pasture. A riot broke out on the other side of my patio fence as the inmates mutinied there over a bunch of gnarly berries. Now Maggie was headbutting her own piglets who rolled between the feet of the sheep like a bunch of croquet balls through wooly wickets. The chickens staged a counterattack, pecking everything in sight including sheep feet, and no one seemed to notice that they’d devoured all of those stupid strawberries and were now fighting over an empty, plastic clamshell.

All I could think of was Katy’s last words to me. “Just try to keep them alive.” I didn’t know if chickens can chew plastic and stay alive. Or if sheep eat trash like goats do, or if pigs are the equivalent of grazing garbage cans, but if any jagged piece of that container made it into their digestive tracts, I was pretty sure Jules was gonna fire me.

“Geeze Louise,” I muttered in frustration, quickly reviewing my options.  I’d have to walk all the way down to the double gates, open that tight chain in the dark, then double back up the pasture in the pitch blackness, make my way through a herd of filthy animals to retrieve a defiled clam shell covered in pig snot and chicken slobber if I couldn’t figure this out. Gross. Double gross. There was no way I was gonna put my life at risk like that. I was not going to die trampled to death by pigs in a field of chicken poop. I had my dignity, after all.

My mind racing, I ran into the house and retrieved the only thing I could think of—my handy dandy grabber from Amazon. If I hurried, maybe I could stab it through the mesh opening in the fence, grab the edge of the clamshell, and lift it up above the animals’ heads and over the fence to safety. But by the time I returned, they’d wrestled the filthy thing out of my reach. Back to the house I ran. This time, I seized my long-handled broom and hurried outside with it. The criminals were still struggling with the empty strawberry container, slowly edging it further and further away from my fence.

With seconds to spare, I shoved the handle of the broom through the open mesh, pinned the clamshell to the ground and held on for dear life. It was like hanging on to a slab of meat in a river boiling with pirhanas as the wild animals fought for control of the desecrated plastic. But I had more to lose than they did if I didn’t regain control of this situation—I’d have to explain why the animals died of PVC poisoning to the Bradys when they got home. Finally, after a tense couple of seconds, Maggie lost interest and she and her dizzy brood all wandered off, the chickens got distracted by random bug vibrations, and the snooty sistersheep gave me a bleat of contempt and disappeared. I didn’t care. I scooched the container back toward my fence, retrieved it with the grabbers, and brought the clamshell over for the win.

It was disgusting. All I had to show for my expertise and amazing courage was a snot-covered clam shell painted muddy brown with animal drool and dirt. And a filthy grabber that I once used to pull clean clothes out of the washing machine. I wasn’t even sure it could be salvaged after the way I’d humiliated it. Probably I’d just have to burn it at the stake.

Holding the plastic hostage at arm’s length, I scooped the broom up off the patio, and cradled the sacrificial grabber under my arm while I headed back inside. I shoved the clamshell deep inside the garbage can and washed my hands. Repeatedly.

Those pigs. I used to think a lot of Maggie, but she had really let me down this time. Drying my hands on a towel, I leaned back against the counter, exhausted and disheartened. I didn’t know when I’d ever been so disillusioned by a pig before.

Staring off into space, I blew out a breath.

“I’m so disappointed in Maggie,” I said, choking out the words. "I'm not sure I’ll ever enjoy eating sausage again.”

With thanks to Bill Harrison for permission to use his hilarious photo seen above. The original can be viewed at this link: I went bowling - everyone was impressed | I thought this was… | Flickr