Lyric farewell

No, you don’t want to have to google how to kill a goat. How to shoot it dead, painlessly. But if you do, and you don’t have a gun license like me, first things first.

Find a friend who does.

“I need you to euthanize my goat for me”, I said.

“You mean shoot it dead!” was the reply.

So, this has to be a good friend.

“She is sick, old and suffering,” I say.

“Aren’t we all?” he says.

“But I know how you can do it,” I tell him. And proceed to give directions according to my Co-Pilot, who knows how-to anything...including killing goats painlessly.

1. Aim away from yourself. (Thanks!)

2. Aim perpendicular to the intersection of two imaginary lines on top of the goat’s head, from the outside corner of the eye to the opposite side of the head. (Almost lost me there).

Miss Lyric, our feisty mother goat, had been suffering for months. Limping on her front knees, coughing, slumping under the great cottonwood poplar through the afternoon. The vet had come and gone, no change. This last week she could hardly rouse herself to the delight of the evening homing meal. Rondo, Rain and Snow, her goat family and the four Shawns (the indistinguishable sheep) wait eagerly for their daily dose of salts and minerals. She just lay there. It was my youngest daughter who told me to wake up and make the call. She needs to be put out of her suffering, Lily says. Already an elder in goat years, what was I hoping for? There are some things you cannot remedy. Like the ultimate resignation to gravity, sagging unto dust.

Lyric was the protector of the pack. You would not want to be the dog who cornered her and her family. She would stand up to you ferociously. But in her last few months she had become less connected to her family and spent a lot of the day on her own. The only thing that she would still respond to was salty chips. That passion never left her.

But we are hobby farmers, our animals have pet status, our gardens are only a grocery store supplement, not the main source of our food. The vet had already left a handsome bill. I didn’t want more of that. The barbituates needed to humanely put down animals must to be applied intravenously and I was not comfortable with doing that either. Nor was I keen on using the baseball bat. Hence the search for a man with a gun. In America you don’t need to look far.

So we brought her a pile of chips and my friend who was now well versed on the why and the how lay next to her in her comfy corner on a cushion of hay, and did what a real farmer would do. While I looked on sheepishly until my neighbor came rushing to hug me out of it.

When we lifted her into her grave, deep enough to keep the coyotes from digging her up, we lit a sage bundle and breathed together peacefully. So simple and right, this cycle. This living and dying.

Rondo, Rain and Snow ran over to the graveside when they heard the shots. But after a few minutes they headed off to browse. My friend and I lay beside the hay covered grave right in the middle of a field.

“I know it’s normal, but the twitching got to me,” I said.

“I get the twitches too sometimes,” he said.