For most people the first time they witness death is when they actually cause it. Stepping on, or squishing a bug. A seemingly insignificant gesture, snuffing out the life of some small insignificant creature. Seldom are children reprimanded for such an act, and in fact some are told to “step on the ant”. How sad it is that we do not learn at a younger age that all animals, even spiders and ants value their lives as much as we value ours.

Farm kids grow up seeing, or at least knowing, that their livestock are killed to become food. City kids never witness the death of the item on their plate. For many the first taste of death is when a pet dies or is killed.

For me the first pet death occurred before my time of memory, my parents had brought home two chicks at Easter. I know this is true because we had photos. But like 95% of Easter chicks, they probably didn’t survive more than 24 hours, if even that. All I know is we never had photo of us with actual pet Chickens, so I know they never got older.
The next time I watched death was when we went on summer holiday to “the lake”. Back then there were loads of tiny one inch young fish all over the place. We would scoop them up in buckets and attempt to keep them as “pets”… they died. Without oxygen in water, and the fact that a bucket of water got much warmer on a sunny day, than did a whole lake, the young fish never survived. We were young, and dare I say, stupid. Nobody told us what we were doing was wrong, or even cruel. We caused suffering and death, and although we were sorry, we carelessly did it again and again, as I know countless other children did, and still do. Nowadays the lake does not have as many schools of young fish, mostly due to human activity around the lake, but possibly in part to the murderous actions of hundreds of children.

The next death I witnessed was a horse, one of the noblest creatures, and my personal favorite. I was working at a large horse stable at the time. A new horse had come in and oddly enough the barn foreman at the time didn’t follow normal protocol which required new horses to be quarantined for a time. Instead she stuck this horse in a pen with another horse. Later in the day, the new horse was found standing with a broken leg. She was euthanized by injection and fell to a heap on the ground in front of my eyes. It was horrible. Seeing such a large impressive creature fall to a heap of nothing in seconds.
I later moved and got work as a waitress, one of our regular customers was a woman who had had a stroke. She was very hard to understand as her language skills were either gone, or her motor skills for speech were impaired. Some of the staff took the duty to serve her, as it was a task to understand what she wanted. One day she was extra hard to understand, I was her waitress on this particular day. So it came that I called the ambulance, but she died while they were attending to her.

She was not the first human death I witnessed but I shall not tell you about the others, at least not here and now.

I worked also for some years at an animal shelter. Sadly we had to euthanize animals once a week due to a lack of space and more animals coming in than we could provide homes for. Typically only the manager and animal health technician worked with the veterinarian to preform euthanasias. However late one day a large litter of Pitt Bull cross puppies was admitted to the shelter. We could only keep eight of them because of space so had to select four to be put down. It was the end of the day, and most staff had gone home, I volunteered to stay. We “killed” animals by using a lethal injection, a lot of people say they could not watch this sort of thing, and I will not say it is easy, but i do think it is important. The puppies went limp, that was pretty much it. At this time and throughout my career at the shelter, I became accustomed to say “go in peace” to the animal.

As time passed I bought a small acreage and acquired livestock. These animals were mostly to be our pets, we had no intention of killing them and eating them. Some were bought to be lawnmowers. Some were bought to guard the lawnmowers. I refer to sheep, llamas, and donkeys. One time we acquired a young female llama, and without warning she got very ill. We moved her into the barn to tend her. As our veterinarian informed us, with such animals they will not let you know they are sick until usually too late. Sick animals, particularly the herbivores will put on an act of being fit, especially when they are ailing so they do not appear weak. As such, so it was with Ali, our llama. We tended to her for a few days, then one morning found her dead in the stall.

Since then we had a couple of deaths of lambs, old pet cats that have required euthanasia, and so forth, as our vet says “If you have livestock, you have dead stock”. One of the worst, but not the most troubling, was a young lamb whose mother was not looking after him. She looked after his twin sister, but not him, it took some time for us to realize this, and it was in the dead of winter at the time. He was cold and near death when we found him and rushed him to the veterinarian. He was given shots and we were instructed to bottle feed him. After a couple of days he was not looking any better, he was extremely listless, didn’t “bah” for food, and we spent hours just holding him to keep him warm. My husband would stay up late holding the little guy, and one night he called out for me. I came, it seems the little guy was having convulsions. I took him into my arms and within minutes he passed away. Time of death 3:05 am.

The worst was a death I still question to this day, it happened this past winter. In the cold of January, one month before this little lamb died. I get up at seven in the morning to do the chores, and in winter it is still dark at this time. I went out feed the sheep, and one was missing. It was too dark to see much so I returned to the house to get a flashlight and my husband. We looked in the pasture, and on the snow I saw blood. Upon further investigation I found drag marks. I was full of dread, and since I have already told you this is a story of death you know the ending. It took a while but by following the drag marks and the blood on the snow, I eventually found what was left of Miss White Face Barbado sheep. In truth, very little was left, no head, only one leg, backbone and ribs. Also her stomach. That was it. Nothing more. Nothing to say “good bye” to, or to whisper “go in peace”.

From foot prints in the snow I can only assume a group of coyotes had got her, the remaining llama and donkey happened to be in another corral, unable to protect the sheep. To this day I wonder what happened, did she die quick, or were they especially cruel to her. She was a good sheep, whose only fault was a limp which slowed her down when she was first woken up, redoubtably a contributing factor to her death. I didn’t sleep well following this. But luckily no other sheep have been killed since. Our llama was able to guard them for the rest of the winter, and throughout lambing.

Everyone of us will experience death at some time, even if it is only our own. One minute life is there, then suddenly it is gone. Leaving us filled with questions and wonderment. Hopefully we can all find peace and ensure that we are not cruelly causing others to suffer deaths needlessly, or that we become so cold we cannot recognize that all of us value our lives to some extent.