The Road to Bud

At thirteen years of age, a gentle Dexter bull found himself sitting in a pound with two very different paths before him. And neither was his to choose, for the lives of farmed animals so often follow roads decided by human hands.

While we don’t know every page of the life that brought him there, we do know his gentle nature had made him useful to humans, and perhaps, in one of life’s curious turns, that same gentleness was about to save him.

For one path led towards an ending.

The other led here.

And so, in the wake of losing our beloved Blossom, when our hearts were still learning the new shape of her absence, another old bovine quietly shuffled into our care and kindness. Not as a replacement, because love cannot work that way. But perhaps sanctuary has always been a place where endings and beginnings somehow learn to share the same gate.

We called him Bud.

A gossamer thread back to Blossom, perhaps, and to spring’s quiet insistence that beginnings can come at any age.

What strikes us most about Bud’s story is how precariously an animal’s whole world can rest upon human whim and want. A decision made, a hand raised at auction or a phone call answered. And suddenly a life continues in an entirely different direction.

Bud is thirteen. He is a gentle lad with the kind of knowing face that comes from many laps around the sun.

And now he is safe.

And while he could not choose either of the paths placed before him when his road divided, kindness chose the one that let him keep walking.