Circle M Farm

Pepe is gone. Shannon shot him this morning.

Preparing to vanquish yet another section of fence.

The event was surprisingly heartbreaking, in spite of the fact that he’s been a royal pain in the butt since the day he came onto this farm. He’s mangled every gate, widened holes in every old fence, and bent every bit of new woven wire we’ve painstakingly stretched around the perimeter of our little homestead. While on the loose, he’s nibbled rings in the bark around every baby fruit tree we’ve planted and munched off entire rows of lettuce in an afternoon. He even shredded the heavy horse lead we tethered him with last night.

Deciding to take a life is difficult, at best. When we choose to harvest an animal for meat, the decision is never easy, but we do feel a certain pleasure in knowing the meat animals in our care have lived a peaceful life and fulfilled an excellent purpose by providing healthy food for ourselves and our customers. Choosing to cull a problematic animal feels like another matter entirely, though the practice is certainly a necessity on any well-managed farm. One simply cannot afford, for the sake of the whole homestead, to spend time and money on an animal that doesn’t give as much back as it requires. In Pepe’s equation, the hassle in fence repairs and creative solutions to contain him far outweighed his worth as a breeding buck, though Nigerian Dwarf goats are a heritage animal that we’d hoped to help preserve.

Pepe certainly had worth beyond he’s ability to reproduce. His tiny size and belligerent attitude made him the comic star of the farm. Once, we had him grazing in with three beef steers. His entire body was about the size of one of their heads, but that didn’t keep him from charging them when they came into his territory. He would rise up on his tiny hind legs, warning them away, and then come down ferociously, little horn stubs jabbing forward, and ram into their noses. With a slow gentle turn of the face, one of the steers would toss him 10 feet. He’d just roll back to his feet and come back at them. Since Pepe was spotted black and white and the steers were Angus-Holstein crosses, he looked just like a mini version of them. And I’m pretty sure he thought he was a bull.

Last night when we were wrestling with the issue, I came to the conclusion that I’d feel fine about culling Pepe, if he could at least serve the good purpose of being cooked and fed to the dogs. Since he’s a three-year-old buck, the meat would be pretty unpalatable for us, as bucks apparently taste as bad as they smell. “So,” I said to Shannon, “If you’ll just build a spit over the burn barrel, I’ll let you shoot him.” He looked at me like I was crazy, of course, which I pretty much was. It was 15 degrees outside and windy. Since Pepe was just about the size of a fox, he’d make maybe one meal for our Great Pyrenees. But I just couldn’t bear the thought of killing the goat just to be rid of him.

The horrible thing in situations like these is that Shannon doesn’t have the luxury of feeling any grief of his own, because I take all of it. I’m so unreasonably sad about making the decision, Shannon has to be the bad guy in the discussion and pull the trigger, even though taking a life makes him sad, too. He just knows it has to be done. So he’ll argue to get it done, and do it, and put up with me being angry with him throughout the process. I’m selfish.

But I’m thankful, too. Thankful that Shannon and I are running this farm together, so I don’t have to make the hard management decisions myself and I don’t have to shoot things. While he was outside having a tragic last minute with Pepe, I was inside frantically housecleaning and blaring the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice video so I didn’t have to hear the shot.

I still smell Pepe on my hands and clothes, where he left that most durable scent of buck (he was named for Pepe Le Pew) when I went out to pet him, bless him and say goodbye this morning. He certainly had a life of adventure here on this farm, and I’m ultimately glad it ended before he destroyed so many things that we came to hate him. He was a tough little coot and a stinker. Amen.