4-H and FFA: Tales of Auction and Heartbreak

You couldn’t be a middle class rural kid in the United States without facing the prospect of joining one of those two venerable youth development organizations; 4-H, and the FFA (Future Farmers of America), wherein participants learned all about the agricultural and livestock business.

The whitewash evident in each group’s policies and procedures, lorded over by the United States’ Department of Agriculture, wasn’t terribly evident to us preadolescent kids who raised the animals for sale and slaughter. Thus comes about all those videos and images folks might see online, where kids wearing the green and white dressies are bawling their eyes out as they say goodbye to the animal they’d stewarded for the last year. You’ve already guessed I’m among those damaged goods who experienced that coming-of-age ritual. Perhaps you’re also thinking, ‘heck, that was four-plus decades ago, don’t tell me this Gen X geezer is still hung up on having to let go of a rack of lamb.

I realized in recent months that I am indeed still ‘hung up on it.’

I didn’t really consciously acknowledge it until this very year, I think, in the A.D. of 2024. It is, I now know, a permanent scar on my heart.

Here’s my quick tale in affirming that wound’s longevity.

Whether one actually joined one of those clubs was up to the child, or more accurately, the child’s parents. I had plenty of pals who managed to dodge the draft, so to speak, be it out of disdain for the ‘aggie’ components of each (I grew up with a lot of aspiring counter-cultural metal heads), or whether their parents didn’t much care if they were versed in the mechanics of shearing sheep or feeding hogs or raising chickens.

Me, however, I grew up on a ranch. My mom figured I oughta verse myself more in that which I’d already studied in, thanks to my workaholic, ranch-savvy father, who’d already instructed me in any number of farming and ranching tasks, including equestrian training, gardening for food, irrigation, varied types of animal husbandry including cattle, goats, and sheep. We drank raw milk, squeezed from our own dairy cattle. Grew our own corn. Shucked our own walnuts. He slaughtered his own beef. I learned how to shovel shit, corral after corral, barn after barn, which turned out handy in becoming a writer. Badabump.

So I joined 4-H, along with many of my grade school classmates. ‘4-H’ stands for ‘head, heart, hands, and health,’ which is a nice, apple pie mantra of upholding that bread basket-work ethic mindset that’s kept Middle America pumping out our produce, grains, and meats for the last two hundred years.

Jessica Scott-Reid, a journalist for Sentient Media, penned a revealing article back in 2021 about a 21st century trend of 4-H and FFA kids having the option to send their raised animals to sanctuaries instead of slaughterhouses. If only I’d had that option at that time, but it was the early 80s, and that just wasn’t part of the aggie landscape yet.

Reid cited a 2010 study published in the journal Animals and Society; “Reproducing Dominion: Emotional Apprenticeship in the 4-H Youth Livestock Program. It painted 4-H as “an apprenticeship in which children learn to do cognitive emotion work, use distancing mechanisms, and create a ‘redemption’ narrative to cope with contradictory ethical and emotional experiences. Participants in 4-H learned not to name their animals and to think of them as existing for ‘the market,’” and that “the death of an animal is justified if it supports a ‘good cause,’ such as a college education.”

She went on to interview a sanctuary founder and former cattle rancher named Renee King-Sonnen, who said: “These animal ag education systems are the precursor to kids becoming farmers and ranchers…many of the families participating in these programs, who are part of animal farming culture, are living in a construct, or a belief system, a reality they hold dear, that they feel is righteous because it’s been handed down for generations. To step out of that belief system, to see animals, their sentience, and their fate differently, is difficult. But it’s happening more and more.”

King-Sonnen ran a place called Rowdy Girl Sanctuary in Waelder, Texas, where she cared for dozens of farmed animals, including several surrendered from 4-H and FFA participants. More requests came every year to take in those animals thanks to growing awareness of the sanctuary’s Families Choosing Compassion program, which offered an option for 4-H and FFA participants to surrender their animals and continue a relationship with them for the rest of the animal’s natural life.

What a boon from on high. I continue to lament this option not being around back in my heyday (see what I did there?). Yet not as much as I lament the fact that young Bard, admittedly ahead of his years and a rabid animal lover, didn’t stand up and say, fuck that noise, I ain’t doing that, my parents own a ranch, my lamb will just keep living with us until she dies of natural causes.”

It gets worse.

My lamb’s name was Dusty.

Yes, I named her.

We became thick as thieves. She was as a dog to me, among our ranch’s other actual canine doggies. She followed me around without a leash or halter. She called out to me when she was lonely. I took her on long walks (gotta keep that lamb shank fit and trim). I loved her beyond question. She loved me even more. Really. I’m not anthropomorphizing.

The decision I made…the decision that was mapped out for me, rather…to take her to show (won the blue ribbon), auction her off to an en masse bidder from some grocery store chain, and let her head to the slaughterhouse…it haunts me even now, here at the twilight of my years.

If only I’d had the spine to say no.

Not just to my 4-H elders, but to my own budding, entrepreneur self.

How I wish I’d been given a choice for sanctuary. I didn’t even need a sanctuary. My parents owned a ranch. We had the room, and the livestock wherewithal required, with barns, corrals, pasture, deliveries of hay, all of it.

Part of me wants to blame my parents for encouraging me in retrospect, but I think if I’d insisted, they’d have ceded. There’s no question the lure of getting the monetary payoff was part of my reasoning.

Fucking stupid capitalism.

And fucking stupid carnivorism.

No, I’m not vegetarian yet.

But I’m aspiring to get there.

I haven’t touched lamb meat since that fateful summer.

I gave up beef and pork some years ago.

I’m working on giving up the fish and the birds.

Not that that’s a saving grace. It ain’t.

It gets worse once again.

After we’d won best in show, after she’d cleared a more than decent price per pound at auction, the next day, I was stupid enough (or wise enough, depending on my mood in hindsight), to ‘chaperone’ her from her pens at the county fair, into the sawdust arena where staff would herd her and her soon-to-be-mint-jellied brethren up the ramp into the truck that would take her to a slaughterhouse.

She was panicked. Confused. Not understanding why she was being herded away from me. She bleated and cried out for me as they guided her up the gangway into the livestock trailer. I still remember her wailing, clear as fucking day. The rumble of hooves clattering up the truck ramp. I cried.

But I let it happen.

Because that’s what I was supposed to do.

Fuck. I’m crying now even as I write this.

Forty-odd years later.

I don’t even know why I’m writing about this, to be honest.

I’ve already given an homage to Dusty in my debut novel The Kindness of Ravens. That ode itself, was yet another sign that perhaps I’ve been carrying this goddamned sheep baggage, buried deep down in the depths of antiquity, for most of my years as an adult.

It absolutely ranks among the biggest fuck-ups of my entire life, and I’ve had some colossal errors tallied in my name, you can be sure.

I was smart enough to know better. Yet I was gliding within the established tracks of my middle class, country whiteboy roots. That’s what being an American is all about. Culturalization, following the footsteps of the elders before you, be it in religion or politics, traditions or working class pageantry.

For that oversight…and my naivete of youth be damned, for I was never really a man of my tender years, this weathered soul inside this body of stardust and water was always too old to properly ignore the wide world as it should have…I essentially let a being I loved die for no good reason.

Just because something’s ordained, doesn’t mean it’s right.

The food chain is what it is. I get that.

Here’s one thing I know for certain.

If 4-H and the FFA exposed all their kiddie members to the horrors of your average slaughterhouse, live and in person, all the blood and shit and terror within…nah, few of those kids would continue on, and few of their parents would allow them to be exposed to that. Even my old school father sent me off into town with a pocketful of quarters to hit the arcade for a few hours when he was slated to slaughter one of our own cows. Funny how that worked. I’d come home and we’d have one less member of our cattle herd, and a couple freezers full of fresh beef.

Our elders wanted to spare our precious feelings with the grisly details, but also hoped to instill a sense of responsibility in upholding that same system. Why not do both, let us see what really happens to our livestock for consumption? Because there’s just no way to invest in that when we see the stark reality for ourselves. You know the old saying. Everybody wants to eat the cheeseburger, but nobody wants to meet the cow.

We Americans really do have an awful habit of cherry-picking the macabre to further our cultural and national interests. That ain’t news to anyone. But the idea it trickles all the way down the pyramid into after school activities is too damning not to mourn our collective loss of soul in that regard.

I haven’t yet step foot inside a slaughterhouse. I just can’t. I know what would happen to my mind if I did. Something really bad. Yes, I’m still a semi-carnivore, and yes, I understand there are women and men who do that for living, and yes, I appreciate their efforts in keeping all of us fed.

This is a story less about promoting veganism, and more about knowing the right thing to do when it comes to expressions of love, how our Western spirituality is so out of wack when it comes ensuring we’re communicating our truest feelings to the people…and animals…that we love, and that we need not let culture nor propriety dictate how that manifests.

I failed you, Dusty.

I am so sorry.

I was a punk kid.

I’m no longer shackled to my world’s expectations. Haven’t been for some time. I wish it had occurred earlier for me, though compared to my contemporaries, I was ahead of the curve.

But not enough.

I suspect there’s a place in the next world for all sapient beings and creatures, and I hope to find you wherever you might dwell now, so that I might make amends with you.

I don’t know how I’ll do that.

But I’ll spend eternity making sure I figure out a way.