by Jon Katz
I saw that this contemplation of what measure of compassion is owed to the farmer was a dialogue between Simon and me. It wasn’t that he had the words, language, or emotion to join in the discussion or have theories about it. But he had opened up this vein in me. As a person with a lot of anger and judgment inside of him, I found this to be new and challenging terrain.
When I wrote about my reluctance to judge the farmer on my blog, I got a lot of messages from people who were incredulous that I would have any sympathetic feelings for the man after what he had done to Simon. People said that what he had done was too hateful to forgive. But that, I thought, is not compassion.
And why, I kept asking, are people who love animals so angry at people? Animals are perhaps better treated now and more appreciated than at any other time in human history. Why are we so drawn to their abuse and mistreatment, so repelled by our own?
Our society offers us few ways to be merciful. The poor and the dying are hidden away in ghettos and nursing homes. More and more, we communicate through avatars and devices, and we hear fewer human voices and stories. Our so-called news has become a vehicle for transmitting conflict and tragedy, and we spend more and more time closeted in our homes, flickering screens our most frequent companions.
It’s easy to avoid suffering and easier to feel disconnected from the people experiencing it. There are millions of animals in need of care and homes, and it’s curious that the idea of animal rescue is so new, even though needy animals have always been around.
Rescuing Simon brought me many gifts. I felt good about doing it; it was immensely satisfying in the most profound way. I was also showered with praise from all over the world.
And you know what? It wasn’t very hard to do, it didn’t cost much, and it was not complicated if you had a pasture and a barn—I had four. All that was required was hay, several different medicines, and a willingness to put your hands on the tender and private parts of a donkey. I suppose I could admit to a certain squeamishness at the open sores and lice and maggots, but squeamishness is easy to overcome, and I had had a lot of practice dealing with it during my years at the farm.
I did feel generous and noble. Everybody in town knew what we had done for Simon. Everybody thanked me and thought it was a wonderful thing to do. So this is where I put my compassion, my mercy, I thought, here, where it is easy and recognized, not there, out in the country, with that sullen man and his frightened family.
But I was coming to see what mercy and compassion really meant, and where I wanted it to take me.
I went into the house and wrote a letter to the farmer. It said:
Dear __________,
Thanks for talking to me. I appreciate it. I want you to know that Simon is well and I will take good care of him. I suspect you did the best you could. If I can be of any help to you and your family, please feel free to contact me.
And I mailed it off.
The next morning, Simon and I went for a walk in the woods. Except for one standoff—he was determined to veer left to sample some grass he liked the smell of—our walk was easy. He seemed eager and trotted alongside of me. It was warm that morning, and there was a soft breeze blowing down the path. The rustling of the leaves seem to fascinate Simon. I am not sure he had seen them before or paid much attention. For many years, I hadn’t, either.
We stopped every now and then so he could lean over and snatch a fat leaf off of a maple tree. He stopped and chewed the leaves thoughtfully. I was beginning to see why so many writers throughout history loved to take walks with donkeys. They are wonderful companions, and they appreciate the natural world, noticing everything in a way that is infectious.
I didn’t say much until we turned around and started back toward the farmhouse. By now, the sun was peeking through the forest cover and it seemed as if we were walking into a tunnel of light.
“It’s easy to talk about being merciful and compassionate,” I said to my donkey. “It’s not so easy to figure out how to live that way.”
TWELVE
The Different Face of Compassion
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another and all involved in one another.
—THOMAS MERTON
There is a particular feeling of self-worth, even righteousness, that comes from saving a helpless animal from suffering or mistreatment. When I rescued Simon, there was no ambivalence or second-guessing; there was nothing but praise. Praise feels good. I was learning that compassion also feels good. It is both healing and affirming, but for me it was also confusing and troubling. Simon had me all stirred up.
It’s so easy to help an animal in need, especially if the animal is cute or nice or amenable to being helped, or shows affection and what we like to call gratitude. People tell me how grateful Simon seems to me, how appreciative. It’s nice to hear, but I’ve studied and lived with animals long enough to know I have no idea what Simon is really thinking.
Gratitude is a very human kind of emotion. It requires a sense of narrative and reasoning I don’t believe animals have. When animals are fed and given attention—fresh hay and an apple a day will do it—they attach very powerfully to the people nurturing them. Their lives depend on it; their instincts proffer it. Dogs and donkeys have been around people a very long time—they know the game. Simon plays me like a Stradivarius, braying and sighing whenever he sees me until he gets a cookie or a carrot. If someone else comes along with a cookie or a carrot, he is off like a shot.
Perhaps the longing look Simon gives me is gratitude; perhaps it’s just the excitement any domesticated animal has learned to display when food or attention is in the picture. This may sound cynical, but it is not really. Simon is attached to me; he is also attached to the many hundreds of other people who visit and bring him carrots and treats. We see what we want to see and need to see. This is the role animals play in our distracted and intense world.
Animals can’t leave, talk back, disagree, or challenge our assistance. There are few, if any, laws or regulations governing caring for them. They can’t sue us if something gets screwed up or go on Facebook and air their grievances.
As I thought about it, I realized that I was pretty careful in my choice of compassionate opportunities. I didn’t feel too much compassion for snakes or coyotes, cows or rabid raccoons and skunks. I wondered how much compassion I would have felt for Simon had he been ill-tempered or resistant to treatment, if he hadn’t watched me carefully with his big brown eyes as I read to him, or loved children and visitors so much.
When it came to my being compassionate toward people, I was even more selective, as Simon helped me to see. There was a sweet woman down the road with cancer, and I took her food and offered to help her every day. Another neighbor was a mean drunk living alone in poverty. I never thought of taking him food or visiting his house.
I began to see I was making decisions about compassion, and recalibrating those decisions all the time. For instance, we had a big beautiful rooster named Strut, who I took a lot of photos of and put them up on my blog. Eventually he began to turn aggressive, as many roosters do, and attacked Maria one afternoon. The attack was disturbing. Strut threw himself suddenly at Maria’s legs as she walked by, raking her with his beak and claws, attacking again and again, even after she kicked at him and blocked him with a bucket.
Before she got away from him, her legs were covered with blood and scratches. Maria is the kind of person who rehomes spiders and moths; compassion comes much more naturally to her than to me. Still, she was shaken by the attack.
I went into the house, got my .22 rifle, loaded it, and walked out in the pasture where Strut was pecking for bugs with his hens. I shot him through the heart, killing him almost instantly.
When I wrote about this on my blog, I got many messages of understanding from farmers who had known roosters and had been through the same experience, and many from people with pets who expressed outrage th
at I would kill the rooster rather than rehome him or confine or separate him in some way.
“I suppose,” one woman fumed, “you would shoot a sheep if she attacked your wife.” Well, yes, I thought, I would.
None of those people expressed any concern or compassion for Maria or for the idea that the safety of a human is of equal importance to the well-being of a rooster.
So there were different dimensions to my practice of compassion: While I tended to be compassionate to people and animals I liked and who liked me, I found it hard to be compassionate or empathetic to people whose beliefs and actions were offensive or disturbing to me.
Compassion, like freedom of speech, is one of those ideas we all love to talk about until something vile happens, then not so much.
And yet, I thought, wasn’t compassion really about empathizing on a broader scale than that? Simon had entered my interior world. Empathizing with him was easy; he touched on many of my own painful childhood issues—loneliness, abandonment, neglect, abuse. I didn’t experience the same things he had, but I did experience what I imagined were some of the things he suffered. I related to them.
Strut didn’t receive the same empathy, and I can’t say I regret it, either.
I began reading the works of some strong thinkers on compassion—the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, Saint Francis of Assisi, Plato, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer—and I kept running across another view of it. Compassion is not really about our personal interior world but the exterior one. It extends to living things beyond our yards and pastures. It extends to people as well as animals, encompassing things we don’t like as well as things we do: animals that are not cute and endearing, but are simply suffering and in need.
My ideas about compassion were small and immediate—my interior world—but compassion was a much bigger and more complex idea than that. I did not come close to understanding it yet—not in me, not in the world beyond.
When I looked at the news, I saw little compassion mirrored back at me. In fact, whenever I looked at news from Washington, I saw none. Our world is not very compassionate. I wonder sometimes if anyone apart from the Dalai Lama can be deeply and consistently compassionate. And even he often says, in his speeches and memoirs, that he is not nearly as patient or compassionate as he would like to be.
Is compassion some ephemeral and unachievable goal for people, or is it really possible?
Many of our leaders do not seem able to put themselves in another’s shoes; instead they relentlessly attack and demonize the people standing in front of them. Religion often seems riddled with conflict and judgment to me—at least until Pope Francis appeared and seemed to touch a deep global need for compassion and empathy.
If the people leading the world didn’t feel much compassion, what hope was there for me? Okay, I saved a donkey, but that will not necessarily alter the nature of the world. Or will it?
Standing in the pasture, waiting for Simon to bray to me and come down to get his morning apple, maybe get some balm rubbed on his wounds, I think I understood that compassion was a powerful and important goal, like spirituality: perhaps a path that never ended, a journey that was never over.
Humans have a need for compassion, but they also have a lot of anger, envy, frustration, and resentment, all the enemies of compassion.
I liked Merton’s call to awareness. For me the process had begun. I was aware of compassion, of its ubiquity and interdependence. A donkey in trouble had begun the process for me, and I had absolutely no idea how far I would go with it, or even should.
Merton’s idea—the interdependence of all things—was something I found in Saint Francis, Einstein, and in almost all of the great writings about compassion. “In the first step toward a compassionate heart,” wrote the Dalai Lama, “we must develop our empathy or closeness to others.… The closer we are to a person, the more unbearable we find that person’s suffering.” It is not, says the Dalai Lama, a question of physical proximity; it is a feeling of responsibility.
We are not alone. We are all connected. Me, Simon, the farmer, the state police, all of the donkeys and people of the world, we are one thing. I love this idea. It is powerful and stirring, yet it is not what I feel inside of my head, not what I see in the outside world, not what is on the news, in all those arguments and press conferences out of Washington, in all those pious and often angry declarations I hear from people who call themselves religious.
I wonder how Saint Thomas Aquinas might have dealt with one of the dominant ideas of our time, the Facebook idea, the notion of interconnectedness, of one family, of interdependence taken to an almost unimaginable level—a billion people connected to each other. Is a connected medium the same as a compassionate one? I don’t think so.
Soon after Simon came to the farm, I was invited to do a Q & A with an animal rescue site on Facebook. The page had two hundred thousand likes and it was teeming with photos, videos, and commentary about animal rescue, and almost all of it was enraged, furious. It seemed to me to be a hive of angry bees.
Although a number of people thanked me for saving Simon, most of the comments on the page offered horror stories of animals abused, mistreated, neglected, or abandoned, and there was nothing but rage and contempt for the human beings of the world presumably responsible for all of this cruelty.
I asked myself a question: Can you love an animal and hate people and be compassionate?
If we are all one, part of the same interconnected system, why do we feel so much for the animal who is mistreated but so little for the human beings who mistreat them?
Looking at Simon, I could not help but wonder about his farmer. I was shocked at the concern I felt for him. I had intuitively done just what the Dalai Lama was suggesting. I recognized the gravity of his misery, the suffering that must have occurred for him to lose his humanity in this way.
Perhaps I was able to do this because I had a farm. I am a writer, not a farmer, but I have many friends who are farmers, and I have seen up close the grinding brutality of their lives, the constant struggle, the filth, disease, mechanical and money issues, the wrestling with bureaucracies and regulations, all the things that make their lives such a challenge.
For several years, I have photographed farmers in their struggles, and so I possessed the physical and emotional closeness the Dalai Lama is talking about when it comes to compassion.
I could almost feel Simon’s farmer’s struggle to survive, day after day, year after year, to the point that his exhaustion and frustration might have simply drained his soul of energy and reason.
I shared these thoughts on the rescue website, and the response was fast, furious, and merciless. The farmer was an animal, a monster; he should be jailed, punished, tortured, even killed. No one offered a single line of compassion or understanding or concern for him, or for his son, who had bravely helped Simon when he was starving.
The hatred and fury were shocking to me, disturbing; this idea of rescue was not compassionate for me. I withdrew from it; it wasn’t where Simon’s experience was taking me. Something inside of me has always rebelled at the idea that loving animals justifies hating people.
With Simon, I had taken a big step toward a compassionate heart. I saw, in my mind, felt in my heart, this idea of interdependence, this sense of my experience with Simon being connected to the wider world.
As we treat one creature, we treat all creatures. As we free ourselves of judgment, we learn what compassion is and how to feel it.
Our task, wrote Einstein, is to liberate ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
I loved this idea. This was where I wanted to go, where Simon was meant to lead me. Perhaps this is why he had come, and why I had accepted him so eagerly into my life and embraced his healing so passionately. Perhaps this is why he opened me up.
But it was also humbling for me. My spirit was not remotely ready to stretch to so vast and all-encompassing an embrace. It wo
uld require as much change as anything I had ever attempted in my life.
I am not the Dalai Lama, not Merton, and surely no Einstein. The voice in my head was small and soft: “What’s the big deal? He’s just a donkey.”
It is fashionable to quote brilliant people and ignore what they say. Reading Merton’s call to compassion, I wondered if Simon and I were too small to quite grasp it, let alone live it.
Pressed by the details of ordinary life—work, money, family, friends, health—my consciousness is rarely large enough to encounter the entire universe of beings. I am touched by the call to recognize that we are all one, but I am hard-pressed to keep such a huge concept in the forefront of my brain as I go about my life, which is filled with small things. And I was discouraged by the hard reality of what I saw in the exterior world, the one beyond Simon and me.
THIRTEEN
Rocky
If Simon began teaching me the meaning of compassion, Rocky, a small blind pony, was to be one of my biggest and most challenging lessons.
In the winter of 2010, the blizzards came week after week, dumping so much snow in parts of the Northeast that the plows had no place to put it. All of the farmers I knew were worried about their barns, and for good reason.
Most barns are old, built by friends and neighbors long ago, with thin rafters and slate or shingle roofs. Many of these barns were made from cedar planks, because the farmers had a tool called an adze that split cedar trees easily. Typically, barn roofs are slanted so that the snow will slide off onto the ground, but this winter, the heavy snow was wet and, thanks to climate change, the temperatures varied wildly. It snowed, then warmed up a bit, then froze. Then more snow came and piled on. You could see it driving by: huge amounts of snow piled up on barn roofs, no easy or safe way to get it off.