What Warms Their Heart

Updated July 3, 2023

Amidst graziers’ alerts and frost warnings, our days continue as we, in the Southern Hemisphere, all march briskly on to winter. Although it was just yesterday that three dear ewes, unable to march, were carried into our barn.

Along with them came four scrawny, wee lambs, barely days old. If the weather was not enough to warm our hearts, the sight of this pitiful heptad surely was. And so we set to warm theirs.

Slings were summoned, medications prepared, as the intricate task of working out whom belonged to whom began. Although on the latter score, we deferred to the lambs themselves to knowingly tell us this tale.

And this they did.

Slings were summoned, medications prepared, as the intricate task of working out whom belonged to whom began

The sprightly Tokyo and Madrid said they were twin lads as they determinedly, and almost con-joinedly, navigated their path across the unfamiliar terrain that was a bed of soft golden straw, to Cassandra. Nestling clumsily into her buxom breasts, they claimed her as their rightful mum. Her ready acceptance of them confirmed this.

Oh how proudly she stood as they nursed eagerly from her. The necrotic tissue poking from what remained of the third eyelid of her right eye – the handiwork of an eager crow, no doubt – a haunting reminder that life had not been kind to her. Yet the gentle removal of the caked-on blood, the legacy of this horror, and the white cream that now oozes from this eye says that life now is.

With warm placenta still trailing from her rear end, Winifred cut a most forlorn figure. And we learned her rescue came just moments before she was to have her throat cut. Yet none of this deterred the young Quebec from nudging gently and opportunistically at her plump teats. Although we doubted she had birthed this babe, his instincts to do so may have just been the impetus she needed to nudge her along and find the will to keep living. For this she demonstrably has.

And then there was the stoic Leticia, the right side of her body bearing the hallmarks of days cast on her side, not only unable to move, but unable to nurse the baby she was to lose contact with. We trust that with the passage of time and tender care, her eye will no longer bear the scars of this ordeal, and her ear too and pressure sores will find their former glory.

All of which left the very leggy Paris Lamb unmothered. But not unloved, as we have dutifully taken on that maternal role, whilst we assist Cassandra and Leticia in theirs.

That all of these formerly farmed animals will be farmed no more is cause for rejoicing, and that they are slowly ticking forward in their progress to good health and happiness at sanctuary serves to remind us that what warms their hearts is the very thing that warms our own – human kindness.