Reproductive Justice & The 13 Wishes
On this holiday week, I have a blog for you on reproductive justice.
Perhaps it is not the most festive of blogs for this time of year but the cows know no holiday season, even though I have promised them a new salt lick on Christmas. The farm continues in its own cycle, in its own rhythm that doesn’t always make sense with our human festivities. And so, reproductive justice is the topic for now in honor of all female animals everywhere and in honor of all human women too.
For those of us who have grown up as women and been socialized as women, we have been expected to bear the responsibility of controlling reproduction when it is unwanted. As we know, the western medical system focuses on the female reproductive system when it comes to birth control: pills, IUD’s, implants and tube tying is on us — the women. The morning after pill and abortifacients are on us — the women. The herbs, prayers and tinctures are on us — the women. The womb massage, yoni steams and strong, bitter teas are on us — the women. As women, we become accustomed to the weight of making sure we don’t get pregnant if we do not want to be. And yes, we need to take responsibility for our reproductive systems, they are ours after all.
However, women everywhere are asking: why not place more reproductive responsibly on men? And luckily, the world of animal husbandry has an answer for this. In the world of animal husbandry — there is reproductive justice.
What to do when our Jersey Mama Cow births a tiny baby bull? We did indeed castrate him. We (and by we I mean our farm hand) placed a tight and small rubber band around his testicles and after about three weeks, they simply fell off. We are still waiting to stumble upon his small and shriveled testicle sack in the field but perhaps an eager raven has scooped them up by now. We did not put our Mother Cow on birth control or remove her uterus. We tended to the reproductive capacity of our bull making him now, technically, a steer. A steer is simply a bull who has been castrated.
What to do when out of the eight cats that are now living on our property only one of them is male? We did indeed castrate him. And by we, I mean we took him to the Española Animal Shelter and the vet removed his testicles and sent him home with a small portion of his backend shaved. We did not take our seven female cats in to the vet to have them spayed. No, we tended to the male. We removed the smallest obstacle. We hopefully have reduced the likelihood that any of our seven cats will become pregnant, thereby reducing the cat population of Ojo Sarco by at least fifty.
While some folks may think it is inhumane to castrate male animals, it is interesting that in the domesticated animal community that is the least invasive way to go about birth control. Perhaps there is something for the human community to learn here. While I do not enjoy removing testicles from my animals and would certainly not want my genitalia cut off in any way, the loud and rowdy feminist in me is laughing.
Messing with our female animal’s reproductive systems is far more dangerous in our animal community. We need their bodies to be healthy, fertile and productive. Jersey cows need to get pregnant once every year — once every year! Their womb, their cycle of fertility and their ovulation fluid is the golden nectar of any farm. If their reproductive system fails, everything fails. Life stops. Manure dries up. There are less hooves stomping carbon into the soil. We must keep their udders in fine form. We must rub coconut oil infused with peppermint oil on Rose’s back, left teat every morning to prevent what they call “cake udder” from forming. We must feel the udder, muse on the udder and decide how to keep the udder in prime condition.
Rose has a funny teat — much like a milk duct on a woman’s breast could be fussy or require more pampering than another milk duct. One of her teats is so small and hard to milk that it easily gets clogged up. If we miss one morning of massaging her back, left teat, her udder starts to feel like thick cake batter, with lots of lumps. And so, we massage. She protests every morning but mildly. As we massage, she raises her back hoof and places it slowly back down on the ground. A gentle and meaningless stomp. It is barely a protest. But the peppermint oil works. It saves our cow from contracting mastitis — a serious infection that will render her milk undrinkable and leads to the death of some cows.
Funnily enough, these male animals — both our steer and our male cat who we have named Mouse because he is the runt of the litter — have become my favorite animals on our farm. They are the most tender, and most affectionate animals, even before we removed their testicles. They have claimed their spot in my very female-oriented heart and made a place there. Before Billy (our Steer) and Mouse (our cat), I had never had a male animal — always inclined to feisty and independent females. But now, as nature would have it, these boys have surpassed my judgment of male animals and I have fully embraced them — probably too much.
When our neighbor asks us to teach her how to kill her roosters, we don’t hesitate. Roosters are more than just loud and annoying when they incessantly crow at 5am. If you have more than one, they become a chorus of roosters crowing in rounds and harmonies all their own -sounding like a train on tracks trying to screech to a halt as metal grinds against metal. Our neighbor’s roosters have been mounting all of her hens, digging their claws into the backs of the hens and pulling out all the feathers — leaving the hens open to the cold and bitter nights of the winters up here in these mountains. This is not unusual rooster behavior but it can seem violent to the beginner eye. It can only be described as rooster pillaging and the hens do not seem to enjoy it. They try and get away from the roosters, running around in circles, squawking unless the roosters happen to sneak up on them and grab them by the neck from behind. It is challenging not to intervene.
We show up to our neighbor’s house on a bright and warm December Sunday. Winter has not hit here yet at 7,500 feet and we are holding our breath. Praying for the snow to come but also relishing in this very prolonged fall, leaving our driveways free of ice and making our morning milking much more easeful. We brought with us a pair of sharp hedge clippers to remove the rooster’s heads, a slim knife with a wooden handle to cut open their bodies and remove the internal organs, gloves and a thermometer to test the temperature of the water for removing the feathers from the roosters.
We walk into the chicken coop one by one, grabbing the feisty roosters and immediately hanging them upside down. When you hang a chicken or a rooster upside down, they relax. They stop fighting you. You can rub the bottoms of their feet for added relaxation — the pads on their chicken feet bubbled and buoyant. But oh yes, roosters are hard to catch. They run and scream and flap and act as though they are about to die because perhaps they know that is the only reason you would come for them. But together (it took four of us) we caught the roosters one by one, leading them upside down to their death.
So, the solution to chicken birth control is the slaughtering of the roosters. There really is no other solution. It is almost impossible to give away a rooster up here because everyone already has roosters they do not want. Roosters collect around the edges of farms, everyone wondering what to do with them like the dead bugs on the inside of a window screen. How am I ever going to get them out of there? Little bug skeletons clinging onto the screen through the whole winter, shaking in the winter wind.
We kill five roosters and one old, withered red hen. I teach my neighbor how to remove the rooster’s stomach, heart, lungs and kidneys all without breaking open the toxic gallbladder full of green sludge. She does it with no gloves on. The cats circle our chicken culling station with their tails straight in the air — licking the burnt feathers as they fall to the ground. It is their favorite day — a day they wish would repeat every Sunday — their favorite kind of church.
With the roosters gone, the hens cluck peacefully around between the dried and old sunflower stalks from the late summer. They don’t seem to notice they will no longer be forced to participate in unwanted rooster mounting. They seem like girl hens again, able to run into the woods pretending that mushrooms are small hats for their dolls. Innocent. Naive roosters. Healing something in me that needed mending.
We haven’t been able to bring ourselves to cull our own roosters and we have three. I don’t think we will. We have told ourselves they are useful. They do crow when the coyotes are near or when the neighbor’s dog’s are rummaging through the compost heap. Even though our head rooster (Maria) is my nemesis, I still have a soft place in my heart for her. I still want to believe I can win her over even though she charges at me every time I come into the chicken coop offering dried meal worms and raw milk as a peace offering. She doesn’t want peace. She wants to protect. She wants blood.
As a woman who has endured unnecessary reproductive procedures, HPV vaccinations when they were thought to be necessary in the 90’s, the morning after pill, men who were not careful or cautious about where they placed their specimen, an unwanted pregnancy and hormonal birth control — I relish in the reproductive justice happening in animal husbandry. There is a world that exists where women are valued and cherished — where their bodies are not the bodies to be tampered with and harmed. In feminist farming, we deal with the males. We ask the males to change and endure. We ask the males to stand back, stand off and even go on to a better place. We require the males to change their bodies so the females do not have to produce calves, give milk and also worry about birth control. Justice prevails. It leads us forward into a future where the possibility of valuing the female body is something we remember again. Let it begin with the cows.
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The Practice of The 13 Wishes
And for those of you wanting something sacred and holy for this holiday week — I am going to offer you something other than reproductive justice (although I think that is a perfectly wonderful holiday gift).
I am going to introduce you to a practice called:
13 Wishes (Rauhnächte)
— a German/Celtic Tradition practiced during this time of year.
Here is how it works:
Begin by writing out 13 wishes for your coming year. These can be wishes that are quite literal or that you don’t even fully know the meaning of. For example: I wish to swim in the Mediterranean Sea this year or I wish to finish a draft of my book manuscript this year or something more open-ended like: I wish to attend spontaneous gatherings this year with people I don’t know. We don’t have to fully understand the wishes. They can move through us like waves and pulses. They can be the wishes of the ancestors, the ancient ones, our relatives — unloved wishes of the dead. They can be wishes that come through our hands but are not only of our hearts.
Make the wish for yourself — not for another. The wishes will inherently impact other people as you live into them but they need to be your wishes — a wish you can put your energy and hands into. For example, wishing for world peace is not a super tangible place to begin.
Write out each wish on a separate slip of paper. Make the slips of paper identical and roll them up into balls.
Beginning on Christmas Day (December 25th), choose one piece of paper at random and burn it in a fire. Each day after that, burn one slip of paper until January 6th.
On January 6th, you will have one slip of paper left. This is what is called, Epiphany Day. On this day, unroll that slip of paper and you will be left with your wish for the year — your 13th wish.
This is a wish to grow into all year long. It may not pan out exactly as you think it is going to. You may wish to swim in the Mediterranean Sea this year and find yourself swimming in all kinds of bodies of water or meeting people who have lived in that region of the world. Who knows. Let the wish sit with you and grow with you. Let it unravel throughout your year.
Choosing one wish doesn’t mean that you cannot pursue your other wishes but this ceremony acts as a kind of divination — something this time of year is especially ripe with. When the veil is thin, when the nights are long and dark, we can scatter our prayers onto hungry ears and receive all kinds of dreams, visions and intuitions.
I invite you to share your wishes with me if you feel called. I am here for it.
