My Gentle Barn (40 page)

It helped to spend time with the three rescued goats. At least then I felt like I was actively doing something to help make things right, rather than simply waiting for news. Each day, the goats grew to trust me a little more. Sassy—a La Mancha goat with little elfin ears—was the first to start showing her true colors. When I sang to the three girls, Sassy started coming over to me and nibbling my nose; then she’d lie
down right next to me and fall asleep. My guess was that she had been someone’s pet before ending up at the backyard butcher, making her the quickest to heal emotionally because she’d had an earlier experience with human kindness.

I kept our Facebook followers up to date on the progress of the three goats, but I posted next to nothing about the backyard butcher himself. I didn’t want to tip him off that we were working with the authorities to shut him down. The less on-guard he was, the better.

A month after we’d rescued the goats, all three were cleared of lung infections and were let out of quarantine. Watching them frolic in the barnyard and meet the other animals gave me a small glimmer of hope that this backyard butcher nightmare might actually get resolved. I wrote a lengthy piece that day about them on my blog, ending with these words:

Finally, on April 2, 2012, we got the call we had been expecting. The case against the backyard butcher was at last complete. The Major Case Unit told us they were going to do a raid on the place the next morning. Manuel would be arrested, and the Unit would pull every last animal. “Can we bring them to you?” they asked.

Yes!

Because all the incoming animals would have to be kept separate
from our current animal residents for at least twenty-one days, we needed to create separate pens for them, immediately. But we didn’t know how many animals to expect and wouldn’t know until the next day; we’d just have to make our best guess. We called the Fence Factory—who had built the temporary village for our animals when we’d first moved to Santa Clarita. They came out again and, in four hours, built temporary pens on our second property that were large enough for a few dozen animals. We would use these outdoor pens to triage the animals—one holding pen where each goat or sheep could be examined, one pen for the goats and sheep who were healthy, one for the sick animals, another for the very sick animals who needed to be in strict quarantine, and an iso-pen for the goats and sheep who were even contagious to other kinds of animals, including humans. We also sectioned off part of the pasture, where the rescued cows would go.

That night I could hardly sleep. I was so amped up—a mixture of excitement that something finally was going to be done to stop this monster and anxiety about how the next day would go. Did we have enough space for all the animals who were going to be confiscated and brought to us? Did we have enough separate pens? How many of the animals would arrive pregnant? Were we going to be able to save everyone?

The next morning, we hurried over to our other property to meet our vet, Dr. Morrison, and make sure everything was ready. We checked if there was enough straw out for the animals to be comfortable. We double-checked that the feeders were securely hung in each pen and that the waters were clean. And we kept looking at the gates, expecting any minute for the officers to arrive.

Finally, around midday we got a call from the Major Case Unit. They were at the backyard butcher’s place. Manuel had been arrested by the police, and the Major Case Unit officers were starting to pull the animals. “There are a lot of them, maybe thirty,” the guy said on the phone. “They’re very sick. Be ready.”

Thirty animals. We had never taken in that many at once. The
hour it took before they arrived seemed like forever. I kept staring at the gate and then at the clock, and then running to double-check the pens. To help pass the time, I finally decided to make a Facebook post to get a jump on rounding up the support we were desperately going to need.

This time when I looked up to check the gates, they were opening.

“They’re here!” I yelled, my heart pounding. And Jay, the vet and her assistant, a barnyard staff member, and I gathered along the driveway, watching as the first truck pulled in through the gates. It was a big white truck pulling a long trailer that stirred eddies of dust into the air. Then another truck followed the first. Then another. And another. I started weeping as I watched five, six, seven big trucks pull their trailers along our driveway. They really were here. They had believed us.

The trucks stopped, filling the full length of our gravel drive, and the officers jumped out. There must have been around eight of them, all in their khaki uniforms with shiny badges. As we started looking inside the trailers to see what kinds of animals had arrived and how sick they were, the officers approached us to shake our hands.

“Thank you so much for what you’ve done,” one of them said. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

“This is the worst cruelty case I’ve ever seen,” said another.

We had talked with a number of these officers on the phone and all were eager to meet us face-to-face. I wanted to be present with each
one of these men and women, but I also wanted to get my hands on the animals and start helping them.

In one trailer I saw the tiniest baby goats with runny noses. In another trailer there were goats with such bad eye infections their eyes had turned an opaque red; if they weren’t already blind, they were headed in that direction. There were five terribly skinny cows. And there was a horse. We hadn’t expected a horse at all; where were we going to put a horse? Then I saw chickens and dogs and cats. We hadn’t expected them, either.

Together with Dr. Morrison, we decided to start with the cows. But once we let them out it would be impossible to corral them to do the needed tests, so Dr. Morrison had to climb into the trailer to examine them.

“Be careful!” I said to her. She was not a very big person, and she was going to climb right into a trailer with a bunch of big, scared cows, some of them with horns.

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” she said, ever soft-spoken.

She talked quietly to the cows as she squeezed in between them. There were five of them in a relatively small trailer, so there wasn’t much room to maneuver. “OK, guys, I’m just going to have a look at you.” She examined them, drew blood, and ran fecals, handing vials out to her assistant. All of the cows were emaciated and had open sores on their hides, but none had fevers or present symptoms of pneumonia. They likely had parasites, but we’d have to wait for the tests to confirm it.

After Dr. Morrison climbed out of the trailer, we backed it straight into the sectioned-off cow pasture and opened the trailer gate. It was as if the cows understood immediately that here they would finally be safe. They ran into the pasture and jumped and sprang through the grass. When Jay and I turned around, all the officers were heading our way. One after another, they hugged us, tears streaming down their faces.

“We never get to see this,” one officer said. “We only see the awful places.”

“It’s amazing how happy they are,” another said. “They have a future. They’re going to be OK here. Thank you so much for the work you do.”

We moved on to the goats and sheep, many of whom were in much worse shape than the cows. The officers unloaded one animal at a time into the holding pen, where Dr. Morrison and her assistant recorded the animal’s gender and distinguishing marks, took vital signs, drew blood, administered a dewormer, and determined which pen each animal should go into. It took two hours to triage the rest of the animals; there were thirty in all, many of them so sick we didn’t know if they’d make it through that first night. There were many with very high fevers, and all of them were emaciated and riddled with parasites.

For the unexpected horse, who looked the worst of any of the animals, we had to quickly come up with a shelter by making a corral with some extra fence panels that was partially covered by an awning. The Animal Control officers would take the chickens, dogs, and cats to their shelter for care and neutering. But they promised they would bring back to us any who didn’t get adopted.

When all the animals were finally in their pens, we sat down with Dr. Morrison to go over our plan of action. After she left, we took the first steps toward creating appropriate indoor accommodations for all these animals. There on our second property, we had a large warehouse filled with hay. We would move all the hay out and raise the money for insulating mats, feed buckets, lots and lots of straw, and fence panels to be able to create separate indoor pens; these animals were just too sick to stay outside for long. As soon as I got back to the house, I headed for the computer to update our Facebook followers. The comments were already pouring in in response to my earlier post. “Great news. Gentle Barn, you are AWESOME!” “Donation made. Thanks for all you do!!!”

I continued to keep our wonderful community in the loop, and they continued to support us, with both donations and moral support flooding in daily. I also kept Ellen and Portia informed, and they went to bat for us once again, boosting public awareness of the Gentle Barn and the backyard butcher case, and asking people to help us out with contributions. The following Sunday many visitors asked about the animals rescued from the backyard butcher, and now that Manuel had been arrested, we could fill everyone in on the details of all we had witnessed. Volunteers started calling and e-mailing right away to let us know they were available to take shifts with the animals. We were so very grateful for their willingness, but because of how terrified these animals were of humans, we decided the best way to proceed was to let them settle in for a couple of months with as few humans around as possible; only two of us would go into their pens twice daily to take temperatures and administer treatments.

In addition to the individual contributions, Sun Chlorella, the maker of our superfood algae supplement, stepped in with a huge grant so we could finish upgrading the warehouse and turn it into a proper, temperature-controlled healing center with an exam room.

Even with all this support it was several months of very long days—sometimes staying up half the night—trying to save these animals, working as hard as we could to raise the thousands of dollars we needed to heal them, as well as taking care of all of our other animals and our own children. But every one of the animals confiscated from the backyard butcher pulled through. Healing them emotionally was going to take even longer. But we’d get there, and eventually these animals would be able to be integrated into our herds.

This rescue went far beyond helping these particular animals. So many times when we rescued animals, we remained powerless to rectify the horrifying situation the animals had come from, and those who had caused the harm could go on to do more harm. This time was different. This time we had interrupted the cycle of abuse, not only
stopping an abuser, but stopping him from teaching the abuse to his children. Manuel Guerra was tried and sentenced to ninety days in jail and five years of probation. He was ordered to pay $4,000 restitution, complete forty-eight animal cruelty classes, and was forbidden from ever owning another animal in his life.

For the first time ever, I felt truly supported by the authorities. They had taken us seriously, backed us up, gone in there and raided the place, and then thanked us, their faces wet with tears. I got to see that the officers themselves cared deeply about animals and had surely gotten into this line of work to help them. All that time that Jay and I had been frustrated with a system so overloaded with red tape and politics, the individual officers had probably been just as frustrated as we were. In the end, we were supported not only by Animal Control but by the county board of supervisors, who thanked us, along with the officers of the Major Case Unit, in a public ceremony in downtown Los Angeles.

I had come a long way from my little half-acre, where it was me and Mary against the world. It no longer felt like the world was opposing me, or that I had to prove that what I was doing was important. Instead, I felt absolutely supported. We had hundreds of thousands of people across the globe saying yes to the Gentle Barn, yes to the work of helping animals and kids. My work was valuable. My thoughts were valuable. I finally had earned my place in the world.