Every rescuer has a story to tell about an animal in a particularly awful situation who they couldn’t save. Everyone copes with it differently; some beat themselves up and replay scenarios in their heads over and over again, some shut it out and never want to remember, some develop anxiety or restlessness. It is for this reason that compassion fatigue and emotional burnout is so common in the animal advocacy world, as these experiences can take a serious toll on a person’s wellbeing.
I have had several experiences like this, and there are a few faces I will never forget. One of these faces was that of a newborn calf I met at a notorious auction known as Ontario Livestock Sales. Ontario Livestock Sales is known in the rescue community for its participation in the illegal horse slaughter pipeline, its numerous animal welfare violations, and most notably, a graphic undercover video recorded by a Mercy for Animals investigator showing brutal physical abuse of animals which surfaced in 2012.
I attended the auction one cold winter morning with Jen, the founder of Sale Ranch Sanctuary, in hopes of rescuing any calf who didn’t sell. Calves end up at auctions because they are a by-product of the dairy industry. Most people don’t realize that in order to produce milk, a cow must have a calf, and on dairy farms, calves are typically separated from their mothers shortly after birth. Bull calves and freemartin calves (female calves born with a male twin who inherit masculine biological characteristics, thus likely being infertile) are entirely useless to dairy farms, and since dairy breeds are too bony and slow-growing for quality beef production, they end up at low end auctions like this one.
To sit through an auction at OLS is an otherworldly experience. Animal abuse is rampant at auction houses and stockyards across the country, but this particular auction is egregious. Dead and dying animals can often be seen strewn throughout the filthy holding pens behind the auction house, and animals with painful limps, open wounds, respiratory distress, eye infections and more are sold by the pound. Its local reputation is the auction that will take any animal; those too scrawny and sickly to be accepted at other sales end up at this last-ditch hellhole. Horses rear and spin in fear when they enter the ring, and smaller animals are shoved, tossed, and struck when they refuse to move.
To briefly summarize a long and exhausting day, we did end up rescuing two calves, but were forced to wait until the end of the auction day to leave. In the meantime, we convinced an auction worker to allow us back into the holding pens to bottle feed the babies we would be taking home in a few hours. The thing was, our calves were not the only babies in that pen, and it was impossible to ignore the hungry, shivering, nuzzling infants who smelled the warm milk and were ravenous.
These calves had already been purchased, likely by a low-end veal farmer, but that wasn’t going to stop us from showing them compassion. One particular calf, #9517 as the bright yellow tag stuck to his fur read, was incredibly affectionate with me. He kissed, nuzzled, climbed on and off of my lap, and rubbed his soft, fuzzy chin all over me; I couldn’t help but love him. We didn’t have much milk to spare and he was clearly starving, having been at the auction for over eight hours now without nursing once. He vigorously suckled and nudged the bottle even after it was empty, but I had nothing more to give him. The helpless newborn huddled back up with the others in the biting wind of that cold December day, umbilical cords still attached. It killed me. It really, absolutely killed me.
He was so innocent, on his wobbly newborn legs, so trusting, so unaware and unsuspecting that the humans who would take him home at the end of that day would not be so merciful.
And we left him there.
Because we had no other choice.
So what do we do when these situations begin to impact us emotionally? I believe in using the stories of the ones we leave behind to fuel systematic changes. I was powerless in that auction chute, but if I hold the power to influence even a single person to reduce or eliminate their dairy consumption over the story of #9517, that my efforts are not futile. We cannot let these individuals die in vain, but rather, we have to share their stories with the world and imagine that one day, they won’t have to suffer. We have to push ourselves beyond our zones of comfort and retell these memories, as painful as they may be, to honor those animals’ stories.
We also have to remember that the act of rescuing even one animal is extraordinary. We may feel helpless when we shut the door and turn our backs on one hundred animals, but if we leave with even a single one, that is an entire life spared, transformed, changed forever. To that individual animal, the whole world changes. The memories of the animals we don’t rescue live on in the ones we do, as their lives as ambassadors change hearts and minds every time they meet someone new.
If you have had to leave an animal behind, forgive yourself. We can’t save the entire world on our own, and the fact that we try is incredible. We don’t forget the ones we leave behind, and that is okay. We will carry their memories with us as we create a world where they don’t have to suffer.
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