I Believe They Are Perfect

When you were in your mother's belly, I could feel your head. I could feel your hooves, soft but fully formed. I could feel your swift kicks and winced for your mom, Ellen. She is more stoic.

It is strange to think you would have never seen this world, that your playful leaps of joy would have been absent from this landscape. It is hard to believe that you would have died inside your mom, as she died in the outside world.

Your mom is from a goat dairy. She grew old and thin and perhaps the farm did not want to invest any more money or time in who they thought would give them no more milk. She was shipped to an auctionyard. It's an awful place, full of crying, dying, struggling to survive animals, smelling of piss and fear and the stench of frying flesh at the restaurant onsite. I'm so glad you will never know of that place. I'm so sorry your mother does.

She was bought and brought to an infamous (to me anyway) place. It's a dirt lot filled with hundreds of animals, who are only fed bread until a buyer comes along. Then each animal is shot in the head, their throats are slit, and their flesh sold.

Your mom was saved by an animal control officer who convinced the slaughterhouse operator to sign her over - she could not walk on her front legs at the time, so her value was not even in her flesh. The slaughterhouse operator was going to shoot and dump her body.

Instead your mom (and you!) came to Animal Place and here you will remain.

You are perfect. You are valuable simply because you exist. You are spring and life and laughter. You fill the holes in your mother's soul, left there by cruel human hands. You are the rightful heir to her milk, even if she tells you to stop being so pushy. You have a right to be alive and to grow old and to die with dignity and compassion.

You are Noah. And you are Cornelius (said with a flourish). And you are home.