My first deployment in 2010 with The Humane Society of the US (HSUS) was a little different from past deployments (e.g., Hawaiian Caper, Texas Tears). This time I was sent to North Carolina, a state with strong protection legislation for companion animals. Not that that mattered, since we were being deployed to help with a farm animal cruelty case. Instead of the usual suspects (cats and dogs), this time I was going to be working with horses and animals in the human food chain. The conditions in which these animals had been housed were deplorable: it was basically a junkyard.
If you know anything about animal welfare groups, you know how much angst there is within the groups themselves when it comes to food animals. Should we eat them? Shouldn’t we eat them? Should we only eat certain ones? Should we eat only ones raised under certain conditions? I can only tell you that a deployment, such as this case, is not the place to resolve any of those questions. The job is to make sure that the animals involved receive humane treatment while they were in our care, and hopefully when they leave our care. Period.
By the time I arrived in North Carolina, the animals had been moved to the Wilson County fairgrounds. Julie arrived to pick me up late in the afternoon at the airport, where she drove in an endless loop, waiting for me to emerge. I was stuck watching the luggage carousel go in its endless loop, waiting for my luggage to emerge. I had no cell phone reception in the bowels of the airport, so I couldn’t tell her that I had, yet again, been forced to file a lost luggage report. Since I seem to have a “Lose this Person’s Luggage” magnet on my forehead, I know to pack the clothes I will need and other necessary items in my carry-on bag. After much delay, we were finally on the freeway, headed for our hotel. There would be more delays: the woman who lives in our GPS unit turned out to be a habitual liar, telling us (among other things) to take a freeway that doesn’t exist. We got really tired of hearing her say “recalculating” in her smug, sarcastic tone. I’m the sarcastic one here, not her.
As we drove along, I asked Julie, “So fill me in on the job. What time do we need to be at the fairgrounds in the morning?” I then made the mistake of taking a swig of water from my bottle.
“Oh, about 9 o’clock,” she said.
I just about spewed my water all over the dashboard. “Nine o’clock! You’ve got to be kidding!” Keep in mind that I’m used to working my tail off on these deployments. Our first day in Texas started at 8am and didn’t end until 3am the next morning. One morning in Hawaii started at 4am, so we could arrive on site before sun-up in an attempt to catch birds before they awoke.
I started laughing and asked, “Why so late?”
“Because the pigs sleep in,” she said.
At that point I lost it. “The pigs sleep in? Now I’ve heard everything.” We were both laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. I even called a friend and fellow National Disaster Animal Response Team (NDART) member in California to share this tale with her.
“Seriously,” Julie said, “it’s so cold in the morning that the pigs won’t get up and eat. They tried going at 7, then 7:30, then 8, then 8:30 and finally found that 9 is the time that works.”
Okay, 9 o’clock works for me! Thank you, lazy pigs!
Another NDART volunteer was due to arrive later that night and was assigned to my room. Linda was from Massachusetts and arrived at about midnight. I awoke to hear her banging her way in. The silent type she is not.
I jumped out of bed and went to the door, first, to make sure it was her and not some random weirdo, and second, to give her a hand getting her luggage into the room.
She threw her bags on her bed and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Oh, damn!”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It’s just that I zip-tied my bag closed and the knife I need to cut through the zip-ties is inside,” she said, disgusted with herself.
I started laughing (couldn’t help myself). “Well, I can’t help you because my bag with my knife inside is still flying around somewhere. You’ll just have to wait until morning and get scissors from the front desk, unless you want to go back down there now.”
I got back into my bed, told her “Good Night” and put a pillow over my head. Despite the pillow, I heard a strange noise and finally turned back over to investigate. There was Linda, up on her bed on her hands and knees, bent over her luggage, chewing through the zippy ties to get to her knife. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to be very, very frightened. From then on I called her Zippy.
The next morning we were greeted at the fairgrounds by this perky fellow.
Next I met a dog who belonged to Gerald, one of the fairgrounds’ employees.
We arrived at the very end of a nasty cold spell, so Mackenzie really needed that sweater!
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Julie and Zippy head for the horse barn
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We headed out to meet our charges. The goats, turkeys and geese had already been moved off-site. “All” we had to care for were 3 horses and 30+ hogs.
We were told that none of the animals were “tame” when they first came to the fairgrounds. The horses had to be put into a squeeze chute to be haltered and have blood drawn. They still couldn’t manage to get a halter on the yearling for fear she would break her legs from the fight she was putting up.
Clearly the horses had been fed, but it didn’t appear that any grooming was part of their daily routine. Get a load of those dreadlocks!
Next we headed to the pig barn to check out the situation there.
For pigs who didn’t want to have anything to do with humans a few days earlier, these guys were quickly learning the drill. Still, it paid to always be cautious, because a few never did come around and would just as soon bite you as look at you. It went from one extreme to the other. The first big sow in the barn would drop like a rock when you started to scratch her because she wanted a belly rub.
There were a dozen piglets.
This one was Rowdy’s favorite. Could it be because their facial hair matches?
We had to learn the daily drill, part of which consisted of cleaning stalls. All of the waste had to be hauled to a big dumpster out back.
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Dave to Julie: Here's how you work the dumpster
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Dave, another NDART volunteer who was scheduled to leave the following day, was very helpful in showing us the ropes, but he was not going to put down that cup of coffee. Why he was not wearing a coat in those freezing temperatures was beyond me.
Zippy was a champ at moving manure. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
Our days settled into a routine that went like this. When we arrived at the fairgrounds in the morning, the first thing we had to do was take the water hose out of the barn where it had been stored the night before to keep it from freezing. We connected it to the faucet closest to the animals’ barns (which had no water piped to them) and then turned on the water valve in the ground (which we had turned off the night before to keep the pipes from freezing).
Julie would head for the horse barn to take care of feeding and watering, while Zippy and I would start taking care of the pigs.
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Food, food , did somebody say food?
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The pigs would start squealing as soon as we walked into the barn, having learned the routine and thus knowing breakfast was on its way. We would fill a wheelbarrow with their feed and I would push it down the aisle while she would scoop the food to them. As we worked our way through the barn, the squeals would turn into contented grunts from happy pigs.
Next we would begin cleaning the water buckets, changing them out completely where necessary. Since they were 5-gallon buckets, this was the hardest part. Zippy was the strongest of the three of us and had the easiest time lifting a full bucket up and over into the stalls. By the end of the week, Julie and I resorted to cleaning, filling and carrying the buckets, while Zippy lifted them into the stalls. You have to find your niche.
Pigs don’t give a hoot about keeping their water bucket clean and some were serial tippers. For those we tied their buckets to the stall wall, which was inconvenient when it came time to remove the bucket for cleaning, but at least it kept water in front of the pig.
Every day we cleaned some stalls. It was most fun when we cleaned the piglets’ stalls. I recommended that we just let the little darlings loose to run around the aisle that circled all the stalls (but was still enclosed in the barn so they couldn’t escape). My thought was that they needed a little exercise, like all babies.
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3 little pigs out for some fun
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They sure had fun! They scampered up and down the aisles, visiting the big pigs, spinning donuts and just generally having a good time. It allowed us time to clean each stall all the way down to the concrete and feel good knowing that they had a full bed of clean, dry straw when we put them back.
At noon it was snack time for the critters. Once again the pigs would jump up and set up a chorus of squeals and grunts, knowing that this time they would enjoy a scoop of corn. And once again, as we worked our way through the barn, they would quiet down and enjoy their treat.
Julie, having never spent much time around horses, was enamored of them. I told her she had to stop spending all day giving them handfuls of sweet feed (no wonder they liked her!), so she bought them a big bag of carrots. Much healthier treat!
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Julie and her new best friend
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The yearling was often in defensive mode, since she was low man on the totem pole in this little herd of 3 horses.
Late in the afternoon was dinner time, which was a repeat of breakfast. Then we disconnected the hose and dragged it back into the barn to protect it for the night. By the end of the week, the weather had warmed enough that it probably wasn’t really necessary to do that, but we did it anyway just to be safe.
Zippy and I decided we had to take our pictures with the giant rooster.
Lest you think we played cards between meal and snack times, there was much clean-up work to be done. Our motto is to leave any place we use in better shape than we found it. First we tackled the stalls where the goats had been kept and cleaned them.
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goat barn - clean as a whistle
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Then we cleaned the barn where the fowl had been housed and swept it clean. Julie made sure that all of the tables were sparkling clean.
The only little “hiccup” in the week came one evening when we were closing things up to leave for the day. Julie and I were tucking the horses in for the night and closing the door at the front of their barn. It was one of the segmented, roll-down, garage-type doors. I reached up to tug on the rope to get it started. That brought it down a few inches and it stopped. Then I reached up with my left hand to pull it a bit farther. To do this I had to stick my fingers in the grooves between two segments. As I did this, Julie did what any normal, thinking person would do. She reached up and grabbed the handle in the center of the door, which was there for just this purpose, and pulled down on it. The door closed … with my fingers in it.
I’ll have you know I screamed like a little school girl!
“What?!” shouted Julie.
“Open the door! My fingers!” I yelled at her.
“Oh my gosh!” she said as she opened the door. I took off for the pig barn, where I knew there was ice on some water buckets. Suffice it to say that I have some purple nails now. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a nail polish that quite matches the shade of purple that I am self-generating. Doesn’t matter, fingernails are overrated anyway.
Poor Julie kept apologizing, as if it were her fault. I kept telling her it was an accident and finally had to threaten her to get her to stop. It really was one of those unfortunate accidents that a bit more care on my part would have avoided.
The next morning, after we finished working with the pigs, I went to find Julie in the horse barn. She said, “I have to show you something. You’re going to laugh so hard!” She headed for the front of the barn. She pulled down the front door.
We both doubled over with laughter. How many times had I walked up to this closed door and not seen this? I had put my fingers right at the “Pinch Point” and voilá! They got pinched! Apparently I was not the first person to do this, since someone had felt obligated to paint a not-to-be-read-by-me warning on the door.
One afternoon this gentleman (below) showed up at the fairgrounds. We are quite used to members of the public coming to see the animals in these situations, sometimes wanting to adopt or buy them.
It was very difficult to understand his speech, and he finally managed to tell us that he had had a stroke in August. He then went on to tell us that he was the founder (years ago) of one of the local animal protection agencies. He told us that he had two poodles and that when he had his stroke, upon waking up in the hospital the first thing he asked for was to see his dogs. He had come to the fairgrounds, he said, to see if he could offer his help. He said he couldn’t talk very well, but he was still able to use a pitchfork!
Most of the people we met were very nice and seemed to be glad that we were there to help. For the first time in my many deployments, however, I ran into someone who was not quite so pleased with our presence. We were at breakfast in the hotel one morning when a nicely dressed older gentleman, seeing Zippy and me in our HSUS t-shirts, approached us and asked, “May I have a moment of your time?”
“Certainly,” I responded.
“Ma’am, do you care at all about the people in Haiti?” he asked me. The earthquake in Haiti had happened on the day I had traveled to North Carolina.
“Absolutely I care about the people in Haiti,” I said.
“Then why aren’t you there helping them?” he asked, his voice rising as he started to tremble.
“Can I tell you what I do when I’m not doing this?” I started to ask him, intending to tell him that I spend a fair amount of time helping humans with my other volunteer work. But he wouldn’t even let me answer.
“Why don’t you go there and do some good, instead of being a trouble-make here?” he demanded.
By now he was so angry that it was clear I could not have an intelligent discussion with him so I just told him I was sorry he felt that way and walked away.
At the end of the week, all of the animals left the fairgrounds for new digs. The courts decided that the owner could keep his animals, but not at his own place. He had to find new, appropriate housing for all of them, or give them away, or sell them. He was mostly interested in keep the pigs, because they had the greatest market value. All the other animals went to new homes where they will be kept as pets. There will further hearings regarding the cruelty charges at some future date.
We spent the weekend cleaning the horse barn and pig barn. Thankfully we got some help from the fairgrounds crew or we’d still be there hauling filthy straw and shavings.
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trailers we filled multiple times
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The last thing to do was pressure wash floors and walls. The place sparkled.
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the other end of the horse barn
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pig barn - after pressure washing
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Even the wheelbarrows were clean!
It was with mixed emotions that I left my North Carolina assignment. It wasn’t tied up all nice and neat like previous cases, but realistically speaking, you’re never going to turn all the people in the world into vegetarians. Heck, I can’t even turn myself into one, although I am taking baby steps in that direction! But how nice it would be if we could raise our meat humanely.
