Where the Blind Horse Sings
Kathy Stevens
Kathy Stevens founded Catskill Animal Sanctuary, CAS, to encourage the concern for farm animals. She takes in abused and injured animals at the Sanctuary, nurturing them back to health and instilling them in the community. Here is one story.
RAMBO THE SHEEP ARRIVED full of testosterone and rage. While his terrified harem of fourteen ewes cowered in the corner when we entered their stall, Rambo evidently thought his job was to kill us. It was a job he seemed to relish. "You're in our space, so now I have to kill you" was what his behavior suggested. He'd rear up on his hind legs and come full tilt at whatever hapless human was assigned to feed the sheep, his head lowered just enough that the base of his massive horns would slam into the thighs of his unfortunate feeder. So violent and volatile was he that we began to compare the bruises on our legs. Eventually, a volunteer named Matt won first prize with a shoebox-sized black-and-blue that spread over both thighs and made walking difficult.
An eventual legal victory granted CAS permanent custody of Rambo and his friends. The ewes and their many offspring were adopted by their delighted foster families, while we rushed to the phone to schedule Rambo's neutering—a desperately-needed procedure that couldn't be performed until he was legally ours. We hoped that our testosterone-free boy would renounce violence, but we were sorely—pun intended—disappointed.
After over a year without progress, we were more than a little discouraged. Consulting sheep breeders exacerbated the situation, since the consensus was that "Jacob" rams were "highly emotional" and "extremely dangerous." One breeder was alarmed that we had Rambo, and advised us to "put him down immediately" before someone got hurt. While I decided not to tell her about the bruises, I struggled with whether, for our own safety, it was indeed time to give up on Rambo. In two years, we had experienced dozens of transformations: broken bodies and broken spirits made whole again. This would be our first failure.
Rambo's metamorphosis was as subtle as winter becoming spring. First came a letting-go of all the behaviors that protected him and his herd, which I believe were also expressions of anger about the conditions in which he'd been forced to live. Though Rambo quickly learned that at CAS he could count on tasty meals twice a day, spacious pasture and shelter, and kindness from his new humans, his responses were conditioned by years of deprivation. And then one day they were gone. To our utter delight, Rambo let go of anger and fully embraced the ethos of CAS. I first saw this on a cold November night.
Before we built our shelter to accommodate turkeys, our two big birds—blind Cliff and his protector Chuck—were taken out each morning to a spacious enclosure shaded by willow trees. There, the two pals would enjoy much that turkeys in the wild enjoy: grass and trees, bugs and grubs, the chance to stretch their legs in the warm sun, to preen lazily and relax with each other. We'd bring them back to their stall in the big barn at the end of each day. One bitter, wet evening, Murphy and I rushed to the barn for our nightly animal check. Rambo lay in the barn aisle just outside Dino's stall; we had long abandoned our effort to enclose him in his own space. (Rambo would literally ram the heavy door that kept him in until it either fell down altogether or enough of the heavy 2' by 6' boards it was made of loosened sufficiently for him to shove them out of the way and escape. He had been confined for far too much of his life. He simply would not tolerate it any longer.)
On this night, Rambo, stood and looked me straight in the eye, wanting a treat. I obliged with a pear procured from the kitchen, then walked over to check on Chester.
As I did each evening, I turned around at the end of the long aisle and called good night to my friends. Like my singing to the cows on many nights, it was a ritual that I didn't dare perform in front of any human. Mimicking the Waltons, I actually called out the name of every single barn resident: "Good night, Belle! Good night, Claude! Good night, Sammy! Good night, Hampton!" and so on.
Before the first name left my lips, Rambo charged up to me, stopped dead, looked up with his great yellow eyes, and bleated. "Something's wrong," he said—no matter that what he said was "baaahh," because his communication was perfectly and instantly clear.
"What?" I asked him. "Show me what's wrong."
The great proud beast marched halfway down the aisle and made a sudden ninety-degree turn into the empty turkey stall.
Oh my god, the turkeys! In the frenzy of a hectic day, we'd forgotten to bring the turkeys in.
Stunned by what I'd witnessed, but concerned about the birds, I'd have to absorb the import of this moment later.
I thanked our guard sheep effusively and ran out to the turkey yard, accompanied by Rambo and Murphy. Chuck cowered at one end of the long enclosure, his feathers drenched, his head tucked in a futile effort to stay warm. Poor Cliff, meanwhile, was outside their pen, motionless in the driveway in a cold, shallow puddle.
"Oh, my poor boys, I am so sorry," I whispered as I approached Cliff. Scooping the animal into my arms, I carried him into his dry, safe space, Murphy and Rambo at my side the entire time. The three of us repeated the process with Chuck. I toweled off the birds, kissed them on their rubbery heads, checked their food and water, and closed the door behind me.
It was time to thank Rambo. In the darkened, hushed barn aisle, I sat on my knees and looked deeply into his eyes. "Thank you, Rambo. Thank you for telling me about the turkeys. What a good job you did...what a good, good job." I took his face in my hands and massaged his woolly cheeks.
What had just happened? So much was revealed in that single communication. That a sheep was aware that the turkeys were outside were impressive enough. That he figured out how to tell a human blew me away. But most astoundingly, Rambo had just shown concern for two animals of a different species and had known that I would help them. I took his face in my hands—he allowed this—as tears began to fall. "Okay, boy," I said, looking into those eyes of his. "If this is who you are, you've got a big job ahead of you."
I received my graduate degree from Tufts University in 1989. In the three years of the program, I read over a hundred books by noted public-policy experts, politicians, historians, sociologists, teachers, and philosophers. The influence of a few of them—John Dewey, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Kozol—on my thinking about education was profound. But somehow, the lesson I'd just received from a sheep far surpassed in its impact anything I'd read, discussed, or debated at one of the country's top universities. As brilliant and instructive as these thinkers' insights were, nothing they wrote challenged what I believed about teaching and learning or about the role of education in the lives of children. Nothing I read told me that my core beliefs were based on a false set of assumptions, on naïveté or ignorance.
But in a darkened barn on a bitter early winter night, a sheep who finally believed he belonged with us did exactly that.