What Verity Knew

There was something about the way Verity looked at me. She would tilt her head ever so slightly to one side, fix those gentle eyes upon mine, and hold them there with a knowing that seemed almost impossible to explain.

Of course we hadn’t. Not in this life, anyway. And yet, in those moments, I sometimes felt as though this little sheep knew something I had forgotten.

When Verity arrived at sanctuary, her body told a story we could only partially read. She was profoundly anaemic and would need a blood transfusion if there was any chance of saving her life. She was so weak she could not stand and carried a parasite burden unlike anything we had encountered before. And it was one no animal living under human care should ever have been expected to endure. A calcified lump upon her front leg suggested neglect was not new to her. What the rest of her life had been, we could only imagine.

In the hours I sat beside her, willing her to stay on the right side of living and promising her it would be worthwhile if she did, I found myself wondering how long she had lain unable to rise. Whether she had watched the world continue around her while her own grew smaller by the hour. Whether hunger had overcome her until food no longer mattered. Whether fear had coursed through her as she realised she could no longer flee a predator. Or whether, eventually, she had simply surrendered to the bewildering sensation of becoming weaker and weaker while no one came.

There is something deeply unsettling in realising that, while most of us go about the ordinary business of our days, somewhere an animal like Verity may be lying upon the earth wondering whether the next moment will be her last.

How does a human heart become comfortable with that?

I still do not know.

Verity’s body was weak, but her spirit was anything but. Hers was not the strength fashioned in gyms or measured in kilometres run. It was the strength forged by a difficult life and an inexplicable determination to remain within it when life and humankind had given her no reason to.

And each day, we joyously watched life begin flowing back into her.

At first, hope announced itself as hunger. And, oh my goodness, did Verity want to eat. So we pinned our hopes to every mouthful. We searched paddocks and even roadsides for the sweetest, most succulent grass we could find. Rolled oats quickly became a favourite, as did sheep pellets, and Verity attacked each offering as though eating itself might somehow carry her towards the future.

Perhaps, in a way, it did.

There was something profoundly moving about watching a being whose body had been emptied of so much insist upon filling herself with life again. Her blood strengthened, her head lifted and her legs began to move as they remembered their charter—if only we humans could remember ours.

And Verity’s world widened.

Then came the moment I will carry forever.

Until then, so much of Verity had been measured in numbers: blood results, medications, feeds, weight, whether she could stand. Then one evening she looked me squarely in the eye, stretched forward and softly nibbled my chin.

Such a tiny gesture.

Yet it almost brought me to my knees.

For in that moment, Verity stepped out from behind everything that was wrong with her body and introduced herself. She was cheeky, curious, trusting and funny, all rolled up in moth-eaten fleece. She adored her carers and increasingly seemed to take enormous pleasure in the simple fact of being alive, all the while tugging on people’s hoodies and heartstrings.

And perhaps this was when we allowed ourselves to imagine the unknowable life that might lie ahead. Of a spring paddock beneath her hooves as her new friends flocked around her. Of sunshine warming her back and a life measured in years, not minutes.

We dared to believe she would have years.

Then, with the cruelty peculiar to life, everything changed.

Without warning, and for reasons neither we nor our veterinary team will ever know, Verity experienced a severe choking episode. We initially relieved it, only for it to return with devastating force. Suddenly the little sheep who had fought so fiercely for tomorrow was once again fighting simply for her next breath and we could not help her breathe.

This time, love asked something different of us. It asked us to let her go. I am still struggling with that. Not because Verity failed; she did not. And not because her body lacked the will to live, because nothing could be further from the truth.

I struggle because she had fallen in love with life just as we had fallen in love with her. And because we had begun writing tomorrow on her behalf.

But perhaps that was never ours to write.

Her name, Verity, means truth. And I wonder now if this gentle little being came into my life carrying one.

Perhaps the tragedy of animals like Verity is not that we do not know they can suffer. We know. Nor is it that we do not know they want to live. They tell us that too, in every mouthful sought, every tentative step, every call to a friend and every face lifted towards the sun.

The harder truth is that we have constructed a world in which knowing these things does not always compel society to act upon them.

And that is the truth Verity leaves me with.

Her life before sanctuary remains largely unknowable. The life she might have lived does too. But for one brief, extraordinary stretch between those two mysteries, we knew her.

And she knew kindness.

She knew hands that came only to help. She knew food appearing because someone wanted her belly full. She knew voices delighted simply because she was still here, and she knew what it was to look into a human face and know only goodness would come in return.

Perhaps that is why her little head tilted so knowingly.

Maybe, Verity.

Perhaps every time we choose kindness, we meet one another again. And perhaps the greatest tribute we can offer you now is not simply to mourn the life you lost, but to change the world for those still waiting to be seen.

Because somewhere, right now, another Verity is waiting.

She should not have to wait until her body is almost emptied of life before somebody decides hers is worth saving.