I got some crazy books for the holidays. I have devoured Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. This is the stuff that I think is cool =) And it reminded me of an essay I wrote a few years ago.
Think about it.
“We are creating monsters.”
The cowboy looked down at the little horse’s muzzle and stroked it. She shuddered in pain and closed her eyes, leaning into his chest. Dr. Heidmann, my boss, sutured quickly: first the layers of muscle, then the membrane above them, and then the flesh.
The pair had come in early that morning. The little Appaloosa had been chased through a barbed wire fence by a pack of wolves. Her chest was hanging open and her eyes were flashing with pain. The cowboy had said he had known the wolves were around his ranch. But as long as they left him and his alone, he would not need to get out the old rifle.
“This little gal’s one of my best. She’ll be a solid horse.”
The cowboy was classic Montana: mud-caked leather boots, plaid shirt, sandpaper skin. His horses work; they are not pets. But during the entire four-hour procedure, he kept his arms wrapped around the little horse’s head.
“I don’t want to say this is the last straw. But I can’t have them killing my horses.”
I brought more sutures, more latex gloves, found the old floor lamps in the closet. The cowboy kept cooing into the little horse’s ear as if she were his newborn daughter.
“What right do we have? Moving onto their land like this? The wolves are just doing what they need to. They are hunting, doing what they are meant to do.”
He told us that the wolves had only started showing up on his property within the last few months. He saw scat at first, then tracks. Two weeks earlier, he had heard them for the first time. Then, he saw the pack running across the plateau earlier that week. They were a vision in the moonlight, he said.
“They are only doing what they do best. It’s not their fault. We are creating monsters.”
During my assistantship at the Montana Equine Medical and Surgical Center, I learned how to insert a catheter into a horse’s neck, how to monitor the anesthesia in surgery, and what a sperm-cozy is. I saw more death than I had before, and more miracles. But nothing surprised me like this cowboy did. He came into the clinic as the stereotypical cowboy of the American West. His voice had a lilt and his belt held a pistol. He ranched the land his father and grandfathers had driven their own cattle on.
But it was not his land, he said. It belonged to the wolves, the elk, and the gophers. He loved it as his own but he understood he was only a steward.
He showed me that more people than just us liberal city-folk care about the birds and the bugs and the dirt. He left me to think: we cannot create monsters.