Yesterday, Antonio came and asked me if I would feed a premature lamb some of it's mothers milk with an eye dropper. I had seen photos of this on other peoples blogs from other wwoof farms with sheep or goats, but Mariangela had said they don't usually do this. The first year they were raising sheep, some of the mothers abandoned the babies and so she and Antonio wrapped them in blankets, fed them with bottles and nursed them back to 'health'. Two months later, every lamb that they had nursed was dead. That was when they learned that mother sheep abandon their babies when there is something chronically wrong with them, and after that experience they never tried to alter, other natures course again in such a significant way.
Yesterday was a different story which is why they made an expectation. This lamb was born as a twin, one arrived still born, and one arrived very small and weak. It wanted to suck, just like the lambs that were abandoned, but the mother also wanted it to which is what made the situation different. 
I was thrilled to be given such an important task- the task to dun-da-dun - save a life! After a quick prayer and preparations of some warm milk and a syringe, I headed down to the pen to play mama sheep. 
It's actually way harder to feed a baby sheep milk than you'd expect. I did this twice before sunset and my optimist heart swears I saw an improvement. This morning I woke up and asked Antonio if he wanted me to feed the little lamb to which he replied 'there's nothing to do, thank you'. I said 'oh it's sucking?' And he said 'no it died'.
Sometimes, despite all you wish for and all the fairy tale farm stories in the world, Mother Nature runs it's course. It's funny, I thought it would be sad, but it's not. It just is exactly what it is and the world continues to turn exactly as it did they day before and the day before. There's nothing sad about a lamb dying in the night, because that lamb belongs to nature and not to humans. It doesn't suffer human emotions and neither does the mother. And we forget that so easily.
Being around animals day I and day out has made me think a lot about how I've thought about animals in the past. I can't help but reference the movie Babe which plays in my head like a sound track every single day despite my best efforts to stop it. The movie features a little British pig in a barnyard full of animal personalities, a bit like Charlotte's Web. The chickens are like old gossiping, bossy women, the sheep are the regal matrons the dogs are ragamuffin boys and bullies of the barn yard. Except that they aren't. They care about two things usually and that's food and reproduction in that order. The moment we assign these completely fictitious emotions and dilusional scenarios and roles to animals we've stepped into a bizarre and unnatural territory that will never give a clear picture of the world.
I really respect vegetarians and vegans who don't eat animals based on the 'animal lover' principle in a way I didn't before. If you have these ideas about animals I think it's essential and inspiring (and slightly dilusional but not really based on the principals of industrial farming) to live them out in a way that impacts your life. If not, then I don't know how you can possibly dream of eating an animal that was calling it's young over because it was getting dirty in the mud and needed a scolding, or it it was bullying it's younger friends. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
In my horrible Italian I had a conversation with the Sardinian shepherd Domenico about how you can't understand nature until you've seen it first hand. Now more than ever, I agree. Mariangela told me about a woman who wanted a lamb but didn't want to see the head, tail, any internal organs etc. and she wanted it cut up until little pieces. Basically she didn't want to know what it was, but she wanted to eat it. This isn't uncommon in everyday life, in fact i think each of us, me included, puts in our mouths each day at least one thing that we have absolutely no idea what it truly is. None. And yet we happily eat it. But the thing I loved was Mari's reaction to this woman. She said she told her to buy it somewhere else because she couldn't believe the ignorance- 'the ignorance! So stupid this woman!' was what she said and then raised her eyebrows like this woman had asked for one of her kidneys or half her head of hair. I hope to never forget this conversation because part of my experience here is banishing just a tiny bit of ignorance I had about food. I'll never be Mari, but I can try to be just a little but more conscientious about my food.
