Life and Death on the Farm
Life & Death on the Farm
Copyright 2006, Harris B. McKee
INDUS, MN.—Wade Pilloud, a principal in Indus, Minn., has resigned and could face felony charges after he shot and killed two orphaned kittens on school property within earshot of students; Pilloud said the shooting endangered no one and “I am not a cat hater: I did not want the animals to suffer.” --Arkansas Democrat Gazette, October 16, 2006.
Iowa farm life was brutal by today’s standards and many of my early experiences that remain vividly implanted in my memory today dealt with life and death of animals and people. Today’s society judges life differently.
Our farm straddled U.S. Highway 65/69, the main route between Minneapolis and Kansas City so there was lots of traffic going through our farm. There also was considerable farm traffic crossing the road.. Some of the cross traffic was organized as when we took our herd of Milking Shorthorn dairy cows across in the morning to the pasture on the east side or brought them back for milking in the evening. Even those trips entailed watching for a break in traffic and then stopping (at least, they usually stopped) any vehicles that arrived during the crossing.
Other crossings involved just a person or tractor or horse drawn wagon; these were the ones that endangered our dogs because one time too often, they were catching up or trying to join the fun on the other side of the road when a vehicle interfered. We had a succession of dogs, often a pup from a neighbors mixed breed litter. They were affectionate and protective. I remember one friend who refused to wrestle with me because my dog participated too vigorously nipping him as we rolled on the grass. But they weren’t well trained or smart enough on their own to avoid the traffic. Perhaps, if we’d had my Grandpa Reel’s skill in dog training, we’d have been more successful but my brother and I didn’t know anything about training dogs and our father was involved with the big picture of grain and livestock farming. In our early years this process of getting a new dog and enjoying them while they survived was our routine.
Some other occasions were not routine. My cousins, Wayne and Brenton, had alerted me to the danger that Tom cats held for kittens, that they were given to dispatching the little kittens apparently to avoid future challenges to their domain. For some reason they didn’t differentiate between male and female kittens; in today’s jargon, the female kittens were just part of the collateral damage. With that for background, one day when I was 12 or 14 as I was forking out manure in the “Horse” barn, I suddenly was alerted by a sound in the corner of the barn where a cat had a new litter of kittens. There was our Tom cat, the one that fed with the other cats in the barn night and morning. He was attacking the kittens. And I attacked the Tom with the vengeance of an enraged farm boy. We had lots of baling wire around;[1] I grabbed a piece, formed a noose and tightened it until he expired. Based on current political correctness and laws to judge the clipping above, I could now be sent to a detention center for such behavior but it seemed like the only right thing to do.
My combat with the raccoon in the chicken house was a very different episode. As I was growing up, we were in a continual war with the foxes and raccoons that seemed to feel that any chick or pullet was part of their intended diet. Sometimes they were as interested in the challenge as the food; for example, one morning we found about 25 midsize pullets that had been massacred during the night and left. On the evening of my encounter, we heard a noise in the hen house. This was unusual; our problems usually took place around the brooder house.
I raced to the hen house, turned on the light and picked up a three foot angle-iron.[2] Just as I looked into the shoulder high roosts, a full sized raccoon, seemingly the size of a small bear, jumped off the roost against me. It was my first and only hand-to-hand life-and-death encounter. I swung the angle-iron; the raccoon stumbled. I swung again; he snarled. I swung again and it was over. I had saved the hens and survived myself.
Just as experience with animals molded my youth, so did two death experiences associated with the highway. The Iowa Highway Patrol had assigned two patrolmen to the section of U.S. 65/69 between Des Moines and Indianola. They may have had a broader territory but that stretch was where we were acquainted with Rex Phares and Joe Chocholka. One morning about 7:00 a.m. while doing chores, I spotted a car in the ditch in the field south of the house. I ran down to the car and arrived about the time that Rex Phares arrived. The driver had run off the road and hit a hackberry tree. The tree was comparatively undamaged, though it would be lost a year later when the road was widened, but the car and the man were in bad shape. Rex, said, “McKee, watch me,” as he removed the man’s wallet. He wanted a witness that he was only checking the identification and not removing money. At that time, a 14 year old’s witness would probably been perfectly acceptable in our county. The ambulance arrived shortly and the man was carried away. I don’t remember whether he survived but as far as I was concerned he had succumbed.
Two or three years later, a car pulled into our barnyard one hot Sunday afternoon. A man with the reddest face that I remembered got out and asked if I would help change his tire. He had struggled with his flat tire for some time down the highway before giving up and coming for help. I was pretty good with a jack and had a good cross tire wrench so changing the tire was easy for me. When I finished and stood up, he emptied his pocket of change and gave me all of it, about eighty-five cents. He then collapsed beside the car. I ran to the house and had my folks call the ambulance and the Warren County sheriff. The ambulance arrived but too late. They were kind and told me that he had been dead when he hit the ground; I couldn’t have helped. It was small consolation, for sure, but I gave the eighty-five cents back.
[1] One day when I needed a piece, Uncle Ryle said, “Just run across the lot. You’ll trip on a piece before you get across.”
[2] The angle-iron was actually a crossbar from our manure spreader.