The Little Sparrow Falls
My job is weird. I suppose, from a certain point of view, itâs also a little morbid. I donât go into too many details in this blog as a rule, but the short of it is that I am a veterinarian working in food safety and humane animal handling at a beef plant. The most common first question I get when people find out what I do is, âDo you have to watch the animals get killed?â. The answer is âyesâ.
It doesnât upset me. I can go on about that at length, but since this is only the prelude to the actual entry, let it suffice to say that I believe in the circle of life and I believe that as human beings we have the ability to be part of our own circle while minimizing suffering, maximizing benefit to both people and animals. I can only hope that someday my death is as humane and useful as the deaths of the animals I oversee on a daily basis.
A small part of my job is to ensure that adequate pest control is maintained at my posting. I spend much of my time in an open barn, and achieving pest control in these conditions is difficult. In spring, sparrows and starlings do their very best to build nests in the rafters and frame. In winter, mice come looking for shelter and a food source. Thereâs lots of corn available year round if the hungry donât care if it comes pre-processed.
In spring, an employee with a long pole comes through the barn a minimum of once a day looking for areas where nesting has started. Grass, sticks and feathers are knocked out of whatever niche the stuff has been accumulating in before eggs are laid. In the winter, mousetraps are set out to corral the less fortunate rodents. Itâs all a bit like putting your finger in the dike while floodwaters spill over the top of the dam. In all honesty, Iâm not always completely on board with the pest control program. I have been known to share my breakfast granola bar with the occasional hungry field mouse on cold January days, though it behooves me not to get caught doing it.
The circle of life for our domestic food animals is not the circle of life for the barn swallow or the field mouse, but because the habitats overlay each other, the wild can become caught in the domestic. The field mouse looks for warmth and ends up trapped outside of its natural food chain. The sparrow that manages to build her nest loses her eggs, not due to predation but in the name of food safety. It is a necessity that I understand, but pains me in a way that the processing of animals for human food does not. Death comes to all, but I feel a wrongness when it prevents a creature from re-entering its own natural circle.
Which brings me to Thursday. Iâve known for over a week that an English sparrow had successfully managed to build a nest high in the eaves. The first hint was the build up of guano about two feet behind where I usually stand to review animals that have newly arrived to the barn. The second, larger hint was the sound of baby birds screaming for Momma Sparrow to shove food down their throats. The sound of new life was something I looked forward to each day for the last week or so. Paraphrasing Jurassic Park, life found a way.
Thursday morning, the sound of baby birds was still in evidence. But there, on the wooden stairs that I used daily, was a small, cold chick, neck outstretched, eyes closed, first adult feathers just starting to appear on its wings. If the sparrows had elected to build their nest in the trees outside the barn, the not-yet-fledgling would have landed in grass and perhaps been attended to by its parents, and further perhaps stood a slight chance of survival. Landing on cold barren wood overnight, the chick died from exposure. It had become a small piece of flotsam that barn employees walked by without noticing.
Had the chick died outside, it would have been recycled as a scavengerâs supper or returned to the soil to feed bugs and fungi. The short life would have still meant something. Here, in the barn, its destiny was to be swept up into the trashcan or knocked into the pens bedding, both destined for the local dump. This ending was wrong on so many levels that I couldnât begin to number them.
I kept looking at that little body, fixated by the wrongness of the situation. I donned a blue nitrile glove, picked up the tiny body in my gloved hand, and then took the glove off, turning it inside out around the chick. I tied the wrist opening in a knot, and smuggled it out of the barn to hide in a drawer in my desk. At the end of the day, I took the tiny corpse home and dug a hole in my garden. I lined the hole with clematis flowers growing on a vine a few feet away, took the dead chick out of the glove, and placed it on top of the flower nest before filling the hole back in.
I can watch two thousand cows go to their collective fate in a single day and feel pride in the work I do. I can also cry over a dead sparrow chick that I never got to meet and feel that somehow I failed to do my job. I have no idea what that says about me.
Poor little thing.
Don’t buy into mission creep, Elfie. Misfortune is blind, and there’s only so much you’re responsible for.
As you may remember, I grew up on a cattle and sheep ranch. I have seen more ranch slaughters than I can remember. In general, animal rights activists and organizations anthropomorphize meat animals, often attributing human emotions to farm animals. The animals are not intelligent enough to even be fearful when the steer standing next to them is shot and falls to the ground. They turn to look at the fallen herd member, but they don’t even try to run away, and then it’s their turn to fall. What these animal rights folks don’t seem to understand is that if there were no market for the meat these animals provide, they would not exist in the world. There might be a few cattle and sheep in zoos, but the vast majority would have never been born. I don’t know what the answers to our world’s problems are, but blaming all of our environmental ills on meat animals seems far too simplistic to me.