As Simon recovered and wove himself into the heart of the farm, I kept thinking about the farmer. I knew he’d been convicted of animal neglect and fined $125. But other than that, I knew nothing much about him.
A neighbor of the farmer’s e-mailed me and asked if she could come by the farm to see Simon and meet me. She said it was important to her to see how he was now.
Three days later, Jeannie drove her battered old Toyota pickup into the driveway. I saw it was a farm truck—the straw, jugs, chains, and bits were unmistakable.
Jeannie looked like a horse lover to me—she had that tall, lean, and muscled look. I guessed her to be in her late thirties. Her handshake was strong, but I could tell she was anxious.
She said she had seen Simon when he first came to the farm five or six months before the raid. He was tied up by the barn, and then he just disappeared. She hadn’t seen him since. She had grown up on a farm near Rochester, and had two donkeys and loved them dearly, and she had a feeling something was wrong. She never saw Simon working or grazing or being fed or brushed.
She had been worried about him, and she felt guilty that she hadn’t called the police. When she saw them arrive with the trailer, she guessed he might be dead.
She looked around the farm, and then we went to the barn. Simon and Lulu and Fanny, all of whom had come to appreciate treat-bearing strangers, came down to check her out and sniff her pockets. Jeannie knew what she was doing. She asked permission, then reached into the pouch in her jacket—horse people always have those—and held out a cookie in an open palm to each donkey. She looked Simon over quickly and then smiled. “Good job,” she said. “From what I hear, this is a lot different than he looked up there.…”
She tickled the side of Simon’s nose, which donkeys love.
What was the farmer like? I asked. She shook her head at first, and then shrugged. Country people never like to talk about their neighbors, especially to strangers. Neighbors are important, and so is their goodwill.
Well, she said finally, he was a quiet man, not friendly, not hostile. If you needed some help, he was happy to provide it, but he never wanted to talk much, and she never saw much of the son or wife. There was to be no socializing, no visiting. She got that message and respected it. She had seen some horses around. She thought he must have been trading some or buying them. They were out in the pasture behind the house. They had a small pole barn for shelter and looked strong and healthy, she said.
She had noticed things deteriorating a bit around the farm; she guessed he was having a rough time. She said she always thought of him as a decent, hardworking man, but obviously she had been wrong about that. No decent man could have allowed an animal to suffer like that.
“They should have put him in jail,” she said, quietly.
I nodded but didn’t respond. After Jeannie left, I went out to the pasture to brush Simon and check on his legs. I kept thinking about what she had said.
Was that so? I hear that judgment often—the idea that people who mistreat animals ought to go to jail. I also hear people say they do not trust anyone who does not love an animal. That there is something wrong with people like that.
I didn’t feel that way. I have good friends who are not drawn to animals, and they are good people. I think the love of animals has become a religion in America, a faith. If you look at the news, you sometimes see an angry and violent country, but if that is so, animals are its soft place, its merciful heartbeat.
The definition of mercy is “the compassionate or kindly forbearance shown toward an offender, an enemy, or other person in one’s power.” The definition of compassion is “a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for those who are afflicted by misfortune.” Compassion is the strong desire to alleviate the suffering of another.
Wouldn’t the farmer be entitled to some of both? Or had his treatment of Simon forfeited that right?
Mercy and compassion are deeply ingrained in the human relationship with animals. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the animal rescue movement, locating animals in need, transporting them around the country, rehoming and rehabilitating them. There are thousands of “no-kill” shelters all over the country where animals spend their lives being cared for and fed rather than euthanized.
In America, the Left and the Right agree on almost nothing, but they do agree when it comes to loving animals and treating them well. It is difficult to think of any single issue or movement that is so unquestioned and supported as the love and care of animals in need.
Yet there is no national rescue group for people—no consensus on how to help the poor or if they should be helped at all. Social service budgets have been slashed all over the country as Wall Street bonuses soar into the billions. I am not a political person. I just wonder at the contradiction, and how narrow the prism of mercy and compassion can be.
For me, compassion—like writing—comes from moving to the edge of my comfort zone. I know that people who profess to love animals seem to show little mercy to humans sometimes.
I’ve seen the mobs online raging about cruel humans and abused dogs. I was first introduced to the great numbers of people who attack human beings in the name of loving animals when I wrote A Good Dog about my decision to euthanize my border collie Orson after he bit three people.
Digital mobs rarely kill people, but I see little mercy and compassion in their swarming. There are thousands of pages on social media devoted to horror stories about people and animals, and the rage I sometimes see there is breathtaking.
Where did I stand in all of this? Animals have made me better every time I opened myself to them. Could I feel this way about people? Learn to be more patient, less judgmental?
I think I knew the minute I met Simon that I had to go and meet the farmer, see his farm, try to understand what had happened. My heart broke for Simon and what he had suffered, but he was also a mirror. In feeling for him I had to also feel for the man who had done this to him. They were not separate things; they were parts of the same thing. Simon and I and the farmer were all connected—part of the adventure of life, the theater of chance.
I suddenly saw that I could not possibly be compassionate toward Simon if I did not at least try to understand what had allowed this abuse to happen. If we can do this to animals, we can to it to others, and ultimately we are doing it to ourselves. Donkeys have always carried messages to human beings, from Jesus to the Kabbalah to Simon in my pasture. Simon was shaping—perhaps reshaping—my heart.
It was just not enough for me to condemn and judge and dismiss. That was not, to me, the path to being a fully realized human. I didn’t want to run away from what the farmer had done. I wanted to run to it, to put myself in his shoes.
One warm July morning I drove out to the small town north of Albany where Simon had lived. I had seen the address in the paper when the farmer had appeared before the town court and been fined. Since the recession hit in 2008, animal control officers reported the growing problem of people who could no longer afford to take care of their animals—dogs and cats dumped on the roads or brought to shelters, farm animals without enough food or proper treatment of sickness and injuries.
Many small farms were going under, and as farmers struggled to stay afloat, they cut corners wherever they could. It wasn’t, I was told by a farmer friend, a decision anyone felt good about; it was a process that devoured the human spirit. Quite often, these farms had been in one family for generations. No one wanted to be the one to break that legacy. No one wanted to let go.
I had been a reporter for a long time in big cities—Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlantic City. I am not afraid to approach people who didn’t want to talk to me, and I had learned how to talk to people, even when it wasn’t comfortable.
Still, I was anxious. It could not have been easy for this man, having the state police come and haul his donkey away and charge him with neglect in front of all of his neighbors. He would not be happy to see me. He was unlikely to want to talk to me. But I was more curious than nervous. I wanted to see how I felt around the man. I loved Simon, and it was hard not to look at his awful suffering and not be angry.
It took an hour and a half to get to Simon’s old farm. I could see it was not and had never been a dairy farm; it was a crop farm. There was one small red barn, no big cow barns, no silos, no broad and sweeping pastures.
There was an old farmhouse next to the barn, and I saw some rickety wooden corral fences, the kind used to contain horses. I saw three horses standing by the gate. They looked a little thin to me, but not alarmingly so.
A dirt roadway led out to some fields in the back—one cornfield and some hay fields. The farmhouse was raggedy, the white paint peeling off of the front, the shutters broken and cracked, gutters falling off of the roof. The old gardens by the front of the house were overgrown and looked as if they hadn’t been tended in years.
I walked down the road away from the house to see if that gave me a better view of the pen in back where Simon was kept, and it did open up as I walked farther south.
I took out my binoculars, which I was carrying in my camera bag, and looked through a break in the pine trees that blocked the view from the front. I saw the pen right away. It looked like an old hog pen to me; the wire mesh fence was tall and looked sturdy. The wooden pallets—the only shelter Simon had—came up in a steeple about four feet off of the ground.
To get shade or protection from the rain, Simon would have had to lie down and stick his head under the pallets. No wonder his skin had been blackened by rain rot. Outside of the pallet shelter, there was room for him to stand up and turn around, but not much more. There was no grass in the pen, so his only food would have been the hay thrown to him. It was a death sentence, that pen, back out of sight of the farmhouse. The farmer didn’t have to even look at Simon, and might have already thought him to be dead.
Simon could have been in the horse corral. There was obviously some hay around; there was plenty of brush and bark out behind the house, for that matter. Donkeys can eat a lot of things if they are hungry—even if they are not. In much of the world, this would have been their fare.
That pen was no place to put a healthy male donkey. It was a prison, a death trap, the equine equivalent of a concentration camp. And I remembered that this was the first thing I had thought of when I saw Simon—he was a concentration camp donkey.
I walked back to the car and put my camera bag in the back before walking to the house. Bringing it would have been provocative and foolish. The farmer might want to talk to me, but who knows how irate he would become if I took a picture of him.
I stopped to take a few breaths. I didn’t want to be angry. I hadn’t come to confront him, but to understand him.
I walked up to the front door and knocked. I heard some footsteps, and a thin, haggard-looking woman in her late forties opened the door. Only her head and her arm were visible. She looked as if she was not expecting good news or friendly visitors.
“Yes?” she asked without any hint of a smile or introduction.
I told her who I was—that I had the donkey that had been taken off of their farm and that I wondered if her husband might be home. I wasn’t a reporter, I said. I was a book writer. I was just trying to understand what had happened; I wanted to hear it from him.
She was anxious, I could see that, and was not going to say anything without her husband’s approval. He was out back, by the barn, she said. “But he won’t talk to you. Couple of reporters called after the police came, and he wouldn’t talk to them, either.”
I tried to explain that I wasn’t here to judge her or her husband, but did not get that chance. “Out back by the barn,” she said, closing the door.
That told me that she was afraid, which suggested her husband might be a scary man. I’ll confess to having a softer image in my mind. I was trying to set up my theory about mercy by imagining the farmer as a sad and tired soul—cruel not because he was a bad person, but an overwhelmed one. A man in his tattered overalls, just trying to keep up.
When I rounded the back of the house, he saw me and I saw him at the same time. From his face, I guessed he knew who I was. He was surprised but not shocked; wary but not angry. I’m sure he knew where Simon had been taken, and it would have been easy enough for him to find out what I looked like.
He stood up, backed away from the lawn mower engine he had been oiling, and waited for me to come up to him. I offered my hand, but he held up his, which were covered with oil.
He also appeared to be in his late forties. He wore farmer’s clothes, dirty jeans, and a work shirt, but also a pair of incongruously clean pointed leather shoes—definitely not farmer shoes.
He had a full head of jet-black hair, some of which was dangling over his forehead. He kept blowing it out of his eyes. In a different context, I would have tagged him as a lawyer. His hands were dirty and rough like a farmer’s, though. He was hard to read.
I introduced myself and said, “Sorry to come here unannounced, but I didn’t think you’d talk to me if I called. I’m not here to judge you or cause trouble.”
He stood straighter, listened to me, wiped his hands on his jeans. “I’m not going to talk to you,” he said. “My lawyer says not to talk to anybody. I’m not going to talk to you.”
I took note of the fact that he didn’t ask about Simon or seem to want to know anything about him. I volunteered that Simon was doing well, he was okay, it had turned out all right.
I went back to my old reporter’s bag of tricks. “Listen, a lot of people had bad things to say about you. I’m a writer and I’m sure I will write about this one day. I don’t need to add to the bad things. I’m just curious to know what happened, if you can guide me a bit. Then I’ll be out of your way and out of your life.”
He looked weary. His eyes seemed cold to me. If he was feeling any emotion he wasn’t showing it.
I told him I wasn’t going to quote him by name, or reveal his identity or true location. I didn’t even need to quote him directly; I just wanted to know his side, to know what had happened.
Most people in conflict with the law feel aggrieved and mistreated, and want to tell their side of things, want their story to get out. He hadn’t thrown me out yet, which he could have done right away. I had the sense he wanted to tell me something.
There was a lengthy pause, which I respected. The two of us stood in the back of his farmhouse for the longest time saying nothing. I knew then that he was going to tell me something. Like so many others I had interviewed, he had been waiting for someone to ask him.
He didn’t apologize for Simon. He didn’t grovel. He said he had never wanted Simon, but to get the horses from the Vermont farmer, he had to take him as well. The farmer pressured him and so he took him. He had a stallion in the corral; he couldn’t put Simon, who was also a male, in with him. So he put him in the back pen, a former hog pen, for the moment. It was just supposed to be temporary.
But it stretched out, he said. The farm had been failing for several years; he was about to lose it. He couldn’t buy grain on credit, and didn’t have enough pasture for his own hay. Last year, he couldn’t buy real Christmas presents for his wife and son. The phone rang all day with creditors, and he was trying to make some money buying and selling horses. There was a market overseas.
He barely had enough food for the horses, he said, barely enough for his family. He expected the bank would foreclose on the farm soon; the only thing that kept it alive was that the bank didn’t want it any more than he did. He never thought he would be in this position, he said. He never thought he would be so up against it.
I said I would leave, but that I had one last question. “I’m sure you’ve got a rifle,” I said. “Why didn’t you just shoot him?”
“I couldn’t even look at him,” he said. “I fed him as long as I could. I can’t talk about this, really. I’ve said too much.” He asked me to leave. I nodded and said good-bye.
The last thing the man said to me was, “I thought he was dead.”
I did not get what I was looking for that morning. There were no sobs, no declarations of guilt, no pleas for mercy or understanding. I suppose I had hoped he would break down in tears and I would pat him on the shoulder and nod and say, I understand, I understand.
My ideas about compassion were changing, perhaps even crumbling, by the minute. Compassion was not one thing but many, and it moved around, one second hovering over the farmer, then his son, then Simon.
As I drove back to my farm, I went over the encounter a dozen times. The farmer was defeated, worn down, humiliated and, now, trapped. He couldn’t take care of his family. He couldn’t keep his farm. He was beyond caring about a hungry donkey. He couldn’t feed another animal he didn’t want and couldn’t sell. He was past caring what people thought, or what I thought.
A part of me wanted to slap the man, to wake him up. Get out of there, I wanted to say. Get your family and get out of there while there is something left of you. Go do something else. Start the work of being a human again.
But this was not for me to do. I remembered his dead eyes. He was beyond reach.
And then I thought about the farmer’s wife and son. All this commotion, all this work to save a donkey and bring him back to life.
What about those two? Who was going to worry about them?