AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:
For a number of unfortunate reasons, I’ve heard the 23rd Psalm a great deal lately, most recently last Friday morning at a cousin’s funeral. I have nothing against this beautiful work of poetry, but it seems to be called upon most often for comfort in times of sorrow, and I’d be happy not to hear it again for a while.
Friday morning, I was struck by one line in the Psalm: “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” It has a lovely cadence in a syntax we would never use, but what was most striking was how it conveys an odd kind of paradox –that one can derive comfort not only from gentle guidance, of the sort provided by a shepherd's staff, but also from the pain of strict discipline, as meted out by the punitive rod. As Peter pointed out to me, the rod represents the harsh justice of the Old Testament's God.
This imagery from the pastoral society of the Bible made me think about whether we, in raising our flocks, also strike a reasonable balance between strict rules and nurturing. Do our animals have a sense that we've created a safe space for them, and is part of their concept of that safe space derived from the strict rules we sometimes make them live by? It does seem that the flock for its well-being depends on both our strict discipline and our loving care.
It should not be surprising that animals can derive comfort both from nurturing indulgence and from strict discipline, because humans do so as well. Two weekends ago, I attended the 80th birthday party of Wyatt MacGaffey, my college advisor, an anthropology professor who was my mentor and who I feel deserves the credit for teaching me to think analytically. I had a long period, when I initially began taking courses with him, characterized by abject terror at the consequences of not doing things to his standards. But once I became comfortable with the rules, my education really flowered. I'm not sure I would have achieved the benefits of the relationship without the initial fear. Only by learning to live up to a strict and at times not entirely comprehensible standard was I able to have the confidence to take full advantage of the nurturing insights and guidance this professor gave me.
I think we can tell when we’ve struck the right balance between discipline and nurturing on the farm when our animals interact with us in an atmosphere of calm cooperation. Do they do what we’d like them to do without our having to resort to force? Take, for example, the process of managing our turkeys and geese. One important tool in that management is neither a rod nor a staff, but rather long bamboo or wood garden stakes which we use as wands to herd these sometimes unruly birds. We didn’t see them advertised as poultry handling instruments in any catalogue. We might have hit upon their value had we thought back to the illustrations in children’s books of young farm girls in pleated bonnets herding their geese and carrying large wands, or if Peter had understood fully how the peasants he saw herding turkeys along the roadsides were using the wands. But we didn’t. Instead, the use of these wands was something that Peter developed, organically, over time. He reinvented a time-honored tool.
The challenge we faced was to move the turkeys and geese from the pasture into secure pens every night where they would be free of the threat of predators. This practice became imperative when, several years ago, while indulging the turkeys' instinctive inclination to roost in trees, we lost a total of 19 turkeys over two successive nights, probably to a horned owl which took off their heads (it is the brain they eat) and left us just the carcasses.
At first we tried simply shooing them into a secured sleeping porch we had constructed for the purpose. But shooing them in a couple at a time can lead to chaos. Peter found he could do much better if he took advantage of their flock instinct and their keen sensitivity to our every movement. It's something he picked up from kinetic theatre, in which actors move responsively to one another. Peter found that if we used slow-motion, gentle, nonthreatening movements to gather the birds together as a flock, we could play on the inclination of the flock to move as unit. By setting up a kind of harmony between us and the flock, in which we through the cues of small bodily movements indicated the direction in which they should go, they would respond as a group. Extended arms, we found, increased our field of control, and using the sticks as wands increased the field of control even further. Once the group got the message to move in a particular direction, they would carry the rest of the flock along, flowing like a river into a recently opened channel.
Geese tend to move like a disciplined squadron, very military in style. Turkeys are considerably more chaotic and individualistic in their style. Nonetheless, once they are disciplined into the steps of this dance – and it is like a dance – they tend to cooperate. Last summer, a visitor who was touring the farm as I was herding the turkeys in from one field to another and then into their sleeping porch, commented that the whole process seemed like a ballet. I don’t think he was referring to my graceful movements, but rather to their movement as a flock. I recall a few years back when the fellow we had hired to carry our 100-plus turkeys to market asked how we would get them into the trailer. He scoffed when Peter said he would walk them in, but walk them in he did, in the space of less than ten minutes, to the amazement of the trucker.
All sorts of conditions, including our emotional states, to which the turkeys are exquisitely sensitive, can affect the process. If I am I frantically rushed and reveal my desperation, they won’t cooperate. The angle of the sunlight and atmospheric conditions can also affect the process. But because it’s a strict and unvarying routine, the turkeys do expect it, and mostly go along. I’m always surprised that on some days when chores are running late to find that some of the turkeys have gone in of their own accord, and the rest have often assembled, waiting to be guided in.
I think it helps that once inside the turkeys know what they will find – comfortable perches where they have the sense of being beyond reach of most of their predators. If the sleeping porch did not offer them a commodious place for the night, they would undoubtedly resist. They find security in being high up, unlike most of our other animals who find security indoors, in cozy safe places.
Wands are not universally useful tools. Sheep, cows, and pigs don’t have the same extremely fine sensitivity to our movements as turkeys do and one cannot get the same level of kinetic action. We did for a while have a shepherd's crook, which Peter used until it was destroyed. But we found that the larger mammals respond much better to following favored food, like grain or apples. Attract Orhan, our 10-year-old whether, with a bucket of grain, and the rest of the sheep herd will fall cooperatively into a single file and follow you into the barn. Among these animals, too, there is a group instinct that leads them to go where the other members of their herd are going. You can herd them a bit by walking slightly behind them, sufficiently to one side that they see you in their peripheral vision. But if they realize you are guiding them into an area that they would prefer not to be in, they will pretty readily circle ahead of you and run behind you, leading to great frustration.
Staffs or wands have some uses with these animals. Sometimes a light prod from behind can guide the animal’s direction, and in any event a stick of any kind can serve as a protective weapon to buy one some time to run out of the zone of danger, in the event a sticky situation arises, such as an unexpectedly enraged bull upset by some unanticipated stimulus. But a 400-pound boar or 1500-pound bull is hardly going to be intimidated by any stick we could conveniently carry.
As with the turkeys, it helps if you are leading the larger animals somewhere they want to go. The sheep are so attached to the barn, as home space, that they will run there for safety from any corner of the fields if something spooks them. When we had a barn fire a few years back, it was all the local firemen could do to keep the sheep from trying to run into the burning barn for security from the chaotic scene. Their feeling of security may end up betraying them.
The most powerful influence on the ability to guide these animals to where you want them seems to be that the action takes place as part of a set routine into which they are disciplined, rules that create the structure in which they feel comfortable. The sheep, like the turkeys, line up near the barn to go “home,” as it were, as dusk approaches each evening.
There are other types of comfort and security important to our animals. They have a keen sense of the arrangement of things, and of what constitutes a safe space. But our peaceful kingdom depends mightily on the calm discipline of routine and order, into which we need only coax, not prod, its members to do what’s expected of them. —Mark Scherzer
