Ick

When "man" first became separate from "ape" (having achieved bipedalism, having lost his opposable toes, and having cut down on the poo-flinging), he was still animalistic in one key area -- he was a hunter-gatherer. But as our ancient, nomadic ancestor observed the world through which he wandered, he began to understand the life cycles of the organisms around him. He realized that instead of roaming the countryside in search of food, he could stay in one place and grow those same plants, nurture those same animals. So man became a farmer.

And as he sowed the grain and fed the herd, he discovered techniques that produced higher yield, and better quality. Soon, man was capable of producing more food than he needed. He realized he could exchange this extra food for something else -- a clay pot, manual labor, a keytar. So bartering was born.

As more farmers produced surplus crops, there were soon men who didn't need to grow any of their own food. These men became smiths and physicians, cooks and laborers, life coaches and IT guys -- they exchanged their services or products for the food they needed. And it was in this generation that the first City Slicker came to be.

The City Slicker gene expressed slowly. But what was at first a mild aversion to the smell of manure gradually became an entire sub-species of men, under the auspices of Billy Crystal, who would never consider farm life in their wildest dreams. And although they could assuredly list several reasons for their pastoral distaste, one significant factor will always be this: ick.

Now I'm not necessarily a City Slicker per se, but my pre-conceived notions of farming definitely contained an expectation of ick. I expected that moldy odor of animals (best described as "wet dog") to be inescapable. I envisioned myself holding my breath while shoveling manure. I imagined that all my clothes would be perpetually caked with mud and shit. I assumed I would be suppressing my gag reflex as I watched a doe birth a bloody, slimy, wrinkly ball of flesh that would eventually unfold into a kid.

But once again I, and by extension the remainder of the quasi-City Slickers out there, was entirely (and happily) wrong.

All shoes are left in the entrance hallway of the farmhouse, so very little dirt gets tracked in, and the house does not smell of the animals outside. Shoveling manure is tiring, but not disgusting and hardly even smelly. Cleaning out kidding pens releases the ammonia that has built-up from all the urine, but I wouldn't call that "icky" so much as "chemically irritating to mucus membranes". Witnessing my first kidding wasn't even that bad: the smell was a mixture of metallic blood and goat dander, and the kids were really slimy but looked like actual goats and opened their eyes within about 15 seconds.

New Kids On The Block

They are about the size of a kitten and

rather unsteady on their feet.

I've been calling this gal "Smiley".

A pretty "painted" boy who is constantly bleating for milk.

(To be fair, the lack of ick is partially due to the nature of this farm. Goats and alpacas both produce pelleted manure that doesn't smear all over them (or me). Also, even though the goats on this farm are a species bred for their meat, this is a breeding farm. The goats here are high-quality, competing in shows and very selectively bred -- they are all checked and treated for lice, parasites, etc., and none of them are actually eaten, let alone killed here on the farm. Hence, it's not exactly a fair comparison to set my experience here side-by-side with the experience of someone at one of those big stockyards where hundreds of cows stand around in manure, waiting in line for slaughter like they're at a bovine Six Flags: "You are now 45 minutes from the ax." Nonetheless...)

Sunrise over the farm? Definitely not icky!

Not that I haven't encountered some ick.

For example: ASTL told me that her biggest pet peeve with QG is his tobacco-chewing. I found this surprising because I hadn't even noticed that he chewed. That's when I realized that the glasses of iceless iced tea which I had seen scattered at random about the house...were not iceless iced tea.

Or this: ASTL wanted to show me how to trim hooves. I was expecting to file them down a quarter inch or so with a goat-friendly emery board. The reality was cutting off inch-long, triple-thick, yellow toenails with giant curved shears.

How about: After the doe gave birth, I was guiding one of the kids to her udder (even though their eyes are open, they're still relatively blind -- they open their mouths and sway their heads back and forth near the udder like a pack of slimy Stevie Wonders). The doe was licking the kid (the caprine equivalent of "You're not eating enough, look at you! You're skin and bones! Eat something!") and then switched to licking my head. This wouldn't have been that icky if she hadn't just been licking copious amounts of amniotic fluid/slime off of the kids.

Perhaps: I needed to clean some kidding pens, but we were out of cat litter (we put it beneath the straw in a clean pen). So I found myself at Wal-Mart at 8 AM on a Sunday buying more than my body weight in litter. The guy behind me at the checkout asked just how many cats I had. Mistaken for a crazy cat lady at the age of 24? Talk about ick!

But if the worst ick I encounter merely drives me to never drink iced tea again, I'd say that's not bad at all -- and hardly fodder for an early 90s film, let alone its mediocre sequel.

μηδὲν ἄγαν,

Dorkas