Last spring one of my ewes showed up at the barn with a gutful of new pasture and a pained expression on her face. I lunged for the Bloat-Eze bottle, gave her a big snort of mineral oil and put her in a pen by herself. Next morning she was standing in the corner with her head down.
The rest of the sheep were fine. Why just this one?
I called Jason, my vet, but I already knew his answer:
“Who knows why, Dan? The rule is that a down sheep is a dead sheep. And the first sign of a down sheep is an upright sheep in a corner with her head down.”
I have never been able to wrap my head around that rule and my medicine closet has more potions than Lucretia Borgia’s poison cabinet. I went through another three days of quack veterinary on my own and the ewe died.
I really hate losing stuff. It always makes me feel guilty and stupid and lazy because I assume it must have been something I did wrong.
“You guys are all the same,” says Jason. “You always think it’s your fault and it almost never is. Stuff dies. There’s something like 200 things that can go wrong with a sheep and you’ve only seen maybe a dozen ailments over 25 years. That’s not bad. You’ve only scratched the surface.”
I asked him how he copes with all the death he sees every day in his practice.
“This is why I only do large animals,” he said. “It’s easier to form an emotional cocoon when the animals have a clear commercial purpose and are not your pets. It doesn’t mean you can abuse them or not care about them, but it helps me stay sane when I see animals suffering and dying every day.”
This is not an idle question. Small animal vets now have one of the highest suicide rates among professionals in North America. They have a charitable group that runs a hotline to help vets suffering dark thoughts.
I’m not sure if Jason has read Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or any of the ancient Stoics but his advice is very similar. Hold the things you love at a distance and practice living without them. Try to live in the moment.
“You have to live by rules and use logic,” says Jason. “I think men do this more naturally than women, which is one of the reasons we are hard to live with. You learn to separate yourself from the outcome and accept the limits of what can be done. One of those limits has to be the financial cost.”
With a pet there are no such limits and no emotional cocoon. Small animal practices now routinely use heroic measures borrowing heavily from human medicine even though the outcome often differs only slightly from large animal practices. The higher the emotional investment, the higher the risk of despondency and feelings of hopelessness when things go downhill and into a hole in the ground.
My own rule is that we must treat ourselves as gently as we do these dumb creatures of the field that surround us. We latch gates and try to release onto reasonably dry pastures. We vaccinate, we worm, we trim hooves regularly, we protect water sources. We try to make sure they endure only one bad day, which is a lot better than any vet or writer gets. All of these efforts should earn us the right not to take it personally when a sheep pries a hole in the fence, takes her friend into the nearest outbuilding and says, “I wonder what’s toxic in here, Marj?”
I did once save a purebred Suffolk ram I bought from a great sheep man, Bill Batty of Meaford, Ontario. The ram got sick the very next day after he was delivered and Bill could not explain the situation apart from observing this often happened when the cheque had not yet cleared the bank. He said he would bring me another ram. But I dosed and injected and drenched and rolled that animal and eventually saved him. Miracle Max we called him. Bill agreed it was a miracle and claimed he had never seen a case like it. He said I had a gift.
“You are a healer,” he said.
I went around thinking I was a healer for about six months until I went out one morning to find Miracle Max lying dead beside the feeder. Cause of death unknown.